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••%
t *
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
a
THE
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
BT
JAMES BRYCE D.C.L.
FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE
and
REGIUS PROFESSOR OF CIVIL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
FIFTH EDITION
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1875
\All rights reserved "]
CrJt^SO^.^n, \C>
HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY
GIFT OF
MRS. PAr>KtR rOTTFR
SE.P 2 1939
OXFORD:
BY E. PICKARD HALL AND J. H. STACY,
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
\
:i>
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION.
1 HE object of this treatise is not so much to give a
narrative historv 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 oudine 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
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 Fifth Edition.
This Edition has been revised, and several additions
and corrections made.
February 2, 1875.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Introductory.
CHAPTER II.
The Boxnan 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
Tbeodoric 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 tlie Prankish Kings 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 .. 62
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 VIL
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 Boman Empire and the German Kingdom.
The German or East Frankish Monarchy 122
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 1 40
Comparison of his Empire with the Carolingian 144
Character and Projects of the Emperor Otto III 146
TTie 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 163
General Results of the Contest 164
CHAPTER XL
The Emperors in Italy: Frederick Barbarossa.
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 185
Sweden 185
Spain 185
England 186
Scotland 187
Naples and Sicily 1S8
Venice 188
The East 189
Rivalry of the Teutonic and Byzantine Emperors 191
The Four Crowns 193
Origin and Meaning of the title * Holy Empire ' .. 199
CHAPTER XIII.
Fall of the Hohenstaufen.
Reign of Henry 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 217
Protest of the Electors at Rhense 220
CHAPTER XIV.
The Ghermanic Constitution:— the Seven Electors.
Germany in the Fourteenth Century 221
Reign of the Emperor Charles IV 225
Origin and History 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 IVs Policy 236
CHAPTER XV.
The Empire as an International Power.
Revival of Learning 241
Beginnings of Political Thought 241
Desi/e for an International Power 243
Theory of the Emperor's Functions as Monarch of Europe.. .. 345
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 Df itfonand^Mi of Dante 265
CHAPTER XVI.
The City of Borne 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
Elxisting Traces of their Presence in Rome 287
Want of Mediaeval, and especially of Gothic Buildings, in
Modem Rome 290
Causes of this ; Ravages of Enemies and Citizens . . 292
Modem Restorations 293
Surviving Features of tmly Mediaeval Architecture — the Bell-
towers 295
The Roman Church and the Roman City 296
Rome since the Revolution 300
xii CONTENTS,.
CHAPTER XVII.
The BenaissaJioe : Change in the Character of the Ilmpire.
Weakness of Germany 304
Loss of Imperial Territories 305
Gradual Change in the Germanic Constitution 309
Beginning of the Predominance of the Hapsburgs 313
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 Beformation and its Effects upon the Empire.
Accession of Charles V , 321
His Attitude towards the Reformation 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: Iiast 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
The Balance of Power 348
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 37a
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 '. 3R3
Results of the Influence of the Empire upon Europe 386
Upon Modem 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
Coodusion 395
xiv CONTENTS.
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
The New Qerman Empire.
Recapitulation : Stages in the Decay of the Old Empire 400
Denationalisation of Germany 401
The Margraviate of Brandenburg and the House of HohenzoUem 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
Aims and Efforts of the German Liberals 414
The Revolution of 1 84S-9 417
Restoration o. 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 43a
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 Germany and Italy 44a
Changed Aspect of European Politics 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 45 a
Note D. — Hildebert's Lines contrasting the Past and Present
ofRome • 459
INDEX 461
DATES OF
SEVERAL IMPORTANT EVENTS
IN THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE.
B.C.
Battle of Pharsalia 48
Battle of Aclium 31
AD.
Coimcil of Nicsea 325
End of the separate Western Empire 47^
Revolt of the Italiails from the Iconoclastic Emperors 728
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 11^6
Death of Frederick II 1250
League of the three Forest Cantons of Switzerland 1308
Career of Rienzi 1347-^353
The Golden Bull 1356
Council of Constance 1415
Extinction of the Eastern Empire 1453
Discovery of America 1492
xvi DATES OF IMPORTANT EVENTS.
Luther at the Diet of Worms 1521
Beginning of the Thirty Years' War 1618
Peace of Westphalia 1648
Prussia recognized as a Kingdom 1701
End of the House of Hapsburg 1742
Seven Years' War 1756-1763
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.
Emperon.
Year of
Accession.
▲. D.
B.C.
Augustus.
27
A.D.
Tiberius.
14
Caligula.
37
Claudius.
41
4*
St. Peter, (according to
Jerome).
Nero.
54
67
Linus, (according to Ire-
naeus, Eusebius, Je-
rome).
68
Clement, (according to
Galba, Otho, Vitellms, Ves-
Tertullian and Rufinus).
pasian.
68
78
Anacletus (?).
.
Titus.
79
Domitian.
81
91
Clement, (according to
some later writers).
Nerva.
9$
Trajan,
98
100
Evarestus (?).
109
Alexander (?),
Hadrian.
117
119
Sixtus I.
129
Telesphorus,
Antoninus Piui.
138
139
Hyginus.
143
Pius I.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE' OF
V=«of
......=^
.^.e™.
aS?^-
A D.
*,D.
'57
Anicctus.
Marcus AuicHul
161
168
SotCT.
'77
Eleulhcriui.
Commodui.
193
Didius Julianui.
■93
Niger.
193
'93
Victor (?).
S^timiiu Severut.
193
iOl
Zephyiinns (?).
Curaculla, Gela.
Opilius Micriuuj, Diadu-
ElagabaluL
V.
119
S23
C»ILiW» I.
Urbm I.
Alexander Severui.
'"
J30
135
Ponii»nus.
Mwimin.
»35
.36
Fibiinus.
The two Goidians. Maxi-
mut PuiHcnui, Balbinui.
»37
The third Gordian.
1.18
Philip.
244
Decins.
J49
>5'
Comclhu.
Hostiliu, Qallui.
»i'
15a
Lucius I.
Volusian.
15'
'53
Steph™ I.
.Xmilian, Valerian, Gallienus
'.j3
Gallienm alone.
160
157
Sinus II.
159
Dionysius.
Claudius 11.
36S
,69
Felix.
Aureliin.
270
"75
Tacitus.
275
Florian.
J 76
Probus.
'76
C>rui.
aSi
1S3
Ciiiu.
184
Diocletiin.
'84
Maxim Ian, associated wiih
Diocletiau.
186
i9fi
M«ccUmai
J04
Viomcy.
Constantius. Galerius.
13
306
Connantine (the Gie>l).
Licinius.
307
EMPERORS AND POPES.
XIX
Year of
i\ccession.
A.D.
Bishops of Rome.
308
310
3"
314
336
337
352
366
384
398
403
418
418
423
432
440
461
Marcellus L
Eusebius.
Melchiades.
Sylvester I.
Marcus I.
Julius I.
Liberius.
Felix (Anti-pope).
Damasus I.
Siricius.
Anastasius I.
Innocent 1.
Zosimus.
Boniface I.
Eulalius (Anti-pope).
Celestine I.
Sixtus III.
Leo I (the Great).
Hilarins.
Emperors.
Maximin.
Constantine, Galerius, Li-
cinius, Maximin, Max-
entius, and Maximian
reigning jointly.
Constantine (the Great)
alone.
Constantine II, Constan-
tius If, Constans.
Magnentius.
Constantius alone.
Julian.
Jovian.
Valens and Valentinian I.
Gratian and Valentinian I.
Gratian and Valentinian
II.
Theodosius.
Arcadius (in the East),
Honorius (in the
West).
Year of
Accession.
Theodosius II. (E)
Valentinian III. (W)
Marcian. (E)
Maximus, Avitus. (W)
Majorian. (W)
Leo L (E)
Severus. (W)
Vacancy. (W)
A.O.
308
309
3^3
337
333
361
363
364
367
375
379
395
408
424
450
455
455
457
461
465
b 2
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF
,>■""'
Bishops at Rome,
Emperor*
.^^
A.r.
Anlhtmios. (W)
467
468
Simplicir*.
Olybrius. (W)
H7»
Glycerlus. (W)
473
Julius Nepos. (W)
474
Leo II. Zeno, Basiliraii.
<all E)
474
475
(End of the Western line
in Romulns.Auginius,
476)
(flm«/orri, m Aj). 800,
-(83
Felix nl*.
SSII.X"' "
491
491
Gdasius I.
496
Anastasiu! II.
498
Symnnehn!.
498
(Liuwntius, Anti-pope).
514
6>6
John I,
Felix IV.
JusliQL
S18
530
Bonifice 11.
"" '
530
(Diosconis, Anti-pope).
53"
John U.
635
Agapetus I.
536
Silverius.
537
Vi^ilim.
555
Pelagius L
560
Johu UL
Justin II.
£65
574
578
Benedict 1.
Pelagiu. II.
Tiberim II.
Maurice.
%
590
Giegoty I <the Great).
601
604
Sabinilnus.
607
BoHJftce HI.
607
615
Boniface IV.
Deus dedit.
Iletaclius.
Cio
61S
Boniface V.
•«-^— *""-'-
r„i.(,..,^,.F^,...
J
EMPERORS AND POPES,
XXI
Year of
Accesaon.
A.D.
625
638
640
642
649
654
657
Honorins I.
Severinus,
John IV.
Theodoras L
Martin I.
Eugenius I.
Vitalianus.
Emperors.
Constantine III, Heracleo-
nas, Constans II.
672
Adeodatus.
676
Domnus or Donus I.
678
682
Agatho.
Leo II.
683 (?)
685
685 (?)
687
687
687
Benedict II.
John V.
Conon.
Sergius I.
(Paschal Anti-pope).
(Theodoras, Anti-pope).
701
705
708
708
John VI.
John VII.
Sisinnius.
Constantine.
715
Gregory II.
731
741
Gregory III.
Zacharias.
753
753
757
767
768
773
Stephen (IT).
Stephen II (or III).
Paul I.
Coustantine (Anti-pope).
Stephen ill (IV).
Hadrian I.
795
Leo in.
Year of
Accession,
A.D.
641
Constantine IV (Pogonatus).
668
Justinian II.
685
Leontius.
694
Tiberius III.
697
Justinian II restored.
705
Philippicus Bardanes.
711
Anastasius II.
713
Theodosius III.
716
Leo III (the Isaurian).
718
Constantine V (Coprony-
741
mus).
Leo IV.
775
Constantine VI.
780
Deposition of Constantine
797
VI by Irene.
CHRONOLOGICAL TAfiLS OF
aI^I^.
Fop«.
E...™^
ATc"'i°=.
z^.~
A D
CharlK I (the Grat).
Soti
{Folhmng btnciforlb ihi
new Wcilirn lint).
Ltwi! I tthe Pioui).
814
816
817
Stephen IV.
b4
827
Gregory IV.
Lothar I.
840
844
ScrgiuB II.
847
Leo IV.
Ssi
Benedict in.
Lewis 11 tin Italy).
855
(AnsstaiinE. ADti-pope).
Nichobs 1.
H.i(liia^^ n.
87a
John Vill,
Charles II, ihe Bald, (W.
875
Frankinh).
Charles III, the F.^ (E.
881
Fran!;iih).
Martin IT.
HadrUn III.
88s
Stephen V.
89.
Formosus.
Guido (in Italy).
891
Lambert ;in Italv).
894
896
Bonif.™ VI.
Aruulf ^E. Prankish).
8^6
89^6
Sicphen VI.
897
Rqmanus.
897
Theodore II.
89S
John IX.
Lev,is (<be Child). *
899
900
Benedict IV.
Lewis HI of Provence (in
903
LeoV.
Ilaly).
901
90s
Christopher.
9°+
Sergius 111,
911
Anaituius III.
Catradl.
9ii<?>
9'3
Lindo.
914
JohnX.
Berengar (in Italy).
9'5
Hmry I (ibt Fwler).
9.8
gas
Leo VI.
rh.=.mai„l,ul„^,l,«,riG„„
m kings .he ntffT midc jn, claim
o,h=
imp
riaJ UU,.
EMPERORS AND POPES,
XXlll
Year of
Accession,
Popes.
Emperors.
Year of
Accession.
A.D.
A.D.
929
Stephen VII.
931
John XL
936
Leo VII.
Otto I {the Great), crowned
936
939
Stephen VIIL
£. Frankish ]^ing at
941
Martin III.
Aachen.
946
Agapetus II.
955
John XII.
Otto I, crowned Emperor
062
963
Leo VIIL
at Rome.
^
964
(Benedict V, Anti-Pope ?).
965
John XIII.
972
Benedict VI.
^ ■
Otto II.
973
974
(Boniface VII, Anti-pope?).
974
Domnus II (?).
■
974
Benedict Vil.
9^3
John XIV.
Otto IIL
983
9«5
John XV.
996
Gregory V.
996
(John XVI, Anti-pope?).
999
Sylvester II.
Henry 11 (th« Saint).
1002
1003
John XVII.
1003
John XVIII.
1009
Sergius IV.
1012
Benedict VIIL
1024
John XIX.
Conrad II (the Salic).
1024
1033
Benedict IX.
Henry III (the Black).
1039
1044
(Sylvester, Anti-pope).
1045
Gregory VI.
1046
Clement 11.
1048
Damasus 11.
1048
Leo IX.
>054
Victor 11.
Henry IV.
1056
1057
Stephen IX.
1058
Benedict X.
1059
Nichobs II.
1061
Alexander II.
1073
Gregory VII (Hildebrand).
(Rudolf of Swabia, rival).
1077
1080
(Clement, Anti-pope).
(Hermann of Luxemburg,
1081
1086
Victor IIL
rival).
1087
Urban II.
r
•
(Conrad of Franconia, rival.)
1093
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF
,rr^;.
Ptoi^
.....^
^^^"^
A.D.
A.D.
1099
Pasdal II.
(Albeit, Anti-pope).
1105
II18
lIlS
(Syly«t«, Aiiti-pope).
Geli^iiu II.
(Grcgptj, Ami-pope).
Clljilus n.
(Celeslinc. ADti-pope).
Henry V.
iio6
1114
HoiK^iu. 11.
Loibw U.
1125
1130
liroocenl 11.
(Anaclelus, Anli-pope).
■Conrid IH.
1 138
I '38
(Victor, Anii.pope).
IH3
Celcilinc U.
Lacfat 11.
"45
Eugenius IIL
Ftcdeticfc 1 (Bstbirassa).
II5I
"53
Anastuios tV.
Hidrian IV.
"59
"59
Akxiadei III.
(Viclor, Aiiti-pope).
.164
(Piich.1, Anti-pope).
liGS
(CjJiltM, AntHwpe).
1.81
Luciu. III.
Uib»n III.
1.8?
Gregory VI IL
.187
Clement III.
Henry VI.
1190
1191
Ctlcsliiic III.
•Philip, Olto IV (tirali).
II97
..98
lonoctDl HI.
otwn'.
Frederick IL
IJ08
1316
:3J7
Honoriuj 111.
Gregory IX.
1241
Celesline IV.
114'
Vicincy.
Iiinoeenl IV.
(Henry Rjmpe, ri«]).
II46
(William of Holland, riral).
W46-?
•Conrad IV.
■ J50
i>54
AleiiinderlV.
"54
■Richard (earl of Cora-
1257
walll. -Alfonso (king of
1 161
Urban IV.
Castile), (rival!).
—»-=--*•"--*"
— —"-■-■-«-
EMPERORS AND POPES.
XXV
Year of
Accession.
Popes.
Emperors.
Year of
Accession.
A.D.
•
A.D.
1265
Clement IV.
1269
Vacancy.
1271
Gregory X.
•Rudolf I (of Hapsburg).
1273
1276
Innocent V.
1276
Hadrian V.
1277
John XX or XXI.
"77
Nicholas III.
1281
Martin IV.
1285
Honorius IV.
1289
Nicholas IV.
1292
Vacancy.
•Adolf (of Nassau).
1292
1294
Celestine V.
1294
Boniface VIII.
•Albert I (of Hapsburg).
1298
1303
Benedict XI.
1305
Clement V.
Henry VII (of Luxemburg).
1308
1314
Vacancy.
Lewis IV (of Bavaria).
(Frederick of Austria, rival).
1314
131^
John XXI or XXII.
1334
Benedict XII.
1342
Clement VI.
Charles IV (of Luxemburg).
1347
1352
Innocent VI.
(Giinther of Schwartz-
burg, rival).
1362
Urban V.
1370
Gregory XI.
1378
Urban VI.
(Clement VII, Anti-pope).
•Wenzel (of Luxemburg).
1378
1389
Boniface IX.
1394
(Benedict Anti-pope).
•Rupert (of the Palatinate).
1400
1404
Innocent VII.
1406
Gregory XII.
1409
Alexander V.
1410
John XXII or XXIII.
Sigismund (of Luxemburg)
(Jobst of Moravia, rival).
I4IO
1417
Martin V.
1431
Eugene IV.
•Albert II (of Hapsburg).t
1438
• Those I
narked with an asterisk were never ac
tually crowned at Rome.
t AU the
succeeding Emperors, except Cha
xles VII and Francis I, belong to
the house of
U^jsburg.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE OF
Ynrof
p=p«
Empc™.
,V„.
1439
{Felix V Anti-pope).
i.r.
'447
Nichol.s V.
Frederick UI.
1440
'45S
Ciliztus IV.
■458
Pius II.
1464
Paul 11.
Siitui IV.
U8+
Innocent Vin.
'493
Aleiander VI.
•Mwlmilian I.
'493
'503
Pius III.
1S0.I
Julin, n.
'S'3
LeoX.
tChirlei V.
1519
lift
'S'S
Hadriin VI.
Cltmenl VII.
'534
Paul III.
iSSO
juiiu! in.
'555
Mircellui IL
'555
Piul IV.
•Feriiini.nd 1.
'658
'559
p;u. rv.
•Maiimillan II.
1564
isM
PinsV.
157 »
Gregory XIIL
•Rudoirn.
i5;6
'58s
S JtWs V.
'59°
Uiban Vn.
1590
Gregory XIV,
1591
InoociHl IX.
'59=
aemtnt VIII.
1604
Leo XI.
1604
Pint V.
•MallMjJ.
■Ferdin.nd H.
i6iy
1691
Gregory XV.
1613
Urbui VIII.
•FerdininJ III.
1637
1644
'6^
Alexuidei VH.
•Leopold L
1658
1667
Clement IX.
.Tl,«.m.rt,rf«,l,^.«,ri,lc-
^T,«««„«Ulyc™™«l.,R>,n.^
t CmwneJ Emperor, buial BoloKn
*Mt.tRom..
EMPERORS AND POPES.
xxvu
Year of
Accession.
Popes.
Emperors.
Year of
Accession.
A. D.
■
A.D.
1670
Clement X.
1676
Innocent XI.
1689
Alexander VIII.
169I
Innocent XII.
1700
Clement XI.
♦Joseph I.
1705
♦Charles VI.
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 II.
1790
♦Francis II.
1792
1800
Pius VII.
Abdication of Francis II.
1806
1823
Leo XII.
1829
Pius VIII.
■
183 T
Gregory XVI,
1846
Pius IX.
• Those marked with an asterisk wc
>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,
7-
CHAP. 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 power
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 affairs 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 modem 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
CHAP. L
THE HOL Y 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 THE
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. II.
77>tf Roman
Empire in
the second
century.
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. II.
Obliteration
of 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 oflScials 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 disaflfection. 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 colonics, 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,
1
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. Stoicism, 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
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
about this unity, when other influences began to threaten
CHAP. II.
The Capi-
tal.
Diocletian
and Con-
stantine.
8
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. n.
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 were raised by their armies in
every part of the Empire, and ruled great provinces as
monarch s 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
nienaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer
greatness of Milan. Constantine trod in the same path,
extending the system of titles and fimctionaries, sepa-
rating the civil from the military, placing coimts and
dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making the
household larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more
important, though to a Ronian eye degraded by their
attachment to the monarch's person. The crown became,
for the first time, the fountain of honour. These changes
brought little good. Heavier taxation depressed the
THE EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS.
aristocracy »: population decreased, agriculture withered,
seridom 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 monarchy 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 ^.
* According to the vicious finan- ^ See the eloquent passage of
dal system that prevailed, the cvrv- Claudian, In secundum consulatum
ales in each city were required to StilicboniSf 129, sqq.^ from which
collect the taxes, and when there the following lines are taken (150-
was a deficit, to supply it from 160) : —
their own property.
* HsBc est in gremio victos quae sola recepit,
Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit,
Matris, non domins, ritu; civesque vocavit
Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinzit.
Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes
Quod veluti patriis re ionibus utitur hospes:
CHAP. u.
10
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. n.
Chris-
tianity,
Its alliance
with 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
Chiu-ch 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 c. Both in Israel and at Rome the
mingling of religious with civic patriotism had been har-
Quod sedem mutare licet : quod cernere Tholen
Lusus, et horrendos quorfdam penetrare recessus:
Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Oronten,
Quod cuncti gens una sumus. Nee tenninus unquam
RomansB ditionis erit.'
" In the Roman jurisprudence, ius sacrum is a branch of ius
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 aflfecting 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 jurisdiction, 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 no
CHAP. II.
12
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. n.
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 <i, 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
* TertuUian, writing circ. a.d. minus noster elegerit. Et merito
200, says : * Bed quid ego amplius dixerim, noster est magis Caesar, ut
de religione atque pietate Chris- a nostro Deo constitutus.' — Apolo'
tiana in imj)eratorem quem necesse get. cap. 34.
est suspiciamus ut eum quem 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®.
« See the book of Optatus, bishop
of MUevis, Contra Donadstas, 'Non
cnim respublica est in ecclesia, sed
ecdesia 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 Patro-
logics Cursm compUius.) 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 and representing
its unity.
CHAP. II.
// embraces
and pre'
serves the
imperial
idea.
CHAPTER III.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
CHAP. m.
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 little 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 perseverance 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
* * Addiderat consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii.' — Tac.
Ann. i. 2. ^ Tac. Ann, ii. 9.
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 setded 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 tide of Friend of the Roman People ; in
* Stilidio, the bulwark of the Empire, seems to have been himself
a Vandal by eztractioo.
CHAP. m.
Admitted
to Roman
titles and
honours.
i6
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. III.
Tbeirfeel-
ings to-
wards the
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 oflBce,
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
<i Of course not the consulship itself, but the omamenta consularia.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
17
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 markjgt-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®.'
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^. Alaric
• Jomandes, Be Rebus Geticisy cap. 28.
' Tac. BUt, i. and iv.
CHAP. III.
Their desire
to preserve
its institU"
tions^
i8
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. m.
became master-general of the armies of lUyricum. 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 s.' A contemporary
historian has recorded the remarkable disclosure of his
own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest
8 * Vester ^qnidem est populus
meus sed me plus servire vobis
quam illi prasesse 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 attiilissent.
Cumque gentem nostram videamur
regere, non aliud nos quam milites
vestros credimus ordinari. . . . Per
nos administratis remotanim 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 prsestitam
obex nulla concludit, nee ullis pro-
vinciarum terminis diffusio felicium
sceptrorum limitatur. Salvo divini-
tatis honore sit dictum.* — Letter
printed among the works of Ari-
tus, Bishop of Vienne. (Migne's
Patrologia^ vol. lix. p. 285.)
This letter, as its style shews,
is the composition not of Sigismund
himself, bnt 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 imtameable 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 V
Historians have remarked how valuable must have been
the skill of Roman oflficials 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
less than its own children. For it is hardly too much to
say that the thought of antagonism to the Empire and the
CHAP. III.
>» • Referre lolitus est (sr. Ataul-
phns) se in primis ardenter in-
hiasse : ut obliterato Romanorum
nomine Romanum omne solum
Oothorum imperium et faceret et
Tocaret : essetque, ut vulgariter
k)qnar, Gothia quod Romania fuis-
set ; fieretque nunc Ataulphus quod
quondam Caesar Augustus. At ubi
muka ezperientta probavisset, ne-
qne Gothos ullo modo parere legi-
bot posse propter effrenatam barba-
riem, neque reipublicae interdici
leges oportere sine quibus respublica
non est respublica, elegisse se sal-
tem, ut gloriam sibi de restituendo
in integrum augendoque Romano
nomine Gothoruni viribus quaereret,
habereturque apud posteros Ro-
manae restitutionis auctor postquam
esse non potuerat immutator. Ob
hoc abstinere a bello, ob hoc inhiare
pad nitebatur.* — Orosius, vii. 43.
C 2
20
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. m.
The belief
in its
eternity.
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 ; 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 imiversal, so must it be eternal. Nothing
like it had been seen before. The empire of Alexander
had lasted a short hfetime ; 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 foimdations 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 pro-
sperity, 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
^ Athaulf formed only to aban-
don it.
^ See, among other passages,
Varro, J>€ lingua Latino^ iv. 34 ;
Cic. Pro Domo, 33 ; Virg. Aen, ix.
448 ; Hor. Od. iii. 30. 8 ; TibuU.
ii. 5t 33; Ovid, Am, i. 15, a6;
Trist. iii. 7, 51 ; and cf. in the
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
21
his countrymen which Virgil had expressed —
'His ego nee metas rerum, nee tempora pono:
Imperium sine fine dedi* —
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. 3, 9. The
phrase *iirbs xtema* appears in a con-
stitotion issued by Valentinian III.
Tertullian speaks of Rome as
' ciritas sacrosancta.'
1 Lact. Divin. InsHt. vii. 25 :
* Etiam res ipsa declarat lapsum
niinamque rerum brevi fore : nisi
qnod incolumi urbe Roma nihil
btiusmodi videtur esse metuendum.
At vero cum caput illud orbis occi-
derit, et pvixq esse coeperit quod
Sibyllae fore aiunt, quis dubitet
venisse iam finem rebus humanis,
orbique terrarum ? Ilia, ilia est
ciFitas quae adhuc sustentat omnia,
precandusque nobis et adorandus
est Deus coeli si tamen statuta eius
et placita differri possunt, ne citius
quam putemus tyrannus ille abo-
minabiUs veniat qui tatitum fa'cinus
moliatur, ac lumen illud effodiat
cuius interitu mundus ipse lapsurus
est'
Cf. Tertoll. Apolog. cap. xxzii :
* Est et alia maior necessitas nobis
orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro
omni statu imperii rebusque Ro-
manis, qui vim maximam universo
orbi imminentem ipsamque clausu-
1am saeculi acerbitates horrendas
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 imperio 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 Dominus quam regni
Romani defectio fiat, et appareat
antichristus qui interficiet sanctos,
reddita Romanis libertate, sub suo
tamen nomine.* — Ad II Thess. ii.
4.7-
c:iAP. m.
22
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. m.
Sanctity of
the imperial
name.
triumph of Christianity this beKef 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 imending 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 "^. From
the time of Julius and Augustus his person had been
■B For example, by the ' restitutio natalium/ and the ' adrogatio per
rescriptum principis/ or, as it is expressed, * per sacrum oraculum.'
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
23
hallowed by the office of chief pontiffs and the tribum-
cian power; to swear by his head was considered the
most solemn of all oaths <> ; his ^^^ was sacred p, even
on a coin ; to him or to his Genius temples were erected
and divine honours paid while he lived <i ; and when, as it
was expressed, he ceased to be among men, the title of
Divus was accorded to him, after a solemn consecration r.
In the confused multiplicity of mythologies, the worship
of the Emperor was the only worship common to the
whole Roman world, and was therefore that usually pro-
posed as a test to the Christians on their trial. Under
the new religion the form of adoration vanished, the
sentiment of reverence remained : and the right to control
the Church as well as the State, admitted at Nicaea, and
habitually exercised by the sovereigns of Constantinople,
made the Emperor hardly less essential to the new con-
ception of a world-wide Christian monarchy than he had
been to the military despotism of old. These considera-
tions explain why the men of the fifth century, clinging to
preconceived ideas, refused to believe in that dissolution
of the Empire which they saw with their own eyes.
CHAP. III.
» Even the Christian Emperors
took the title of Pontifex Maximus,
till Gratian refused it: aBkynarov
(lyai XpiGTi6v<if rd ax^F^ vojuaas.
— Zosimus, lib. iv. cap. 36.
o • Maiore formidine et callidiore
timiditate Caesarem observatis quam
ipsam ex Olympo lovem, et merito,
si sciatis. . . . Citius denique apud
vos per omnes Deos quam per unum
geniumCaesaris peieratur.* — Tertull.
Apolog. c. xxviii.
Cf. Zos. V. 51 : d filv ydip npbi
r6v Otbv TCTVX^Kfl SlS6/X€V0S upKOSt
^ &y ws cUcoi vapidftv hSibovTas
rp Tov $€<n) <pi\av0pQnri(f t^v knl
KaroL r^v tov ^aatiXioos 6im)/x6k(-
aav KffpaXfjs^ ovk Hvai O^furdv
avrois €is t6v Toaovrov 6pK0v If-
ajjuipTCiv.
P Tac. Ann, i. 73 ; iii. 38, etc.
4 It is curious that this should
have begun in the first years of the
Empire. See, among other passages
that might be cited from the Au-
gustan poets, Virg. Georg. i. 24;
iv. 560 ; Hor. Od. iii. 3. 11;
Ovid, Epp. ex Ponto^ iv. 9. 105.
*" Hence Vespasian's dying jest,
• Ut puto, deus fio.'
24
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP, m^
ha&t days
of (be West-
ern Empire.
Because it could not die, it lived. And there was in the
slowness of the change and its 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 Romes. 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
■ OTTOV hv o $aai\€vs y, inci i) *P(l>/*i;. — Herodian.
t If the accounts we find of the Armorican republic can be trusted.
77IE BARBARIAN INVASIONS,
25
have 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. When,
at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus Augustulus, the boy
whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native
CHAP. III.
« Odoacer or Odovaker, as it
Mcois his name ought to be written,
is usually, but incorrectly, described
as a King of the Heruli, who led
his people into Italy and overthrew
the Empire of the West; others
call him King of the Rugii, or
Skyrri, or Turcilingi. The truth
seems to be that he was not a king
at 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 Skyrri were a small
tribe, apparently akin to the more
powerful Heruli, whose name is
often extended to them.
26
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. III.
IH extinc-
tion by
Odoacer^
A.D. 476.
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 title 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
* AvyovffTos 6 *Opiarov vlo*
dKOvcas Z'fjvojva v6\iv t^v jSaac-
keiav avakfKrfjaOai t^s t(u. . . .
"^vdyKaac rijv ^ovk^v diro<rT(t\ai
•npta^flav Z^vojvi arjfuuvovaav ws
iSias fiiv avTots ^aaiXuas ov Scot,
Koivbs 8i d-no-xpiiau fi6vos i)v airo-
KpoTOJO kv d/JUpoT^pois Tois iripaffi,
t6v /jlIvtoi 'Oduaxov inr* ahrSiv vpo-
$(^\rjff9ai iKavdv ovra adj^fiv tcL
trap* avTois npdyfJUXTa voMtik^v
^Xcljv vovv Koi avvcaiv dfwv koI
fMxitM)v, Kcd dftaOai rod Z-qvajvos
varpiKiov T€ adr^ dvoarciKcu d{iay
KOI TTjv tSjv 'ItoXcov tovt^ €<p€tvai
bioiicrjaiv. — Malchus ap. Photium
in Corp. Hist. Byzant,
7 Not king of Italy, as is often
said. The barbarian kings did not
for several centuries employ terri-
torial titles ; the title * king of
France/ for instance, was first used
by Henry IV. Jornandes says that
Odoacer never so much as assumed
the insignia of royalty.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS,
27
the sceptre of the world, and head an undivided Catholic
Church z. To those who lived 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
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-
nmner of the first barbarian Emperor, Theodoric the
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/ — Theodoric to Zeno:
CbuU de r Empire Occidentale. Jornandes, De Rebus Geticis, cap.
* * Nil deest nobis imperio vestro 57.
CHAP. III.
Odoacer.
Tbeadoric,
28
rilE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. ITI.
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 deca)dng
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 nations, 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 ;
^ *Unde et paene omnibus bar-
baris Gothi sapientiores exstitenint
GrsBcisque paene consimiles.' — Jom,
cap. 5.
« 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-
cophagus, in which his body is
supposed 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' ApoUinare,
and not far from the tomb of
7HE BARBARIAN INVASIONS,
29
issued equal laws for Roman and Goth, and bade the
intrader, 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
Jostmian, who had viewed with jealousy the greatness
of his nominal lieutenant, determined to assert his dor-
mant rights over Italy; its people welcomed Belisarius
as a deliverer, and in the struggle that followed the race
and name of the Ostrogoths perished for ever. Thus
agahi 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
which we now see may have be- fourteenth century.
CHAP. ni.
Italy re-
conquered
by Justi-
nian.
30
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. m.
The Trans-
alpine prO'
vinces.
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 ®.
^ *Igitur Chlodovechus ab im-
peratore Anastasio codicillos de
consulatu accepit, et in basilica
beati Martini tunica blatea indutus
est et chlamyde, imponens vertici
diadema . . . et ab ea die tanquam
consul aut ( = et) Augustus est voci-
tatus/ — Gregory of Tours, ii. 58.
• Sir F. Palgrave {English Com-
monwealth) considers this grant as
equivalent to a formal ratification
of Clovis* rule in Gaul. Hallam
rates its importance lower {Middle
AgeSy note iii. to chap. i.). Taken
in connection with 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, a§ 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 feelings and policy of the order
he entered.
As the Empire fell to pieces, and the new kingdoms
which the conquerors had founded themselves began to
dissolve, the Church clung more closely to her imity of
faith and discipline, the common bond of all Christian
men. That imity must have a centre, that centre was
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
character and customs, and laid the foundations of a
CHAP. in.
Littering
influences
of Rome,
Religion,
32
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. III.
Jurispni-
dence.
power over men's souls more durable than that which she
had lost over their bodies C 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-
gothic 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 8. Its phrases, its forms, its courts, its
subtlety 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 century, S. Leo the
Great could say to the Roman
people, * Isti (sc. Petrus et Paulus)
sunt qui te ad hanc gloriam pro-
vexerunt ut gens sancta, populus
electus, civitas sacerdotalis et regia,
per sacram B. Petri sedem caput
orbis effecta latius przsideres reli-
gione divina quam dominatione ter-
rena.' — Sermon on the Feast q^
SS. Peter and Paul. (0pp. ap. Migne,
torn. i. p. 336.)
8 *Ius Romanum est adhuc in
viridi observantia et eo iure prae-
sumitur quilibet vivere nisi adver-
sum probetur.* — Maranta, quoted
by Marquaid Freher.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
33
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 institutions continued to subsist, and
studying the feelings of that time, 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.
CHAP. lU.
CHAPTER IV.
RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
CHAP. rv.
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 comer 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 Prankish 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 from 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)
RESTORATION 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
hegemony 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
CHAP. IT.
A.D. 486.
36
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. rv.
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
in 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 » ; and at
length, as the most powerful among Catholic nations, they
attracted the eyes of the ecclesiastical head of the West,
now sorely bested by domestic foes.
Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under
* *Denique gens Francorum dendo, sed et alios salutifere con-
multos et fcecundissimos fructus vertendo/ says the emperor Lewis
Domino attulit, non solum ere- II. in aj>. 871.
RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
37
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
Byzantiiun, 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 b. 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
Sjrlverios. (Ralph Colonna, or, as some think,
« A singular account of the de Colon mellc), i)c /rans/aftone 7m-
origin of the separation of the ^k /2oma«« (circa 1 300). *The
Creeks and Latins occurs in the tyranny of Heraclius,' says he,
CHAP. IV.
Itaiyi the
Lombards,
Tbi Popes,
38
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IV.
Iconoclastic
controversy.
The Emperor Leo, born among the Isauiian 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 or; 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 Prankish 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
political revolt) carried their heresy
further and founded Mohammedan-
ism.' Similarly, the Franciscan
Marsilius of Padua (circa 1324) 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 o(
the West from Constantine to
Augustulus : the very existence of
this Western line seems to have
been even in tlie eighth or ninth
century altogether forgotten.
* Anastasius, Vita Pontijleum
Romanoruniy 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 e. Some
accoimts 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
(sumamed 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.
Maratori's Scriptores Rerum Itali- R. S. I. iii. [2.] p. 96), a strange
earum, ?ol. iii. (part 2nd), ad- mixture of earnest adjurations,
dressed * Subregulo Carolo.' dexterous appeals to Frankish
CHAP. IV.
The Popes
appeal to
the Franks.
40
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IV.
Pifin pa-
trician of
the Romans,
AJ). 754.
Import of
this title.
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 ofl&ce 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 K 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-
rions: *Declaratum quippe 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-
da?L*
s 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 Carolomanno
patriciis.' And so the Ctronicon
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 b used of him. As
one of these is a letter of Pope
Gregory IPs, the explanation may
be that the title was offered or in-
tended to be offered to him, al-
though never accepted by him.
b 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 AJ). 1015. Dn-
cange, s. v.
RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
41
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 Frankish 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 J And
since 'defence' implies a corresponding measure of obedi-
ence on the part of those who profit by it, there must have
been conceded 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 were 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
fix)m the 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 Frankish 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
CHAP. IV.
Extinction
of the Lom-
bard king-
dom by
Charles
king of the
Franks.
42
THE HOL Y 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 Frankish
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-
selfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix upon every-
thing its grasp 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
RESTORA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE,
43
one which could not fail to pervert the purposes of the
Poi>es 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 ofiicial 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.
InA.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 ofiicer should be deputed to the city
to receive from the people their oath of allegiance to the
CHAP. IV.
Accession
of Pope
Leo III,
A.D. 796.
44
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IV.
Belief in the
Roman
Empire not
extinct.
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 revoked
Saxons: thither Leo following overtook him at Pader-
bom 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;
k had been cherished by th6 Chiu-ch ; 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 title 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 imperaiores and hasileis of Britain,
Within the last century and a half the rise of Moham-
medanism i had brought out the common Christianity
of Europe into a fuller relief. The false prophet had
left one religion, one Empire, one Commander of the
£adthfiil : the Christian commonwealth needed more than
ever an eflftcient 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,
1 After the translatio ad Fran- corresponded exactly to the two
cot of AJ>. 800, the two Empires Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova.
i 'Plaudentem ceme senatum
£t Bjzantinos proceres, Graiosque Quirites/
In Eutrop, ii. 135.
CHAP. IV.
Motives 0/
tbe Pope,
46
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IT.
who while insulting his weakness 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, aa
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 predecessOTS
are said to have already contemplated"^, and towards
* Several Emperors daring 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 modem eye there is of
course no necessary connection be-
tween the Roman Empire and a
cathoHc and apostolic Church ; in
fact, the two things 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 times entertained whoUy
different notions respecting the re-
lation to one another of the same
ideas or the same institutions.
m Monachtts Sangallensis, Dt
Gestis Karoli; in Pertz, Afonw-
menta Germania Historiea.
RESTORA 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 Byzantiimi impose a master on the
original seat of empire? It was time to provide better
for the most august of human oj65ces: 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
&e Avar of Pannonia, had earned him the title of Cham-
pion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He
was now unquestioned l6rd 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 o, erected on the ruins
of that whose mingled iron and clay seemed crumbling
to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks of
Constantinople.
■ Monachus Sangallensis ; ut regna regni Franconim culmen
wpra. So Pope Gregory the Great excellit/ £p. v. 6.
two centuries earlier : ' Quanto ^ Alciatus, De Formula imperii
OBteros homines regia dignitas Romani,
antecedit, taotocsterarum gentium
CHAP. IV.
48
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. IV.
Coronation
of Charles
at Rome,
A.J>. 800.
At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The
Pope's cause was heard; his innocence, already vindi-
cated by a miracle, was pronomiced 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 Apostie'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 colimins, 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 ^ itself the curule chair of some
p Or rather, according to the 9XiA'P\ii'tiitt*%Bescbrahung der Staii
then prevailing practice of begin- Rom; with which compare Bon-
ning the year from Christmas-day, sen's work on the Basflicu of
Aj>. 801. Rome.
4 An elaborate description of old ' The primitive castom was for
St. Peter's may be found in Bunsen's the bishop to sit in the centre of
RESTORA TION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE,
49
forgotten magistrate s. From that chair the Pope now
rose, as the reading of the Gospel ended, advanced to
where Charles — ^who had exchanged his simple Frankish
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.
CHAP. nr.
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 Rayenna, particularly the beau-
tiful one of Bant' ApoUinare in
Classe, and in the cathedral of
TorceUo, near Venice.
• On this chair were represented
&e 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 satis-
factorily 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.
E
CHAPTER V.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
CHAP. V.
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 Caesar 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 ungovemed
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.
• Before the end of the tenth Charles — and some of them are
century we find the monk Bene- very good — may be found in the
diet of Soracte ascribing to Charles book of the Monk of St. Gall.
an expedition to Palestine, and Many refer to his dealings with
other marveilous exploits. The the bishops, towards whom he is
romance which passes under the described as acting like a good-
name of Archbishop Turpin is well humoured schoolmaster.
known. All the best stories about
£ 2
CHAP. V.
h
52
TBE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. V.
Import of
the corona-
tion.
As the event of a.d. 800 made an unparalleled impres-
sion on those who lived at the time, 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-
ments b. 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, Ann.^zd ann. 800 ; Spanhemius, De ficta translafione
Bellarminus, De translafione im- imperii; Conringius, De imperio
perii Romani adversus lUyricum; Romano Germanico.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
53
would have 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 thfe 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
alwajTS been wont to sit, and all the other regions which
< See especially Greenwood, Cathedra Petrit vol. iJL p. 109.
CHAP. V.
ContempO'
rary ac-
courUs.
54
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
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
ot 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 he 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 aloud. And when the people had made an
end of chanting the Laudes, he was adored by the Po|>e
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,
^ Ann. Lauresb,t ap, Pertz, Af. G. H. i.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
55
that they should name Charles king of the Franks to be
Emperor, seeing that he 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 VitcB 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
mass the most serene lord Emperor offered gifts f.'
• Apud Pertz, M. G. H, i.
' VUiB PonHf, in Mur. i^. R. L
CHAP. V.
56
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. V.
Impression
wbicb tbey
convey.
In these three accounts there is no serious discrepancy
as to the facts, although the Italian priest, as is natural,
heightens the importance of the part played by the Pope,
while the Germans are too anxious to rationalize the event,
talking of a synod of the clergy, a consultation of the
people, and a formal request to Charles, which the silence
of Eginhard, as well as the other circumstances of the
case, forbid us to accept as literally true. Similarly
Anastasius passes over the adoration rendered by the
Pope to the Emperor, upon which most of the Frankish
records insist in a way which puts it beyond doubt. But
the impression which the three narratives leave is essen-
tially the same. They all shew how little the transaction
can be made to wear a strictly legal character. The
Frankish king does not of his own might seize th6 crown,
but rather receives it as coming naturally to him, as the
legitimate consequence of the authority he already enjoyed.
The Pope bestows the crown, not in virtue of any right
of his own as head of the Church : he is merely the in-
strument of God's providence, which has unmistakeaWy
pointed out Charles as the proper person to defend and
lead the Christian commonwealth. The Roman people
do not formally elect and appoint, but by their applause
accept the chief who is presented to them. The act is
conceived of as directly ordered by the Divine Providence
which has brought about a state of things that admits
of but one issue, an issue which king, priest, and
people have only to recognize and obey; their personal
ambitions, passions, intrigues, sinking and vanishing in
reverential awe at what seems the immediate interposition
of Heaven. And as the result is desired by all parties
Aifastasius in reporting the shout of nonim/ which the other annalists
the people omits the word ' Roma- insert after ' imperatori.'
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
57
alike, they do not think of inquiring into one another's
rights, but take their momentary harmony to be natural
and necessary, never dreaming of the diflficulties and con-
flicts which were to arise out of what seemed then so
simple. And it was just because everything was thu?
left undetermined, resting not on express stipulation but
rather on a sort of mutual understanding, a sympathy of
beliefs and wishes which augured no evil, that the event
admitted of being afterwards represented in so many
different lights. Four centuries later, when Papacy and
Empire had been forced into the mortal struggle by which
the fate of both was decided, three distinct theories re-
garding the coronation of Charles will be found advocated
by three different parties, all of them plausible, all of them
to some extent misleading. The Swabian Emperors held
the crown to have been won by their great predecessor as
the prize of conquest, and drew the conclusion that the
citizens and bishop of Rome had no rights as against
themselves. The patriotic party among the Romans, ap-
pealing to the early history of the Empire, declared that
by nothing but the voice of their senate and people could
an Emperor be lawfully created, he being only their chief
magistrate, the temporary depositary of their authority.
The Popes pointed to the indisputable fact that Leo im-
posed the crown, and argued that as Gojl's earthly vicar it
was then his, and must always continue to be their right to
give to whomsoever they would an office which was created
to be the handmaid of their own. Of these three it was the
last view that eventually prevailed, yet to an impartial eye
it cannot claim, any more than do the two others, to con-
tain the whole truth, Charles did not conquer, nor the
Pope give, nor the people elect. As the act was unpre-
cedented, so was it illegal; it was a revolt of the ancient
CHAP. V.
Later
theories re-
specting' the
coronation.
58
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. V.
Wa& the
coronation
a surprise f
Western capital against a daughter who had become a
mistress ; an exercise of the sacred right of insurrection,
justified by the weakness and wickedness of the Byzantine
princes, hallowed to the eyes of the worid by the sanction
of Christ's representative, but founded upon no law, nor
competent to create any for the future.
It is an interesting and somewhat perplexing question,
how far the coronation scene, an act as imposing in its
circumstances as it was momentous in its results, was
prearranged among the parties. Eginhard tells us that
Charles was accustomed to declare that he would not,
even on so high a festival, have entered the church had
he known of the Pope's intention. Even if the monarch
had uttered, the secretary would hardly have recorded a
falsehood long after the motive that might have prompted
it had disappeared. Of the existence of that motive
which has been most commonly assumed, a fear of the
discontent of the Franks who might think their liberties
endangered, little or no proof can be brought from the
records of the time, wherein the nation is represented as
exulting in the new dignity of their chief as an accession
of grandeur to themselves. Nor can we suppose that
Charles's disavowal was meant to soothe the offended
pride of the Byzantine princes, from whom he had nothing
to fear, and who were none the more likely to recognize
his dignity, if they should believe it to be not of his own
seeking. Yet it is hard to suppose the whole affair a sur-
prise ; for it was the goal towards which the policy of the
Frankish kings had for many years pointed, and Charles
himself, in sending before him to Rome many of the
spiritual and temporal magnates of his realm, in summon-
ing thither his son Pipin from the war against the Lom-
bards of Benevento, had shewn that he expected some
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
50
more than ordinary result from this journey to the imperial
city. Alcuin moreover, Alcuin of York, the prime minister
of Charles in matters religious and literary, appears from
one of his extant letters to have sent as a Christmas gift to
his royal pupil a carefully corrected and superbly adorned
copy of the Scriptures, with the words 'ad splendorem im-
perialis potentise/ This has commonly been taken for
conclusive evidence that the plan had been settled before-
hand, and such it would be were there not some reasons
for giving the letter an earlier date, and looking upon the
word 'imperialist as a mere magniloquent flourish?. More
weight is therefore to be laid upon the arguments supplied
by the nature of the case itself. The Pope, whatever his
confidence in the sympathy of the people, would never
have ventured on so momentous a step until previous
conferences had assured him of the feelings of the king,
nor could an act for which the assembly were evidently
prepared have been kept a secret. Nevertheless, the
declaration of Charles himself can neither be evaded nor
set down to mere dissimulation. It is more just to him,
and on the whole more reasonable, to suppose that Leo,
having satisfied himself of the wishes of the Roman clergy
and people as well as of the Frankish magnates, resolved
to seize an occasion and place so eminently favourable to
his long-cherished plan, while Charles, carried away by the
enthusiasm of the moment and seeing in the pontiff" the
prophet and instrument of the divine will, accepted a dignity
which he might have wished to receive at some later time
or in some other way. If, therefore, any positive con-
clusion be adopted, it would seem to be that Charles,
although he had probably given a more or less vague
s Lorentz, Lehen Alcuins, And cf. DoUinger, Das Kaisertbttm Karls
des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger,
CHAP. V.
6o
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
Theories of
the motives
of Charles,
consent to the project, was surprised and disconcerted by
a sudden fulfilment which interrupted his own carefully
studied designs. And although a deed which changed the
history of the world was in any case no accident, it may
well have worn to the Prankish and Roman spectators the
air of a surprise. For there were no preparations apparent
in the church ; the king was not, like his Teutonic suc-
cessors in the aftertime, led in procession to the pontifical
throne : suddenly, at the very moment when he rose from
the sacred hollow where he had knelt among the ever-
burning lamps before the holiest of Christian relics — ^the
body of the prince of the Apostles — the hands of that
Apostle's representative placed upon his head the crown
of glory and poured upon him the oil of sanctification.
There was something in this to thrill the beholders with
the awe of a divine presence, and make them hail him
whom that presence seemed almost visibly to consecrate,
the * pious and peace-giving Emperor, crowned of God.'
The reluctance of Charles to assume the imperial title
is ascribed by Eginhard to a fear of the jealous hostility of
the Greeks, who could not only deny his claim to it, but
might disturb by their intrigues his dominions in Italy.
Accepting this statement, the problem remains, how is
this reluctance to be reconciled with those acts of his
which clearly shew him aiming at the Roman crown ? An
ingenious and probable, if not certain solution, is sug-
gested by a recent historian^, who argues from a minute
examination of the previous policy of Charles, that while
it .was the great object of his reign to obtain the crown of
the world, he foresaw at the same time the opposition of
•» See a very learned and interest- Karls des Grossen und seiner Nacb-
ing tract entitled Das Kaisertbum folger, by Dr. v. Dollinger.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
6i
the Eastern Court, and the want of legality from which his
title would in consequence suffer. He was therefore bent
on getting from the Byzantines, if possible, a transference
of their crown ; if not, at least a recognition of his own :
and he appears to have hoped to win this by the negotia-
tions which had been for some time kept on foot with the
Empress Irene. Just at this moment came the coronation
by Pope Leo, interrupting these deep-laid schemes, irri-
tating the Eastern Court, and forcing Charles into the
position of a rival who could not with dignity adopt a
soothing or submissive tone. Nevertheless, he seems not
even then to have abandoned the hope of obtaining a
peaceful recognition. Irene's crimes did not prevent him,
if we may credit Theophanesi, from seeking her hand in
marriage. And when the project of thus uniting the East
and West in a single Empire, baffled for a time by the op-
position of her minister -^tius, was rendered impossible by
her subsequent dethronement and exile, he did not aban-
don the policy of conciliation until a surly acquiescence in
rather than admission of his dignity had been won from
the Byzantine sovereigns Michael and NicephorusJ.
Whether, supposing Leo to have been less precipitate, a
cession of the crown, or an acknowledgment of the right
of the Romans to confer it, could ever have been obtained
by Charles is perhaps more than doubtful. But it is clear
that he judged rightly in rating its importance high, for
the want of it was the great blemish in his own and his
successors' dignity. To shew how this was so, reference
* *ATroKpi<Ti&pioi napd, KapoiJXAow i Their ambassadors at last sa-
icat Aiovros cdTOijfi€voi ^(vxOrjvai luted him by the desired title 'Laudes
ovT^v Ty Kapo^\X<f) vpos ydfiov ei dixerunt imperatorem eum et
«a2 ivSiacu rd 'Eot)d Koi rd 'Effircpia. basileum appellantes.* Eginh. Ann.,
— -Theoph. Cbron, in Corp. Scripit, ad anu. 812.
Hist. Byz.
CHAP. V.
Defect in
the title of
the Teutonic
Emperors.
63
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V. must be made to the events of a.d. 476. Both the ex-
tinction of the Western Empire in that year and its revival
in A.D. 800 have been very generally misunderstood in
modern times, and although the mistake is not, in a certain
sense, of practical importance, yet it tends to confiise
history and to blind us to the ideas of the people who
acted on both occasions. When Odoacer compelled the
abdication of Romulus Augustulus, he did not abolish the
Western Empire as a separate power, but caused it to be
reunited with or sink into the Eastern, so that from that
time there was, as there had been before Diocletian, a
single undivided Roman Empire. In a.d. 800 the very
memory of the separate Western Empire, as it had stood
from the death of Theodosius till Odoacer, had, so far as
appears, been long since lost, and neither LfCO nor Charles
nor any one among their advisers dreamt of reviving it
They too, like their predecessors, held the Roman Empire
to be one and indivisible, and proposed by the coronation
of the Frankish king not to proclaim a severance of the
East and West, but to reverse the act of Constantine, and
make Old Rome again the civil as well as the ecclesiastical
capital of the Empire that bore her name. Their deed
was in its essence illegal, but they sought to give it every
semblance of legality : they professed and partly believed
that they were not revolting against a reigning sovereign,-
but legitimately filling up the place of the deposed Con-
stantine the Sixth; the people of the imperial city ex-
ercising their ancient right of choice, their bishop his right
of consecration.
Their purpose was but half accomplished. They could
create, but they could not destroy: they set up an Emperor
of their own, whose representatives thenceforward ruled
the West, but Constantinople retained her sovereigns as
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
63
of yore ; and Christendom saw henceforth two imperial
lines, not as in the time before a.d. 476, the conjoint heads
of a single realm, but rivals and enemies, each denouncing
the other as an impostor, each professing to be the only
true and lawful head of the Christian Church and people.
Although therefore we must in practice speak during the
next seven centuries (down till a.d. 1453, when Constan-
tinople fell before the Mohammedan) of an Eastern and
a Western Empire, the phrase is in strictness incorrect,
and was one which either court ought to have repudiated.
The Byzantines always did repudiate it^; the Latins usually;
although, yielding to facts, they sometimes condescended
to employ it themselves. But their theory was always the
same. Charles was held to be the legitimate successor,
not of Romulus Augustulus, but of Basil, Heraclius,
Justinian, Arcadius, and the whole Eastern line; and
hence it is that in all the annals of the time and of many
succeeding centuries, the name of Constantine VI,
the sixty-seventh in order from Augustus, is followed
without a break by that of Charles, the sixty-eighth.
The maintenance of an imperial line among the Greeks
was a continuing protest against the validity of Charles's title.
But from their enmity he had little to fear, and in the eyes
of the world he seemed to step into their place, adding the
traditional dignity which had been theirs to the power that
he already enjoyed. North Italy and Rome ceased for ever
to own the supremacy of Byzantium; and while the Eastern
princes paid a shameful tribute to the Mussulman, the
Prankish Emperor — as the recognized head of Christ-
endom— received from the patriarch of Jerusalem the keys
CHAP. V.
^ AMiongh they occasionally
eoooeded the title of Emperor to
the Teutonic forereign : as in the
instances cited in note ^ p. 61, and
note ^ p. 193.
Government
of Charles
as Emperor.
64
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
His author-
ity in mat-
ters eccle-
siastical.
of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Calvary ; the gift
of the Sepulchre itself, says Eginhard, from Aaron king of
the Persians K Out of this peaceful intercourse with the
great Khalif the romancers created a crusade. Within his
own dominions his sway assumed a more sacred character.
Already had his unwearied and comprehensive activity
made him throughout his reign an ecclesiastical no less than
a civil ruler, summoning and sitting in councils, examining
and appointing bishops, settling by capitularies the smallest
points of church discipline and polity. A synod held at
Frankfort in a.d. 794 condemned the decrees of the second
council of Nic3ea, which had been approved by Pope Ha-
drian, censured in violent terms the conduct of the Byzantine
rulers in suggesting them, and without excluding images
from churches, altogether forbade them to be worshipped
or even venerated. Not only did Charles preside in and
direct the deliberations of this synod, although legates from
the Pope were present— he also caused a treatise to be
drawn up stating and urging its conclusions ; he pressed
Hadrian to declare Constantine VI a heretic for enouncing
doctrines to which Hadrian had himself consented. There
are letters of his extant in which he lectures Pope Leo in
a tone of easy superiority, admonishes him to obey the holy
canons, and bids him pray earnestly for the success of the
efforts which it is the monarch's duty to make for the sub-
jugation of pagans and the establishment of sound doctrine
throughout the Church. Nay, subsequent Popes them-
selves ^ admitted and applauded the despotic superin-
tendence of matters spiritual which he was wont to
exercise, and which led some one to give him playfully a
^ Harun er Rashid ; Eginh. Vita
Karoli, cap. i6.
^ So Pope John VIII in a docu-
ment quoted by Waitz, DitUsckt
VerfassungsgeschichU, iii.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
title that had once been applied to the Pope himself,
'Episcopus episcoporum/
Acting and speaking thus when merely king, it may be
thought that Charles needed no further title to justify
his power. The inference is in truth rather the converse
of this. Upon what he had done already the imperial
title must necessarily follow: the attitude of protection
and control which he held towards the Church and the
Holy See belonged, according to the ideas of the time,
especially and only to an Emperor. Therefore his coro-
nation was the fitting completion and legitimation of his
authority, sanctifying rather than increasing it. We have,
however, one remarkable witness to the importance that
was attached to the imperial name, and the enhancement
which he conceived his oflfice to have received from it.
In a gpreat assembly held at Aachen, a.d. 802, the lately-
crowned Emperor revised the laws of all the races that
obeyed him, endeavouring to harmonize and correct them,
and issued a capitulary singular in subject and tone °i.
All persons within his dominions, as well ecclesiastical as
civil, who have already sworn allegiance to him as king,
are thereby commanded to swear to him afresh as Caesar;
and all who have never yet sworn, down to the age of
twelve, shall now take the same oath. ' At the same
time it shall be publicly explained to all what is the force
and meaning of this oath, and how much more it includes
than a mere promise of fidelity to the monarch's person.
Firstly, it binds those who swear it to live, each and every
one of them, according to his strength and knowledge, in
the holy service of God ; since the lord Emperor cannot
extend over all his care and discipline. Secondly, it
binds them neither by force nor fraud to seize or molest
« Pertz, M, G. H. iii. (legg. I.)
F
CHAP. V.
TT>e impe-
rial office
in its eccle-
siastical
relations.
Capitulary
o/"a.d. 802.
66
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
any of the goods or servants of his crown. Thirdly, to
do no violence nor treason towards the holy Church, or
to widows, or orphans, or strangers, seeing that the lord
Emperor has been appointed, after the Lord and his
saints, the protector and defender of all such.' Then in
similar fashion purity of life is prescribed to the monks ;
homicide, the neglect of hospitality) and other offences
are denounced, the notions of sin and crime being inter-
mingled and almost identified in a way to which no
parallel can be found, unless it be in the Mosaic code.
There God, the invisible object of worship, is also, though
almost incidentally, the judge and political ruler of Israel ;
here the whole cycle of social and moral duty is deduced
from the obligation of obedience to the visible autocratic
head of the Christian state.
In most of Charles's words and deeds, nor less distinctly
in the writings of his adviser Alcuin, may be discerned
the working of the same theocratic ideas. Among his
intimate friends he chose to be called by the name of
David, exercising in reality all the powers of the Jewish
king; presiding over this kingdom of God upon earth
rather as a second Constantine or Theodosius than in the
spirit and traditions of the Julii or the Flavii. Among
his measures there are two which in particular recall the
first Christian Emperor. As Constantine founds so
Charles erects on a firmer basis the connection of Church
and State. Bishops and abbots are as essential a part of
rising feudalism as counts and dukes. Their benefices
are held imder the same conditions of fealty and the
service in war of their vassal tenants, not of the spiritual
person himself: they have similar rights of jurisdiction,
and are subject alike to the imperial missu The monarch
tries often to restrict the clergy, as persons, to spiritual
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
67
duties; quells the insubordination of the monasteries;
endeavours to bring the seculars into a monastic life by
instituting and regulating chapters. But after granting
wealth and power, the attempt was vain ; his strong hand
withdrawn, they laughed at control. Again, it was by
him first that the payment of tithes, for which the priest-
hood had long been pleading, was made compulsory in
Western Europe, and the support of the ministers of
religion entrusted to the laws of the state.
In civil aflfairs also Charles acquired, with the imperial
title, a new position. Later jurists labour to distinguish
his power as Roman Emperor from that which he held
already as king of the Franks and their subject allies:
they insist that his coronation gave him the capital only,
that it is absurd to talk of a Roman Empire in regions
whither the eagles had never flown ^i. In such expressions
there seems to lurk either confusion or misconception.
It was not the actual government of the city that Charles
obtained in a.d. 800 ; that his father had already held as
Patrician and he had constantly exercised in the same
capacity: it was far more than the titular sovereignty of
Rome which had hitherto been supposed to be vested
in the Byzantine princes : it was nothing less than the
headship of the world, believed to appertain of right to
the lawful Roman Emperor, whether he reigned on the
Bosphorus, the Tiber, or the Rhine. As that headship,
although never denied, had been in abeyance in the West
for several centuries, its bestowal on th^ king of so vast
a realm was a change of the first moment, for it made the
coronation not merely a transference of the seat of Empire,
but a renewal of the Empire itself, a bringing back of it
" Putter, Historical Development Conring, and esp. David Blondel,
of the German Constitution ; so too Adv, Cbtffletium,
F 2
CHAP. V.
Influence of
the imperial
title in
Germany
and Gaul.
68
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
Action of
Charles on
Europe.
from faitl. to sight, from the world of belief and theory to
the world of fact and reality. And since the powers it
gave were autocratic and unlimited, it must swallow up
all minor claims and dignities : the rights of Charles the
Frankish king were merged in those of Charles the suc-
cessor of Augustus, the lord of the world. That his
imperial authority was theoretically irrespective of place
is clear from his own words and acts, and from all the
monuments of that time. He would not, indeed, have
dreamed of treating the free Franks as Justinian had
treated his half-Oriental subjects, nor would the warriors
who followed his standard have brooked such an attempt.
Yet even to German eyes his position must have been
altered by the halo of vague splendour which now sur-
rounded him ; for all, even the Saxon and the Slave, had
heard of Rome's glories, and revered the name of Caesar.
And in his effort to weld discordant elements into one
body, to introduce regular gradations of authority, to con-
trol the Teutonic tendency to localization by his missi—^
officials commissioned to traverse each some part of his
dominions, reporting on and redressing the evils they
found — and by his own oft-repeated personal progresses^
Charles was guided by the traditions of the old Empire.
His sway is the revival of order and culture, fusing the
West into a compact whole, whose parts are never thence-
forward to lose the marks of their connection and their
half-Roman character, gathering up all that is left in
Europe of spirit and wealth and knowledge, and hurling
it with the new force of Christianity on the infidel of the
South and the masses of imtamed barbarism to the North
and East. Ruling the world by the gift of God, and the
transmitted rights of the Romans and their Caesar whom
God had chosen to conquer it, he renews the original
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
69
aggressive movement of the Empire: the civilized world has
subdued her invader o, and now arms him against savagery
and heathendom. Hence the wars, not more of the sword
than of the cross, against Saxons, Avars, Slaves, Danes,
Spanish Arabs, where monasteries are fortresses and
baptism the badge of submission. The overthrow of the
IrminsMP, in the first Saxon campaign^, sums up the
changes of seven centuries. The Romanized Teuton
destroys the monument of his country's freedom, for it is
also the emblem of paganism and barbarism. The work
of Arminius is undone by his successor.
This, however, is not the only side from which
Charles's policy and character may be regarded. If the
imity of the Church and the shadow of imperial preroga-
tive was one pillar of his power, the other was the
Prankish nation. The empire was still military, though
in a sense strangely different from that of Julius or
Severus. The warlike Franks had permeated Western
® • Graecia capta ferum victorem Saxons as a warlike representation
cepit,' is repeated in this conquest of Wodan. The Rev. Dr. Scott, of
of the Teuton by the Roman. Westminster, suggests to me that the
P The notion that once prevailed name may l)e merely an altered form
that the IrminsiU was the * pillar of of the Keltic word which appears in
Hermann,* set up on the spot of the Welsh as Hir Vaen, the long stone
defeat of Varus, is, however, now {Mam, a stone). On this view the
generally discredited. Some German pillar would commemorate a pre-
antiquaries take the pillar to be a Teutonic race, whose name for it the
rude figure of the native god or hero invading tribes adopted. A rude ditty,
Irmin, who, as Grimm {Deutschi apparently referring to the destruc*
Mythologie, i. 325) thinks, may be tion of the pillar by Charles, still lives
an eponym of the HerminoneS, and in the memory of the Westphalians
was probably worshipped by the round Paderbom, and runs thus : —
* Hermen sla dermen
Sla pipen, sla trummen
De Kaiser wil kummen
Met hammer un stangen
Wil Hermen uphangen.'
* Eginhard, Arm.
CHAP. V.
His position
as FranJdsh
king.
70
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. V.
General re-
sults of bis
Empire.
Europe; their primacy was admitted by the kindred
tribes of Lombards, Bavarians, Thuringians, Alemannians,
and Burgundians ; the Slavic peoples on the borders
trembled and paid tribute ; Alfonso of Asturias found in
the Emperor a protector against the infidel foe. His
influence, if not his exerted power, crossed the ocean :
the kings of the Scots sent gifts and called him lord':
the restoration of Eardulf to Northumbria, still more of
Egbert to Wessex, might furnish a better ground for
the claim of suzerainty than many to which hi^ suc-
cessors had afterwards recourse. As it was by Frankish
arms that this predominance in Europe which the im-
perial tide adorned and legalized had been won, so was
the government of Charles Roman in semblance rather
than in fact. It was not by restoring the effete mechanism
of the old Empire, but by his own vigorous personal ac-
tion and that of his great officers, that he strove to admin-
ister and reform. With every effort for a strong central
government, there is no despotism ; each nation retains
its laws, its hereditary chiefs, its free popular assemblies.
The conditions granted to the Saxons afler such cruel
warfare, conditions so favourable that in the next century
their dukes hold the foremost place in Germany, shew how
litde he desired to make the Franks a dominant caste.
He repeats the attempt of Theodoric to breathe a
Teutonic spirit into Roman forms. The conception was
magnificent; great results followed its partial execution.
Two causes forbade success. The one was the eccle-
siastical, especially the Papal power, apparently subject
to the temporal, but with a strong and undefined pre-
rogative which only waited the occasion to trample on
' Most probably the Scots of Ireland. — Eginhard, Vita KaroU, cap. 16.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
71
what it had helped to raise. The Pope might take away
the crown he had bestowed, and turn against the Em-
peror the Church which now obeyed him. The other
was to be found in the discordance of the component
parts of the Empire. The nations were not ripe for
settled life or extensive schemes of polity ; the differences
of race, language, manners, over vast and thinly-peopled
lands baffled every attempt to maintain their connection :
and when once the spell of the great mind was with-
drawn, the mutually repellent forces began to work, and
the mass dissolved into that chaos out of which it had
been formed. Nevertheless, the parts separated not as
they met, but having aU of them undergone influences
which continued to act when political connection had
ceased. For the work of Charles — a genius pre-eminently
creative — was not lost in the anarchy that followed:
rather are we to regard his reign as the beginning of a
new era, or as laying the foundations whereon men con-
tinued for many generations to build.
No claim can be more groimdless than that which the
modern French, the sons of the Latinized Kelt, set up to
the Teutonic Charles. At Rome he might assume the
chlamys and the sandals, but at the head of his Frankish
host he stricdy adhered to the customs of his country,
and was beloved by his people as the very ideal of their
own character and habits s. Of strength and stature
almost superhuman, in swimming and hunting unsur-
passed, steadfast and terrible in fight, to his friends gentle
and condescending, he was a Roman, much less a Gaul,
in nothing but his culture and his schemes of government,
otherwise a Teuton. The centre of his realm was the
■ Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 23.
CHAP. V.
Personal
habits and
sympathies.
72
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. V.
HU Em-
pire and
character
generally.
Rhine; his capitals Aachen* and Engilenheim"; his
army Frankish; his sympathies — as they are shewn in
the gathering of the old hero-lays^, the composition
of a German grammar, the ordinance against confining
prayer to the three languages, Hebrew, Greek, and
Latin, — were all for the race from which he sprang,
and whose advance, represented by the victory of Aus-
trasia, the true Frankish fatherland, over Neustria and
Aquitaine, spread a second Germanic wave over the
conquered countries.
There were in his Empire, as in his own mind, two
elements ; those two from the union and mutual action
and reaction of which modern civilization has arisen.
These vast domains, reaching from the Ebro to the
Carpathian mountains, from the Eyder to the Liris, were
all the conquests of the Frankish sword, and were still
governed almost exclusively by viceroys and officers of
Frankish blood. But the conception of the Empire,
that which made it a State and not a mere mass of
subject tribes like those great Eastern dominions which
rise and perish in a lifetime, the realms of Sesostris, or
Attila, or Timur, was inherited from an older and a
grander system, was not Teutonic but Roman — Roman
in its ordered rule, in its uniformity and precision, in its
endeavour to subject the individual to the system — Roman
in its effort to realize a certain limited and human per-
fection, whose very completeness shall exclude the hope
of further progress. And the bond, too, by which the
* Aix-la-Chapclle (called by En- Pertz's edition of Eginhard, begin-
glish writers of the seventeenth cen- ning,—
tury, Aken). See the lines given in
* Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis,
Sedes regni principalis.
Prima regum curia.'
^ Engilenheim, or Ingelheim, lies between Mentz and Bingen.
near the left shore of the Rhine * Eginhard, Vita Karoli, cap. 29.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
n
Empire was held together was Roman in its origin,
although Roman in a sense which would have surprised
Trajan or Severus, could it have been foretold them.
The ecclesiastical body was already organized and cen-
tralized, and it was in his rule over the ecclesiastical
body that the secret of Charles's power lay. Every
Christian — ^Frank, Gaul, or Italian — owed loyalty to the
head and defender of his religion: the unity of the
Empire was a reflection of the imity of the Church.
Into a general view of the government and policy of
Charles it is not possible here to enter. Yet his legis-
lation, his assemblies, his administrative system, his mag-
nificent works, recalling the projects of Alexander and
Caesary, the zeal for education and literature which he
shewed in the collection of manuscripts, the founding of
schools, the gathering of eminent men from all quarters
around him, cannot be appreciated apart from his posi-
tion as restorer of the Roman Empire. Like all the
foremost men of our race, Charles was all great things
in one, and was so great just because the workings of his
genius were so harmonious. He was not a mere bar-
barian warrior any more than he was an astute diplo-
matist; there is none of all his qualities which would
not be forced out of its place were we to characterize
him chiefly by it. Comparisons between famous men
of different ages are generally as worthless as they are
easy: the circumstances among which Charles lived do
not permit us to institute a minute parallel between his
greatness and that of those two to whom it is the modern
fashion to compare him, nor to say whether he was or
could have become as profoimd a politician as Caesar, as
7 Es^inhard, Vita KaroU^ cap. 17.
CHAP. V.
74
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP..V. skilful a commander as Napoleon z. But neither to the
Roman nor to the Corsican was he inferior in that one
quality by which both he and they chiefly impress our
imaginations — that intense, vivid, unresting energy which
swept him over Europe in campaign after campaign,
which sought a field for its workings in theology, science,
literature, no less than in politics and war. As it was
this wondretis-activity that made him the conqueror of
Europe, si was it by the variety of his culture that he
became her civilizer. From him, in whose wide deep
mind the whole mediaeval theory of the world and human
life mirrored itself, did mediaeval society take the form
and impress which it retained for centuries, and the traces
whereof are among us and upon us to this day.
The great Emperor was buried at Aachen, in that
basilica which it had been the delight of his later years
to erect and adorn with the treasures of ancient art.
His tomb under the dome — where now we see an
enormous slab, with the words 'Carolo Magno' — was
inscribed, * Magnus aique Orthodoxus Imperaior\' Poets,
fostered by his own zeal, sang of him who had given to
* It is not a little curious that of
the three whom the modern French
have taken to be their national
heroes all should have been fo-
reigners, and two foreign con-
querors.
• This basilica was built upon
the mo4el of the church of the
Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem, and
as it was the first church of any
size that had been erected in those
regions for centuries past, it excited
extraordinary interest among the
Franks and Gauls. In many of its
features it greatly resembles the
beautiful church of San Vitale, at
Ravenna (also modelled upon that
of the Holy Sepulchre), which was
begun by Theodoric, and com-
pleted under Justinian. Probably
San Vitale was used as a pattera
by Charles's architects: we know
that he caused marble columns to
be brought from Ravenna to deck
the church at Aachen. Over the
tomb of Charles, below the cen-
tral dome (to which the Gothic
choir we now see was added some
centuries later), there hangs a huge
chandelier, the gift of Frederick
Barbarossa.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES,
75
the Franks the sway of Romulus ^. The gorgeous mists
of romance gradually rose and wreathed themselves round
his name, till by canonization as a saint he received the
highest glory the world or the Church could confer ^ For
the Roman Church claimed then, as she claims still, the
privilege which humanity in one form or another seems
scarce able to deny itself, of raising to honours almost
divine its great departed ; and as in pagan times temples
had risen to a deified Emperor, so churches were dedi-
cated to St. Charlemagne. Between Sanctus Carolus and
Divus Julius how strange an analogy and how strange
a contrast !
*> • Romuleum Francis prastitit Nigellus, in Pertz, M. G. H. t. i.
imperium.' — Elegy of Ennoldus So too Floras the Deacon, —
* Huic etenim cessit etiam gens Romula genti,
Regnorumque simul mater Roma inclyta cessit:
Huius ibi princeps regni diademata sumpsit
Munere apostolico, Christi munimine fretus.'
e A curious illustration of the
influence of the name and fame of
Charles, even on remote nations, is
supplied by a story in the Heims-
kringla. Alfhild, a concubine of
St. Olaf, had given birth to a child
at night, while Olaf was asleep;
and Sigvat his favourite skald,
seeing it to be weak, and fearing
it might die, caused it to be bap-
tized at once, and gave it the
name of Magnus. When the King
awoke and heard what had been
done, he was angry, and calling
Sigvat asked, *Why hast thou
called the child Magnus, which is
not a name of our race ? * The
skald answered, *I called him
after King Karl Magnus, who I
knew had been the best man in
the world/ The child grew up to
be King Magnus the Good, the
most popular and one of the
greatest of all the Norwegian
kings; and from him the name
became a common one over all
the North.
CHAP. v.
CHAPTER VI.
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
CHAP. VI.
Lewis the
Pious,
Lewis the Pious », left by Charles's death sole heir, had
been some years before associated with his father in the
Empire, and had been crowned by his own hands in a
way which, intentionally or not, appeared to Heny the
need of Papal sanction. But it was soon seen that the
strength to grasp the sceptre had not passed with it
Too mild to restrain his turbulent nobles, and thrown
by over-conscientiousness into the hands of the clergy,
he had reigned few years when . dissensions broke out
jon all sides. Charles had wished the Empire to con-
tinue one, under the supremacy of a single Emperor,
but with its several parts, Lombardy, Aquitaine, Austrasia,
Bavaria, each a kingdom held by a scion of the reign-
ing house. A scheme dangerous in itself, and rendered
more so by the absence or neglect of regular rules of
succession, could with difficulty have been managed by
a wise and firm monarch. Lewis tried in vain to satisfy
his sons (Lothar, Lewis, and Charles) by dividing and
redividing: they rebelled; he was deposed, and forced
by the bishops to do penance; again restored, but
* Usage has established this would better express the meaning
translation of * Hludowicus Pius,* of the epithet,
but * gentle * or * kind - hearted *
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
77
without power, a tool in the hands of contending fac-
tions. On his death the sons flew to arms, and the
first of the dynastic quarrels of modern Europe was
fought out on the field of Fontenay. In the partition
treaty of Verdun which followed, the Teutonic principle
of equal division among heirs triumphed over the Roman
one of the transmission of an indivisible Empire: the
practical sovereignty of all three brothers was admitted
in their respective territories, a barren precedence only
reserved to Lothar, with the imperial title which he, as
the eldest, already enjoyed. A more important result
was the separation of the Gaulish and German na-
tionalities. Their difference of feeling, shewn already
in the support of Lewis the Pious by the Germans
against the Gallo-Franks and the Church ^, took now a
permanent shape: modem Germany proclaims the era
of A.D. 843 the beginning of her national existence, and
celebrated its thousandth anniversary thirty-two years
ago. To Charles the Bald was given Francia Occiden-
talis, that is to say, Neustria and Aquitaine; to Lothar,
who as Emperor must possess the two capitals, Rome
and Aachen, a long and narrow kingdom stretching from
the North Sea to the Mediterranean, and including the
northern half of Italy ; Lewis (surnamed, from his king-
dom, the German) received all east of the Rhine, Franks,
Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible su-
premacies over Czechs and Moravians beyond. Through-
out these regions German was spoken ; through Charles's
kingdom a corrupt tongue, equally removed from Latin
and from modem French. Lothar's, being mixed and
^ Von Ranke discovers io this spiritual power. — History of Ger-
ttrly traces of the aversion of the many during the Reformation : In-
Gcnnans to the pretensions of the troduction.
CHAP. VI.
Partition
of Verdun,
A.D. 843.
Lothar I,
78
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
Lewis II,
Charles II.
Charles IIL
End of the
Carolingian
Empire of
the West,
A.D. 888.
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 Une 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 oflf into captivity: pouring through the Straits
<= 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,
talis) 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 castles, the weak became their bondsmen,
or took shelter under the cowl: the governor — count,
abbot, or bishop — tightened 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 isolation, 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 Amulf, 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-
thaiingia, 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 HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
)//o the
Ireat.
^talian
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 trae, as 'v^ell 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 oile 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 diflferences 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
imperil* whereof Tacitus speaks,. ^ posse principem alibi
quamRonuB fieri ^l had long before become alium quam
Rmanum ; and now, the names of Roman and Christian
having grown co-extensive, a barbarian chieftain was,
as a Roman citizen, eligible to the ofl&ce 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 foraierly 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 Rom^ 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 Amulf ; Burgundy® split
up mto two principalities, in one of which (Transjurane)
Rudolf proclaimed himself king, while the other (Cis-
jurane with Provence) submitted to Boso'; while Italy
* Tac. KhU 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
CHAP. VI.
82
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
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. Amulf s 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 was 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. 928 K. 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 pontiff'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 legally 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.
888 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 call himself king), which begins,
' Ego Boso Dei gratia id quod sum,
et coniux mea Irmingardis jvoles
imperialis.'
8 Lewis had been surprised by
Berengar at Verona, blinded, and
forced to take refuge in bis own
kingdom of Provence.
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS,
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 \ 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^
was sought in marriage by Adalbert son of Berengar
n, 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
hy Berengar, escaped with diflBculty from the loathsome
prison where his barbarity had confined her, and appealed
^ Alberic is called variously sena- dolf, king of Transjuranc Bur-
tor, consul, patrician, and prince of gundy. She was at this time in
the Romans. her nineteenth year.
' Adelheid was daughter of Ru-
6 2
CBAP. VI.
Adelbeid
Queen of
Italy.
84
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
OUo*sJirst
expedition
into Italy,
A.D. 951.
Invitation
sent by the
Pope to
Otto,
Motives for
reviving the
Empire.
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 his kingdom as a
vassal of the East Prankish 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
Prankish 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 *Iest the pagans should insult the Christians, if
the name of Emperor should have ceased among the
Christians^. 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
' ^ CLron. Moiss., in Pertz; M. G. H. i. ^05.
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS,
8f
but so many cries for the restoration of the Roman
Empire 1. These were the feelings that on the field of
Merseburg 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"^/
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 Apostle, 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 ofiice;
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 J*,
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
* Sec especially the poem of dissolution of the Carolingian
Floras 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 alluit Hister,
Quos Rhenus Rhodanusque rigant, Ligerisve, Padusve,
Quos omnes dudum tenuit concordia nexos,
Foedere nunc nipto divortia moesta fatigant.*
* Witukind, Annales^ in Pertz. phant cries of the German army.
It may, however, be doubted whe- ° Cf. esp. the * Lihellus de im-
ther the annalist is not here giving peratoria potestate iu urhe Roma*
a Yery free rendering of the trium- in Pertz.
CHAP. VI.
Condition
of Italy,
86
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
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
with 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 oflfer
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, tided
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 Grerman
o * Licet videamus Romanorum peribit, quia stabit in regibus
regnum in maxima parte jam de- suis.* — Liher d» Anticbristo, ad-
structum, tamen quamdiu reges dressed by Adso, abbot of Moutier-
Francorum duraverint qui Roma- en-Der, to Queen Gerberga (circa
num imperium tenere debent, dig- a.d. 950).
nitas Romani imperii ex toto non
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
87
eyes a righteous as well as a glorious design : approved
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
he felt that he was sacrificing, as modern writers have
thought that he did sacrifice, the greatness of his German
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
his queen, he was crowned by John XII, on the day
of the Purification, the second of February, a.d. 962.
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 <i, yet it is plain that the
P From the money which Otto
struck in Italy, it seems probable
that he did occasionilly use the title
of king of Italy or of the Lombards.
That he was crowned can hardly be
considered quite certain.
' *A papa imperator ordinatur/
Mys Hermannus Contractus. * Do-
minum Ottonem, ad hoc usque
vocatum regem, non solum Ro-
"^*oo $ed et poene totius Europae
popolo acdamante imperatorem
CHAP. VI.
consecravit Augustum.' — A nnal,
Quedlinb.f ad ann. 962. *Benedic-
tionem a domno apostolico lohanne,
cuius rogatione hue venit, cum sua
coniuge promeruit imperialem ac
patronus Romanae effectus est ec-
clesisB.' — Thietmar. * Acclamatione
totius Romani populi ab slpostolico
lohanne, filio Alberici, imperator et
Augustus vocatur et ordinatur.' —
Continuator Reginonis. And simi-
larly the other annalists.
Descent of
Otto the
Great into
Italy.
His corona-
tion at
RonUf
AJD. 962.
S8
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VI.
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 consent.
CHAPTER VIL
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE.
Why the
revival of
the Empire
was desired
These were the events and circumstances of the time : chap. vn.
let us now look at the causes. The restoration of the
Empire by Charles may seem to be suflficiently 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 Prankish 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 j
mstitution divine and necessary, having its foundations in
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
90
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VII.
MedicBval
theories.
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 essentially 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 con-
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 e^^piring antiquity bequeathed
to the ages that followed were those of a World-
Monarchy and a World-Religion.
Before the conquests of Rome, men, with little know-
ledge of each other, with no experience of wide political
union**, had held differences of race to be natural and
irremovable barriers. Similarly, religion appeared to them
a matter piu*ely local and national ; 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
CHAP. vn.
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
brash can place them on the canvas,
in despair at representing their
exact position at any single mo-
ment, contents himself with paint-
ing the effects that are broadest
and most permanent, and at giving
raiher 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
setting 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 Middle
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
fourteenth century.
^ Empires like the Persian did*
nothing to assimilate the subject
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.
The World-
Religion,
92
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VU.
Coincides
wi'b the
World'
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 war between Greeks and barbarians as
natural <^, 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®.
It is on 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 imity
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
e Od. iii. 72:—
• • . . ^ fjujaf/iUojs &\&\rj(r0€f
Old T€ Xi;tfTT^p€s, trire^p 5A.a, toIt dXSojvrat
^vx^ napSifxcvoit Kcucbv dXXoSairoun ^pipovrtt i
Cf. Od. ix. 39 : and the Hymn to
the Pythian Apollo, 1. 274. So in
II. V. 214, &KK6Tpios <p&s.
<* Plato, in the beginning of the
Laws, represents it as natural be-
tween all states: voKf/JLbs <f>vaH
virdpxu vpbs &v&<r(u rdf v6\€ts.
• See especially Acts xvii. 26;
Gal. iii. 28; Eph. ii. li sqq., iv.
3-6; Col. iii. II.
' This is drawn out by Laurent,
Histoire du Droit des Gens; and
.£gidi, Der Furstenraib nacb dem
Luneviller Frieden,
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE.
93
world, exactly as the universal sway of the Csesars 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 «. CEcume-
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^.
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. VII.
s ' Romanos enim vocitant homi-
nes nostrae religionis.' — Gregory of
Tours, quoted by -^gidi, from A.
F. Pott, Essay on the Words • R'6-
miscb,* * Romaniscbf* * Roman,*
' Romantiscb.* So in the Middle
Ages, *F<ufimoi is used to mean
Christians, as opposed to "EXkrjves,
heathens.
Cf. Ducange, * Romani oHm dicti
qui alias Christiani vel etiam Catho-
lid'
*» 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
iu 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 believe the Roman Em-
pire to be eternal for one set of rea-
sons, came to believe the Christian
Church to be 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
the Catholic Church.
94
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vn.
Preserva-
tion of the
unity of the
Cburcb,
Mediceval
Theology
requires
One Visible
Catholic
Cburcb,
*city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker
is Godi/
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 Augnsdni,
Dei. His influence, great through praecipueque his qui De Civitate Dei
all the Middle Ages, was greater on praetitulati sunt.' — Eginhard, Ffte
no one than on Charles. — ' Delecta- Karoli, cap. 34.
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE.
95
records and the blind ignorance of the mass of the people
than any to which their modem 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 and live in it : it was the tendency to
see everything in the concrete, to turn the parable into a
fact, the doctrine into its most literal application, the
sjrmbol 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
CHAP. VIU
96
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. VII.
Idea of
political
unity up
held by the
clergy.
- \
rejected with horror; but since there were as yet no
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 oflfices.
k • Quapropter universorum pre-
cibos fidelium optandum est, ut in
omnem gloriam vestram extendatur
imperium, ut scilicet catholica fides
. . . veracitcr in una confessione
cunctorum cordibus infigatur, qua-
tenus summi Regis don ante pietate
eadem sanctae pacis et perfects cari-
tatis omnes ubique regat et custodiat
unitas.* Quoted by Waitz {Deutscbt
Verfassungsgeschicbtef ii. 182) from
an nnprinted 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
ideas out of which the system we call Realism developed
itself. The beginnings of philosophy in those times were
logical ; and its first efforts were to distribute and classify :
system, subordination, uniformity, appeared to be that
which 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 elements,
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 difierences 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-
CHAP. VII.
Influence of
the meta-
physics of
the time
upon the
theory (/
a World-
State,
H
98
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vn.
hendedl 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, imconnected,
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 "^. 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 {Studium)
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 vitali et scientiali, catholica
ecclesia spiritualiter mirificatur,
augmentatur et regitur. His ita-
que tribus, tanquam fiindamento,
pariete et tecto, eadem ecclesia
tanquam materialiter profidt. Et
sicut ecclesia materialis uno tan-
tum fundamento et uno tecto eset,
parietibus vero quatuor, ita im-
perium quatuor habet parietes, hoc
est, quatuor imperii sedes, Aquis-
granum, Arelatum, Mediolanum,
Romam.* — Jardanis Cbromea ; c^.
Schardius, Sylloge Traetatuum, And
see Dollinger, Die Vergca^enbeit
und Gegenwart der kaibSiscbm
Tbeologie, p. 8.
^ * Una est sola respublica totioi
populi Christiani, ergo de necessitate
erit et unus solus princeps et rex
illius reipublicae, statutus et stabili-
tus ad ipsius fidei et populi Chiis
tiani dilatationem et d^ensionem.
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 matiuity 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 ^en, St. Leo the Great could boast that to Rome,
exalted by the preaching of the chief of the Apostles to
be a holy nation, a chosen people, a priestly and royal
city, there had been appointed a spiritual dominion wider
than her earthly swayn. 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 ecclesiam.'—Engelbcrt (abbot of Ad-
Angustinus (i># CivUate Dei, Ub. roont in Upper Austria), De Ortu
zix.) quod extra ecclesiam nunquam et Fine Imperii Romami (circa
intt nec potuit nee poterit esse 1310).
Temm imperium, etsi fuerint im- In this 'de necessitate* every-
peiatores qoalitercnmque et tecun- thing is included.
dom quid, non simpliciter, qui » Sec note ', p. 3 a*
foeniot extra fidem Catbolicam et
H 2
CHAP. yn.
Tbe ideal
state sup-
posed to be
embodied in
tbe Roman
Empire,
100
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VII.
Constan-
tine's Do-
nation.
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 docimient, 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 o. 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
oflfice. The Pope is to inhabit the Lateran palace, to
wear the diadem, the collar, the purple cloak, to cany
« This is admirably brought out by ^gidi, Der Fursienratb naeb dem
Luneviller Frieden.
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE,
lOI
the sceptre, and to be attended by a body of chamberlains.
Sunilarly 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
his prototype the chief of the civil, is the key to all the
thoughts and acts of the Roman clergy; not less plainly
seen in the details of papal ceremonial than it is in the
gigantic scheme of papal legislation. The Canon law
was intended by its authors to reproduce and rival the
imperial jurisprudence; a correspondence was traced
CHAP. Vll.
Interdepen-
dence of
tPapacy and
yEmpire.
P See the original forgery (or
rather the extracts which Gratis^n
gives from it) in the Corpus luris
Canonici, Dist, xcvi. cc. 1 3, 14:
*Et sicut nostram terrenam im-
perialem potentiam, sic sacrosanc-
tarn Romanam ecclesiam decre-
vimas veneranter honorari, et am-
plius quam nostrum imperium et
terrenimi thronum sedem beati Petri
glonose exaltari, tribuentes ei po-
testatem et glori^e dignitatem atque
▼igorem et honorificentiam impe-
riaJem .... Beato Sylvestro patri
Dostro nimmo pontifici et univer-
sal! urbis Komse papae, et omnibus
eins successoribus pontificibus, qui
usque in finem mundi in sede beati
Petri enmt sessuri, de prsesenti
contradimus palatium imperii nostri
Lateranense, deinde diadema, vide-
licet coronam capitis nostri, simulque
phrygium, necnon et superhumerale,
▼eram etiam et chlamydem pur-
porcam et tunicam coccineam, et
<Hnnia imperialia indumenta, sed et
dignitatem imperialem prsesidentium
cquitum, conferentes etiam et im-
perialia sceptra, simulque cuncta
signa atque banda et diversa oma-
meuta imperialia et omnem pro-
cessionem imperialis culminis et
gloriam potestatis nostrae
. . £t sicut imperialis militia oraatur
ita et clerum sanctae Romanse eccle-
siae omari 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
occidentalium regionum provincias
loca et civitates beatissimo papac
Sylvestro universali papae con-
tradimus atque relinquimus. . . .
Ubi enim principatus sacerdotum
et Christianas religiouis caput ab
imperatore ccelesti constitutum est,
iustum non est ut illic imperator
terrenus habeat potestatem.'
The practice of kissing the
Pope's foot was adopted in imita-
tion of the old imperial court. It
wax afterwards revived by the Ger-
man Emperors.
102
THE HOL Y 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<i, 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. 800 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-
<t Dollinger has shewn in a recent So Anastasias, * Ammonebat (tc.
work {Die Papst-Fabeln des MitteU Gregorius Secundus) ne a fide tel
alters) that the common belief that amorc Romani imperii desisterent.'
Gregory II excited the revolt against — Vit<B Pontif. Rom.
Leo the Iconoclast is unfounded.
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE.
103
denly transplanted into a new order of things, from filling
its ancient place and serving its former ends. The dic-
tatorship at Rome in the second Pmiic 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 oflSce 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.
CHAP. vn.
' Of this curious seal, a leaden
ow, preserved at Paris, a figure is
given upon the cover of this volume.
There are very few monuments of
"^t age whose genuineness can be
considered altogether beyond doubt ;
hut this seal has many respectable
authorities in its favour. See,
among others. Le Blanc, Disserta-
^'on bistorique sur quelques Mon-
noies de Charlemagne, Paris, 1689;
J. M. Heineccius, De Veterihus
Germanorum aliarumque nationum
sigillis. Lips. 1 709 ; Anastasios,
Vit<B Pontijicum Romanorum, ed.
Vignoli, Romae, 1752; Gotz,
Deutscblands Kayser-Munzen des
Mittelaltersy Dresden, 1827; and
the authorities cited by Waitz,
Deutsche Verfassungsgescbicbte, iii.
1 79, n. 4.
I04
THE HOL V 'ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. VII.
Position
and/unc-
tions of the
Emperor.
The realistic philosophy, and the needs of a time when
the only notion of civil or religious order was submission
to authority, 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 8. 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 ccelestis *) be represented by a second
earthly vicerpy, the Emperor {Imperator ierrentis *), whose
authority shall be of and for this present life. And as in
this present world the soul cannot act save through the
* * PrsBterea mirari se dilecta
fraternitas tua quod non Fran-
corum set Romanorum imperatores
nos appellemus ; set scire te con-
veuit quia nisi Romanorum impera-
tores essemus, utique nee Fran-
corum. A Romanis enim hoc
nomen et dignitatem assumpsimus,
apud quos profecto primum tantse
culmen sublimitatis effulsit,* &c. —
Letter of the Emperor Lewis II to
Basil the Emperor at Constantinople ^
from Cbron. Salernit,, ap. Murat.
S. R. L
^ * Ulam (se, Romanam ecde*
siam) solus Ule fundavit, et super
petram fidei mox nascentis erexit,
qui beato aetemaB vitse clavigero
terreni simul et ccelestis imperii
iura commisit.' — Corpus Juris
Canonicif Dist. xxii. c. i. The
expression is not uncommon in
mediaeval writers. . So 'unum est
imperium Patris et Filii et Spiritus
Sancti, cuius est pars ecdesia cod-
stituta in terns,' in Lewis U*$
letter.
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE,
ros
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
CHAP. Vll.
» ' Merito summus Pontifex Ro-
manus episcopus did potest. rex et
sacerdos. Si enim doroinus noster
lesus Christus sic appellatur, non
▼idetur incongruum suuni vocare
successorem. Corporale et tempo-
rale ex spirituali et perpetuo de-
pendet, sicut corporis operatio ex
▼irtutc animz. Sicut ergo corpus
per animam habet esse virtutem et
operationem, ita et temporalis iuris^
dictio principum per spiritualem
Petri et successorum eius.* — St.
Thomas Aquinas, De Regimine
Principum.
* * Nonne Romana ecclesia tene-
tor imperatori tanquam suo patrono,
et imperator ccclesiam fovere et
defensare tanquam suus vere pa-
tronus? certe sic Patronis
vero concessum est ut prselatos in
ecclesiis sui patronatus eligant.
Cum ergo imperator onus sentiat
patronatus, ut qui tenetur earn de-
fendere, sentire debet honorem et
emolumentum.' I quote this from
a curious document in Goldast's
collection of tracts {Monorchia Im-
perii)^ entitled * Letter of the four
Universities t Paris, Oxford ^Prague,
and the** Romana gen eralitas" to the
Emperor Wenzel and Pope Urban*
A.D. I. ^80. 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
barmonyof
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
forgery, does not make it less valu-
able as. an evidence of men's ideas.
X So Leo III in a charter issued
on the day of Charles's coronation :
* . . . . actum in presentia gloriosi
atque excellentissimi filii nostri
Caroli quern auctore Deo in de-
fensionem et provectionem sanctae
universalis ecclesiae hodie Augustum
sacra vimus.' — ^JaflfiS, Regesta Pond-
ficum Romanorum^ ad ann. 800.
So, indeed, Theodulf of Orleans,
a contemporary of Charles, ascribes
to the Emperor an almost papal au-
thority over the Church itself: —
* Cceli habet hie (sc. Papa) claves, proprias te iussit habere ;
Tu regis ecclesiae, nam regit ille poli;
Tu regis eius opes, clenmi populumque 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
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
CHAP. Vll.
'ifJnion of
Church and
State,
ic8
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. VII.
•^
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 z. 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 SacbseTtspiegel {Speculum
Saxonicum^ circ. a.d. 1240), 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 Scbwabenspiegel, com-
piled half a ceniury later, subordi-
nates the prince to the pontiff:
* Daz weltliche Schwert des Q«-
richtes daz lihet der Babest dem
Chaiser ; daz geistlich ist dem
Babest gesetzt daz er damit richte.'
» So Boniface VIII in the bull
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL 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^. 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^/
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
Unam Sanctam, will have but one
head for the Christian people:
'Igitur ecclesiflB unius et unicae
uDum corpus, unum caput, non duo
capita quasi monstrum.*
** St. Bernard writes to Conrad
III: 'Non veniat anima mea in
consilium eorum qui dicunt vel im-
perio pacem et libertatem ecclesiae
▼el ecclesiflB prosperitatem et exalta-
tionem imperii nocituram.' So in
the De ConsideraHone : ' Si utrum-
que simul habere velis, perdes
utrumque,' of the papal claim to
temporal and spiritual authority,
quoted by Gieseler.
c * Sedens in solio armatus et cinc-
tus ensem, habensque in capite Con-
stantini diadema, stricto dextra ca-
pulo ensis accincti, ait : " Numquid
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
Albert I, in a.d. i 299. 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. io6) : —
CHAP. vn.
Proofs
from me-
diaeval do-
cuments.
*Soleva Roma, che '1 buon mondo feo
Duo Soli aver, che V una e 1* altra strada
Facean vedere, e del mondo e di Deo.
L* un r altro ha spento, ed h giunta la spada
Col pastorale : e 1* un coll, altro insieme
Per viva forzu mal convien che vada.*
no
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vn.
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^.
That which it is easiest to prove is the connection of the
Empire with religion. From every record, from chron-
icles and treatises, proclamations, laws, and sermons,
passages may be adduced wherein the defence and
spread of the faith, and the maintenance of concord
among the Christian people, are represented as the func-
tion to which the Empire has been set apart The belief
expressed by Lewis II, * Imperii dignitas non in vocabuli
voce sed in gloriosae pietatis culmine consistit©,' appears
again in the address of the Archbishop of Mentz to
Conrad II ^, as Vicar of God ; is reiterated by Frederick
I ff, when he writes to the prelates of Germany, * On
earth God has placed no more than two powers, and as
there is in heaven but one God, so is there here one
Pope and one Emperor. Divine providence has specially
appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance
d See especially Peter de Andlo
{J)e Imperio Romano) ; Ralph
Colonna {De translatione Imperii
Romani) ; Dante (De Monarebia) ;
Engelbert {De Ortu et Fine Im-
perii Romant) ; Marsilius Patavinus
{De translatione Imperii Romani) ;
^neas Sylvius Piccolomini {De Ortu
et Autboritate Imperii Romant);
Zoannetus {De Imperio Romano
atque ejus lurisdietione) ; and the
writers in Schardius's Sylloge, and
in Goldast's Collection of Tracts,
entitled Monarebia Imperii,
^ Letter of Lewis II to Basil the
Macedonian, in Cbron, Salemit, in
Mur. S, R. I. : also given by Baro-
nius, Ann, Eccl, ad ann. 871.
' 'Ad summum dignitatis per-
venisti : Vicarius es ChristL* — ^Wip-
po, Vita Cbuonradi {ap, Pertz),
c. 3.
s Letter in Radewic, ap. Muiat.
S.R,L
THEORY OF THE MEDIMVAL EMPIRE.
Ill
of schism in the Church^;' is echoed by jurists and
divines down to the days of Charles V>. It was a
doctrine which we shall find the friends and foes of the
Holy See equally concerned to insist on, the one to make
the transference (translatid) from the Greeks to the
Germans appear entirely the Pope's work, and so esta-
blish his right of overseeing or cancelling his rival's
election, the others by setting the Emperor at the head
of the Church to reduce the Pope to the place of chief
bishop of his realm J'. His headship was dwelt upon
chiefly in the two duties already noticed. As the counter-
part of the Mussulman Commander of the Faithful, he
was leader of the Church militant against her infidel foes,
was in this capacity summoned to conduct crusades, and
in later times recognized chief of the confederacies
against the conquering Ottomans. As representative of
the whole Christian people, it belonged to him to con-
voke General Councils, a right not without importance
even when exercised concurrently with the Pope, but far
more weighty when the object of the Council was to settle
a disputed election, or, as at Constance, to depose the
reigning pontiff himself.
No better illustrations can be desired than those to
^ Lewis IV is styled in one of
his proclamations, * Gcntis humansB,
orbis Christiani costos, urbi et orbi
a Deo electos prseesse.' — ^Pfeffinger,
VUriariui lUtsstrahu,
i In a document issued by the
Diet of Speyer (ajd. 1529) the
Emperor is called ' Oberst, Vogt, und
Hsnpt dcr Christenheit.' Hierony-
raos Balbus, writing about the same
time, pats the question whether all
Christians are subject to the £m-
CHAP. Vll.
peror in temporal things, as they
are to the Pope in spiritual, and
answers it by saying, * CUm ambo
ex eodem fonte periluxerint et
eadem semita incedant, de utroque
idem puto sentiendum.*
^ 'Non magis ad Papam de-
positio seu remotio pertinet quam
ad quoslibet regum praelatos, qui
reges suos prout assolent, consecrant
et inungunt.* — Letter of Frederick
11 (lib. i. c. 3).
112
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vn.
The Coro-
nation cerC'
monies.
The rights
of the Em-
pire proved
from the
Bible.
be found in the office for the imperial coronation at
Rome, too long to be transcribed here, but well worthy
of an attentive study 1. The rights prescribed in it are
rights of consecration to a religious office : the Emperor,
besides the sword, globe, and sceptre of temporal power,
receives a ring as the s}Tnbol of his faith, is ordained a
subdeacon, assists the Pope in celebrating mass, partakes
as a clerical person of the commimion in both kinds, is
admitted a canon of St. Peter and St. John Lateran.
The oath to be taken by an elector begins, * Ego N. volo
regem Romanorum in Caesarem promovendum, temporale
caput populo Christiano eligere.' The Emperor swears
to cherish and defend the Holy Roman Church and her
bishop : the Pope prays after the reading of the Gospel,
*Deus qui ad praedicandum aetemi regni evangelium
Imperium Romanum prseparasti, praetende famulo tuo
Imperatori nostro anna coelestia.' Among the Emperor's
official titles there occur these : * Head of Christendom,'
'Defender and Advocate of the Christian Church,' 'Tem-
poral Head of the Faithful,' * Protector of Palestine and
of the Catholic Faith™.'
Very singular are the reasonings used by which the
necessity and divine right of the Empire are proved out
of the Bible. The mediaeval theory of the relation of the
civil power to the priestly was profoimdly influenced by
the account in the Old Testament of the Jewish theo-
cracy, in which the king, though the institution of his
office was a derogation from the purity of the older
1 Liber Ceremonialis Romanus, tales Italia Medii JEvi.
lib. i. sect. 5 ; with which compare ™ See Goldast, Collection qfltiu
the Coronatio Romana of Henry peritd Constitutions; and Moter,
VII, in Pertz, and Muratori's Dis- Romiscbe Kayser.
sertation in vol. i. of the Antiqui-
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE,
113
system, appears divinely chosen and commissioned, and
stood in a peculiarly intimate relation to the national
religion. From the New Testament the authority and
eternity of Rome herself was established. Every passage
was seized on where submission to the powers that be
is enjoined, every instance cited where obedience had
actually \)een rendered to imperial officials, a special em-
phasis being laid on the sanction which Christ Himself
had given to Roman dominion by pacifying the world
through Augustus, by being bom at the time of the
taxing, by paying tribute to Csesar, by saying to Pilate,
'Thou couldest have no power at all against Me except it
were given thee from above.'
More attractive to the mystical spirit than these direct
arguments were those drawn from prophecy, or based
on the allegorical interpretation of Scripture. Very early
in Christian history had the belief formed itself that the
Roman Empire — as the fourth beast of DanieFs vision,
as the iron legs and feet of Nebuchadnezzar's images-
was to be the world's last and imiversal kingdom. From
Origen and Jerome downwards it found unquestioned
acceptance °, and that not imnaturally. For no new
power had arisen to extinguish the Roman, as the Persian
monarchy had been blotted out by Alexander, as the
realms of his successors had fallen before the conquer-
ing republic herself. Every Northern conqueror, Goth,
CHAP. vn.
» The abbot Engelbert {J)e Ortu
et Fine Imperii Rotnani) quotes
Origen and Jerome to this effect,
and proceeds himself to explain,
from a Thess. ii., how the falling
away will precede the coming of
Antichrist. There will be a triple
* discessio,' of the kingdoms of the
earth from the Roman Empire, of
the Church from the Apostolic See,
of the faithful from the faith. Of
these, the first causes the second ;
the temporal sword to punish here-
tics and schismatics being no longer
ready to work the will of the rulers
of the Church.
fi4
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VU.
Lombard, Burgundian, had cherished her memory and
preserved her laws; Germany had adopted even the
name of the Empire * dreadful and terrible and strong
exceedingly, and diverse from all that were before it'
To these predictions, and to many others from the Apo-
calypse, were added those which in the Gospels and
Epistles foretold the advent of Antichrist®. He was to
succeed the Roman dominion, and the Popes are more
than once warned that by weakening the Empire they
are hastening the coming of the enemy and the end of
the world P. It is not only when groping in the dark
labyrinths of prophecy that mediaeval authors are quick
in detecting emblems, imaginative in explaining them.
Men were wont in those days to interpret Scripture in
a singular fashion. Not only did it not occm: to them to
ask what meaning words had to those to whom they were
o A full statement of the views
that prevailed in the earlier Middle
Age regarding Antichrist — as well
as of the singular prophecy of the
Prankish Emperor who shall appear
in the latter days, conquer the
world, and then going to Jerusalem
shall lay down his crown on the
Mount of Olives and deliver over
the kingdom to Christ — may be
found in the little treatise. Vita
Anticbristit which Adso, monk and
afterwards abbot of Moutier-en-
Der, compiled (circa 950) for the
information of Queen Gerberga,
wife of Louis d'Outremer. Anti-
christ is to be born a Jew of the
tribe of Dan (Gen. xlix. 17), *non
de episcopo et monacha, sicut alii
delirando dogmatizant, sed de im«
mundissima meretrice et cnidelis-
simo nebulone. Totus in peccato
concipietui, in peccato generabitur.
in peccato nascetur.' His birthplace
is Babylon : he is to be brought up
in Bethsaida and Chorazin.
Adso's book may be found printed
in Migne, t. ci. p. la^o.
P S. Thomas explains the pro-
phecy in a remarkable manner,
shewing how the* decline of the
Empire is no argument against its
fulfilment. *Dicendum quod noi^
dum cessavit, sed est commutatum
de temporali in spirituale, ut didt
Leo Papa in sbrmone de ApostoUs :
et ideo discessio a Romano imperio
debet intelligi non solum a tem-
porali sed etiam a spiritual!, scilidt
a fide Catholica Romanae Ecclesic
Est autem hoc conveniens signum
nam Christus venit, quando Roma-
num imperium omnibus dominaba-
tur : ita e contra signum adventns
Antichrist! est discessio ab eo,'-»
Comment^ ad 2 Tbess, ii.
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE,
"S
originally addressed ; they were quite as careless whether
the sense they discovered was one which the language
used would naturally and rationally bear to any reader at
any time. No analogy was too faint, no allegory too
fanciful, to be drawn out of a simple text; and, once
propounded, the interpretation acquired in argument all
the authority of the text itself. Thus the two swords of
which Christ said, *It is enough,' became the spiritual
and temporal powers, and the grant of the spiritual to
Peter involves the supremacy of the Papacy^. Thus one
writer proves the eternity of Rome from the seventy-
second Psalm, * They shall fear thee as long as the sun
and moon endure, throughout all generations;' the moon
being of course, since Gregory VII, the Roman Empire,
as the sun, or greater light, is the Popedom. Another
quoting, ' Qui tenet teneat donee auferatur'f/ with Augus-
tine's explanation thereof s, says, that when *he who
letteth' is removed, tribes and provinces will rise in rebel-
lion, and the Empire to which God has committed the
government of the human race will be dissolved. From
the niiseries of his own time (he wrote under Frederick
III) he predicts that the end is near. The same spirit of
symbolism seized on the number of the electors : ' the
seven lamps burning in the unity of the sevenfold spirit
which illumine the Holy Empire*.' Strange legends told
CHAP, vn
q See note *, 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 the Sacbsenspiegel says,
* Dat eine svert hadde Sinte Peter,
dat het nudepaves: dat andere hadde
Johannes, dat het nu de keyser.*
» a Thcss. ii. 7.
I
■ 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.
* Jordanis Chronica (written
towards the close of the thirteenth
century).
ii6
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VII.
\
lUustra-
tionsfrom
MeduBval
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
Middle 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 subde 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 unmistakeaUj
THEORY OF THE MEDIMVAL 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
triclinimn, constructeti 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 fa9ade 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 Qirist 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 Tax 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 Aposde 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
suflSciently clear. First comes the revelation of the
CHAP. VU.
Mosaic of
the Lateran
Palace at
Rome,
ii8
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vn.
Fresco in
S. Maria
Novella at
Florence.
Gospd, 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 ^Mch
the Christian people is to be respectively taught and
governed. Thirdly, we are shewn <he 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 conMnonly
ascribed, on Vasari's authority, to Simone Martini of
Siena, but an examination of the dates of his life seems
to discredit this view ^. Most probably it was executed
" Compare with this the words
which Pope Hadrian I had used,
some twenty-three years before, of
Charles as representative of Con-
stantine: *Et sicut temporibus
Beati Sylvestri, Romani pontificis,
a sanctse recordationis piissimo
Constantino magno imperatore, per
eius largitatem sancta Dei catholica
et apostolica Romana ecclesia ele-
yata atque exahata 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 Christianissimiis Dei
Constantinus imperator his tem-
poribus surrexit, per quern omnia
Deus sanctsB suae ecclesias beati
apostolorum principis Petri largiri
dignatus est.' — Letter XLIX of (Sid.
Carol f A J). 777 (in Mur. Scriptares
Rerum 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.
* The church in which the open-
ing scene of Boccaccio's Decameron
is laid.
X 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 beUevers: 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- * There is of course a great deal
tory of Painting in Italy, vol. ii. more detail in the picture, which
PP- 85 sqq. it does not appear necessary to
^ Domini canes. Spotted be- describe. St. Dominic is a con-
caiise of their black-and-white spicuous figure.
^*"^«it. It is worth remarking that the
CHAP. VII.
120
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. vn.
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 'v^diich 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 to restrictions of
place or person. The idea of one Christian people, all
whose members are equal in the sight of God, — an idea
so forcibly expressed in the unity of the priesthood, where
no barrier separated the successor of the Apostle from the
humblest curate, — and in the prevalence of one language
for worship and government, made the post of Emperor
independent of the race, or rank, or actual resoiu"ces of
its occupant. The Emperor was entitled to the obedience
of Christendom, not as hereditary chief of a victorious
tribe, or feudal lord of a portion of the earth's surface,
but as solemnly invested with an oflSce. Not only did he
excel in dignity the kings of the earth : his power was
different in its nature ; and, so far from supplanting or
rivalling theirs, rose above them to become the source and
needful condition of their authority in their several terri-
tories, the bond which joined them in one harmonious
body. The vast dominions and vigorous personal action
of Charles the Great had concealed this distinction while
he reigned ; under his successors the imperial crown ap-
peared disconnected from the direct government of the
kingdoms they had established, existing only in the form
Emperor, who is on the Pope's left the usual imperial globe, a death's
hand, and so made slightly inferior head,typifying the transitory natue
to him while superior to every one of his power,
else, holds in his hand, instead of
THEORY OF THE MEDIEVAL EMPIRE.
121
of an undefined suzerainty, as the type of that unity with-
out which men's minds could not rest. It was charac-
teristic of the Middle Ages, that demanding the existence
of an Emperor, they were careless who he was or how he
was chosen, so he had been duly inaugurated ; and that
they were not shocked by the contrast between unbounded
rights and actual helplessness. At no time in the worid's
history has theory, pretending all the while to control
practice, been so utterly divorced from it. Ferocious and
sensual, that age worshipped humility and asceticism :
there has never been a purer ideal of love, nor a grosser
profligacy of life.
The power of the Roman Emperor cannot as yet be
called international ; though this, as we shall see, became
in later times its most important aspect ; for in the tenth
century national distinctions had scarcely begun to exist.
But its genius was clerical and old Roman, in no wise
territorial or Teutonic : it rested not on armed hosts or
wide lands, but upon the duty, the awe, the love of its
subjects.
CHAP. VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM.
CHAP. vm.
Union of
the Roman
Empire
with the
German
kingdom.
Germany
and its
monarchy.
This was the ofl&ce which Otto the Great assumed in
A.D. 962. But it was not his only ofl&ce. He was already
a German king ; and the new dignity by no means super-
seded the old. This union in one person of two charac-
ters, a union at first personal, then oflScial, and which
became at last a fusion of the two into something dif-
ferent from either, is the key to the whole subsequent
history of Germany and the Empire.
Of the German kingdom little need be said, since it
diflfers in no essential respect from the other kingdoms of
Western Europe as they stood in the tenth century. The
five or six great tribes or tribe-leagues which composed
the German nation had been first brought together under
the sceptre of the Carolingians ; and, though still retain-
ing marks of their independent origin, were prevented
from separating by community of speech and a common
pride in the great Prankish Empire. When the line of
Charles the Great ended in a.d. 911, by the death of
Lewis the Child (son of Arnulf), Conrad, duke of the
Franconians, and after him Henry (the Fowler), duke of
the Saxons, was chosen to fill the vacant throne. By his
vigorous yet conciliatory action, his upright character, his
courage and good fortune in repelling the Hungarians,
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM, 1 23
Henry laid deep the foundations of royal power : under
his more famous son it rose into a stable edifice. Otto's
coronation feast at Aachen, where the great nobles of the
realm did him menial service, where Franks, Bavarians,
Suabians, Thuringians, and Lorrainers gathered round the
Saxon monarch, is the inauguration of a true Teutonic
realm, which, though it called itself not German but East
Frankish, and claimed to be the lawful representative of
the Carolingian monarchy, had a constitution and a ten-
dency in many respects different.
There had been under those princes a singular mix-
ture of the old German organization by tribes or districts
(the so-called Gauverfassung), such as we find in the
earliest records, with the method introduced by Charles of
niaintaining by means of officials, some fixed, others
moving from place to place, the control of the central
government. In the suspension of that government which
followed his days, there grew up a system whose seeds
had been sown as far back as the time of Clovis, a system
whose essence was the combination of the tenure of land
by military service with a peculiar personal relation be-
tween the landlord and his tenant, whereby the one was
bound to render fatherly protection, the other aid and
obedience. This is not the place for tracing the origin of
feudality on Roman soil, nor for shewing how, by a sort
of contagion, it spread into Germany, how it struck firm
root in the period of comparative quiet under Pipin and
Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the im-
press which determined its ultimate form, how the weak-
ness of his successors allowed it to triumph everywhere.
StiU less would it be possible here to examine its social
and moral influence. Politically it might be defined as
"Jc system which made the owner of a piece of land,
CHAP. VIII
Feudalism.
124
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. vm.
The feudal
king.
whether large or small, the sovereign of those who dwelt
thereon : an annexation of personal to territorial authority
more familiar to Eastern despotism than to the free races
of primitive Europe. On this principle were founded, and
by it are explained, feudal law and justice, feudal finance,
feudal legislation, each tenant holding towards his lord
the position which his own tenants held towards him-
self And it is just because the relation was so uniform,
the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly
bound to its support, that feudalism has been able to lay
upon society that grasp which the struggles of more than
twenty generations have scarcely shaken ofif.
Now by the middle of the tenth century, Germany, less
fully committed than France to feudalism's worst feature,
the hopeless bondage of the peasantry, was otherwise
thoroughly feudalized. As for that equality of all the
freeborn save the sacred line which we find in the Ger-
many of Tacitus, there had been substituted a gradation
of ranks and a concentration of power in the hands of a
landholding caste, so had the monarch lost his ancient
character as leader and judge of the people, to become
the head of a tyrannical oligarchy. He was titular lord of
the soil, could exact from his vassals service and aid in
arms and money, could dispose of vacant fiefs, could at
pleasure declare war or make peace. But all these rights
he exercised far less as sovereign of the nation than as
standing in a peculiar relation to the feudal tenants, a re-
lation in its origin strictly personal, and whose prominence
obscured the political duties of prince and subject And
great as these rights might become in the hands of an
ambitious and politic ruler, they were in practice limited
by the corresponding duties he owed to his vassals, and
by the diflSculty of enforcing them against a powerful
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM, 125
offender. The king was not permitted to retain in his
own hands escheated fiefs, must even grant away those he
had held before coming to the throne ; he could not inter-
fere with the jurisdiction of his tenants in their own lands,
nor prevent them from waging war or forming leagues
with each other like independent princes. Chief among
the nobles stood the dukes, who, although their authority
was now delegated, theoretically at least, instead of inde-
pendent, territorial instead of personal, retained never-
theless much of that hold on the exclusive loyalty of their
subjects which had belonged to them as hereditary leaders
of the tribe under the ancient system. They were, with
the three Rhenish archbishops, by far the greatest subjects,
often aspiring to the crown, sometimes not unable to re-
sist its wearer. The constant encroachments which Otto
made upon their privileges, especially through the institu-
tion of the Counts Palatine, destroyed their ascendancy,
bat not their importance. It was not till the thirteenth
century that they disappeared with the rise of the second
order of nobility. That order, at this period far less
powerful, included the counts, margraves or marquises
and landgraves, originally officers of the crown, now
feodal tenants; holding their lands of the dukes, and
maintaining against them the same contest which they in
torn waged with the crown. Below these came the barons
and ample knights, then the diminishing class of freemen,
the mcreasing one of serfs* The institutions of primitive
Germany were almost all gone; supplanted by a new
system, partly the natural result of the formation of a
settled from a half-nomad society, partly imitated from
that which had arisen upon Roman soil, west of the Rhine
and south of the Alps. The army was no longer the
Heerban of the whole nation, which had been wont to
CHAP. ym.
The no-
hUity,
The Qer-
manic
feudal
polity
generally.
126
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VIII.
follow the king on foot in distant expeditions, but a
cavalry militia of barons and their retainers, bound to
service for a short period, and rendering it unwillingly
where their own interest was not concerned* The fre-
quent popular assemblies, whereof under the names of the
Mallum, the Placitum, the Mayfield, we hear so much
under Clovis and Charles, were now never summoned,
and the laws that had been promulgated there were, if
not abrogated, practically obsolete. No national council
existed, save the Diet in which the higher nobility, lay
and clerical, met their sovereign, sometimes to decide on
foreign war, oftener to concur in the grant of a fief or the.
proscription of a rebel. Every district had its own rude
local customs administered by the court of the local lord :
other law there was none, for imperial jurisprudence had
in these lately civilized countries not yet filled the place
left empty by the disuse of the barbarian codes.
This condition of things was indeed better than that
utter confusion which had gone before, for a principle of
order had began to group and bind the tossing atoms;
and though the union into which it drove men was a hard
and narrow one, it was something that they should have
learnt to unite themselves at all. Yet nascent feudality
was but one remove from anarchy ; and the tendency to
isolation and diversity continued, despite the efforts of the
Church and the Carolingian princes, to be all-powerful in
Western Europe. The German kingdom was already a
bond between the German races, and appears strong
and united when we compare it with the France of Hugh
Capet, or the England of Ethelred II ; yet its history to
the twelfth century is little else than a record of disorders,
revolts, civil wars, of a ceaseless struggle on the part of
the monarch to enforce his feudal rights, a resistance by
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM, 127
his vassals equally obstinate and more frequenUy success-
ful. What the issue of the contest might have been if
Germany had been left to take her own course is matter
of speculation, though the example of every European
state except England and Poland may incline the balance
in favour of the crown. But the strife had scarcely begun
when a new influence was interposed : the German king
became Roman Emperor. No two systems can be more
unlike than those whose headship became thus vested in
one person : the one centralized, the other local ; the one
resting on a sublime theory, the other the rude offspring
of anarchy; the one gathering all power into the hands of
an irresponsible monarch, the other limiting his rights and
authorizing resistance to his commands ; the one demand-
ing the equality of all citizens as creatures equal before
Heaven, the other bound up with an aristocracy the
proudest, and in its gradations of rank the most exact,
that Europe had ever seen. Characters so repugnant
could not, it might be thought, meet in one person, or if
they met must strive till one swallowed up the other. It
was not so. In the fusion which began from the first,
though it was for a time imperceptible, each of the two
characters gave and each lost some of its attributes : the
king became more than German, the Emperor less than
Roman, till, at the end of six centuries, the monarch in
whom two 'persons' had been united, appeared as a third
Cerent from either of the former, and might not inap-
propriately be entitied * German Emperor ».' The nature
and progress of this change will appear in the after history
of Germany, and cannot be described here without in
* Although this was of course semper Augustus ; ' * Romischer
never his legal tide. TUl 1806 Kaiser.*
^ wai 'Romanoram Imperator
CHAP. VIII.
The Roman
Empire
and the
German
kingdom.
128
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. Yin.
Results of
this union
in one per-
son.
some measure anticipating subsequent events. A word or
two may indicate how the process of fusion began.
It was natural that the great mass of Otto's subjects,
to whom the imperial tide, dimly associated with Rome
and the Pope, soimded grander than the regal, without be-
ing known as otherwise different, should in thought and
speech confound them. The sovereign and his ecclesi-
astical advisers, with far clearer views of the new office
and of the mutual relation of the two, found it impossible
to separate them in practice, and were glad to merge the
lesser in the greater. For as lord of the world. Otto was
Emperor north as well as south of the Alps. When he
issued an edict, he claimed the obedience of his Teutonic
subjects in both capacities ; when as Emperor he led the
armies of the gospel against the heathen, it was the
standard of their feudal superior that his armed vassals
followed: when he founded churches and aj^inted
bishops, he acted partly as suzerain of feudal lands^ partly
as protector of the faith, charged to guide the Church in
matters temporal. Thus the assumption of the imperial
crown brought to Otto as its first result an apparent inr-
crease of domestic authority; it made his position by
its historical associations more dignified, by its religioiis
more hallowed; it raised him higher above his vassals aad
above other sovereigns ; it enlarged his prerogative in eccle-
siastical affairs, and by necessary consequence gave to
ecclesiastics a more important place at court and in
the administration of government than they had enjoyed
before. Great as was the power of the bishops and
abbots in all the feudal kingdoms, it stood nowhere aa
high as in Germany. There the Emperor's double posi-
tion, as head both of Church and State, required the two
organizations to be exacdy parallel. In the eleventh
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM, 129
century a full half of the land and wealth of the country,
and no small part of its military strength, was in the hands
of Churchmen : their influence predominated in the Diet ;
the archchancellorship of the Empire, highest of all offices,
was held by, and eventually came to belong of right to,
the archbishop of Mentz, as primate of Germany. It
was by Otto, who in resuming the attitude must repeat the
policy of Charies, that the greatness of the clergy was thus
advanced. He is commonly said to have wished to
weaken the aristocracy by raising up rivals to them in the
hierarchy. It may have been so, and the measure was at
any rate a disastrous one, for the clergy soon approved
themselves not less rebellious than those whom they were
to restrain. But in accusing Otto's judgment, historians
have often forgotten in what position he stood to the
Church, and how it behoved him, according to the doctrine
received, to establish in her an order like in all things to
that which he found already subsisting in the State.
The style which Otto adopted shewed his desire thus
to merge the king in the Emperor ^. Charles had called
Imnself * Imperator Caesar Carolus rex Francorum invic-
tisamus;' and again, 'Carolus serenissimus Augustus,
Kus, Felix, Romanorum gubemans Imperium, qui et per
niisericordiam Dei rex Francorum atque Langobardorum.'
Otto and his first successors, who until their coronation
at Rome had used the titles of * Rex Francorum,' or * Rex
Francorum Orientalium,' or oftener still ' Rex ' alone, dis-
carded after it all titles save the highest of 'Imperator
Augustus ;' seeming thereby, though they too had been
crowned at Aachen and Milan, to claim the authority of
^ Putter, Dissertationes de In' tions ; and the proclamations and
•'flwoftW Imperii Romani ; cf. other documents collected in Pertz,
Goldajt's Collection of Consiiiu- M.G.H, (legg. I.)
CHAP. VUI.
Changes in
title.
I30
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. VIII.
Imperial
power
feudaliTLed,
Caesar through all their dominions. Tracing as we are
the history of a title, it is needless to dwell on the signifi-
cance of the change c. Charles, son of the Ripuarian
allies of Probus, had been a Frankish chieftain on the
Rhine; Otto, the Saxon, successor of the Cheruscaua
Arminius, would rule his native Elbe with a power bor-
rowed from the Tiber.
Nevertheless, the imperial element did not in every
respect predominate over the royal. The monarch might
desire to make good against his turbulent barons the
boundless prerogative which he acquired with his new
crown, but he lacked the power to do so ; and they, dis-
puting neither the supremacy of that crown nor his right
to wear it, refused with good reason to let their own
freedom be infringed upon by any act of which they had
not been the authors. So far was Otto from embarking
on so vain an enterprise, that his rule was even more direct
and more personal than that of Charles had been. There
was no scheme of mechanical government, no claim of
absolutism ; there was only the resolve to make tbc
energetic assertion of the king's feudal rights subserve tbc
further aims of the Emperor. What Otto demanded he
demanded as Emperor, what he received he received as
king ; the singular result was that in Germany the imperial
ofl&ce was itself pervaded and transformed by feudal ideas.
Feudality needing, to make its theory complete, a lord
paramount of the world, from whose grant all ownership
in land must be supposed to have emanated, and finding
such a suzerain in the Emperor, constituted him liege lord
0 Piitter {De Instauratione Impe-
rii Romatd) will have it that upon
this mistake, as he calls it, of Otto*s,
the whole subsequent history of the
Empire turned ; that if Otto had
but continued to style himself 'Fran*
corum Rex,' Germany would have
been spared all her Italian wan.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM, 131
of all kings and potentates, keystone of the feudal arch,
himself, as it was expressed, ' holding' the world from God.
There were not wanting Roman institutions to which
these notions could attach themselves. Constantine, imi-
tating the courts of the East, had made the dignitaries of
his household great officials of the State : these were now
reproduced in the cup-bearer, the seneschal, the marshal,
the chamberlain of the Empire, so soon to become its
electoral princes. The holding of land on condition of
military service was Roman in its origin : the divided
ownership of feudal law found its analogies in the
Roman tenure of emphyteusis. Thus while Germany
was Romanized the Empire was feudalized, and came
to be considered not the antagonist but the perfection
of an aristocratic system. And it was this adaptation
to existing political facts that enabled it afterwards to
assume an international character. Nevertheless, even
while they seemed to blend, there remained between the
genius of imperialism (if one may use a now perverted
word) and that of feudalism a deep and lasting hostihty.
And so the rule of Otto and his successors was in a measure
adverse to feudal polity, not from knowledge of what
Roman government had been, but from the necessities
of their position, raised as they were to an unapproach-
able height above their subjects, surrounded with a
halo of sanctity as protectors of the Church. Thus were
they driven to reduce local independence, and assimilate
the various races through their vast territories. It w^s
Otto who made the Germans, hitherto an aggregate of
tribes, a single people, and welding them into a strong
political body taught them to rise through its collective
greatness to the consciousness of national life, never
thenceforth to be extinguished.
K 2
CHAP. VIII.
«3a
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
ctuLP. vm.
The Com-
motu.
One expedient against the land-holding oligarchy
which Roman traditions as well as present needs might
have suggested, it was scarcely possible for Otto to use.
He could not invoke the friendship of the Third Estate,
for as yet none existed. The Teutonic order of free-
men, which two centuries earlier had formed the bulk
of the population, was now fast disappearing, just as in
England all who did not become thanes were classed as
ceoris, and from ceoris sank for the most-part, after
the Conquest, into villeins. It was only in the Alpine
valleys and along the shores of the ocean that free
democratic communities maintained themselves. Town-
life there was none, till Henry the Fowler forced
his forest-loving people to dwell in fortresses that might
repel the Hungarian invaders; and the burgher class thus
beginning to form was too small to be a power in the
state. But popular freedom, as it expired, bequeathed to
the monarch such of its rights as could be saved from the
grasp of the nobles; and the crown thus became what
it has been wherever an aristocracy presses upon both,
the ally, though as yet the tacit ally, of the people.
More, too, than the royal could have done, did the im-
perial name invite the sympathy of the commons. For
in all, however ignorant of its history, however unable to
comprehend its functions, there yet lived a feeling that it
was in some mysterious way consecrated to Christian
brotherhood and equality, to peace and law, to the
restraint of the strong and the defence of the helpless.
CHAPTER IX.
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
He who begins to read the history of the Middle Ages
is alternately amused and provoked by the seeming ab-
surdities that meet him at every step. He finds writers
proclaiming amidst universal assent magnificent theories
which no one attempts to carry out. He sees men who
are stained with every vice full of sincere devotion to
a religion which, even when its doctrines were most ob-
scured, never sullied the purity of its moral teaching.
He is disposed to conclude that such people must have
•been either fools or hypocrites. Yet such a conclusion
would be wholly erroneous. Every one knows how little
a man's actions conform to the general maxims which
he would lay down for himself, and how many things
there are which he believes without realizing: believes
sufficiently to be influenced, yet not sufficiently to be
governed by them. Now in the Middle Ages this per-
petual opposition of theory and practice was peculiarly
abrupt. Men's impulses were more violent and their
conduct more reckless than is often witnessed in modem
society ; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring
spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly
than they would now do to a complete and imposing
theory. Therefore it was, that while everyone believed in
CHAP. IX.
134
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
Otto the
Great in
Rome.
9
the rights of the Empire as a part of divine truth, no one
would yield to them where his own passions or interests
interfered. Resistance to God's Vicar might be and
indeed was admitted to be a deadly sin, but it was one
which nobody hesitated to commit. Hence, in order to
give this unbounded imperial prerogative any practical
efficiency, it was found necessary to prop it up by the
limited but tangible authority of a feudal king. And the
one spot in Otto's empire on which feudality had never
fixed its grasp, and where therefore he was forced to rule
merely as Emperor, and not also as king, was that in
which he and his successors were never safe from insult
and revolt. That spot was his capital. Accordingly an
account of what befel the first Saxon Emperor in Rome
is a not unfitting comment on the theory expounded
above, as well as a curious episode in the history of the
Apostolic Chair.
After his coronation Otto had returned to North Italy,
where the partizans of Berengar and his son Adalbert
still maintained themselves in arms. Scarcely was he
gone when the restless John the Twelfth, who found too
late that in seeking an ally he had given himself a master,
renounced his allegiance, opened negotiations with Be-
rengar, and even scrupled not to send envoys pressing
the heathen Magyars to invade Germany. The Emperor
was soon informed of these plots, as well as of the
flagitious life of the pontiff, a youth of twenty-five, the
most profligate if not the most guilty of all who have
worn the tiara. But he aff'ected to despise them, saying,
with a sort of unconscious irony, * He is a boy, the ex-
ample of good men may reform him.' When, however,
Otto returned with a strong force, he found the city gates
shut, and a party within furious against him. John the
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
135
Twelfth was not only Pope, but as the heir of Alberic,
the head of a strong faction among the nobles, and a
sort of temporal prince in the city. But neither he nor
they had courage enough to stand a siege : John fled
into the Campagna to join Adalbert, and Otto entering
convoked a synod in St. Peter's. Himself presiding as
temporal head of the Church, he began by inquiring into
the character and manners of the Pope. At once a
tempest of accusations burst forth from the assembled
clergy. Liudprand, a credible although a hostile witness,
gives us a long list of them : — * Peter, cardinal-priest, rose
and witnessed that he had seen the Pope celebrate mass
and not himself communicate. John, bishop of Narnia,
and John, cardinal-deacon, declared that they had seen
him ordain a deaccn in a stable, neglecting the proper
formalities. They said further that he had defiled by
shameless acts of vice the pontifical palace ; that he had
openly diverted himself with hunting; had put out the
eyes of his spiritual father Benedict; had set fire to
houses; had girt himself with a sword, and put on a
helmet and hauberk. All present, laymen as well as
priests, cried out that he had drunk to the devil's health ;
that in throwing the dice he had invoked the help of
Jupiter, Venus, and other demons; that he had cele-
brated matins at uncanonical hours^ and had not fortified
himself by making the sign of the cross/ After these
things the Emperor, who could not speak Latin, since
the Romans could not understand his native, that is to
say, the Saxon tongue, bade Liifdprand bishop of Cre-
mona interpret for him, and adjured the council to declare
whether the charges they had brought were true, or
sprang only of malice and envy. Then all the clergy
and people cried with a loud voice, * If John the Pope
CHAP. IX.
136
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
hath not committed all the crimes which Benedict the
deacon hath read over, and even greater crimes than
these, then may the chief of the Apostles, the blessed
Peter, who by his word closes heaven to the unworthy
and opens it to the just, never absolve us from our sins,
but may we be bound by the chain of anathema, and on
the last day may we stand on the left hand along with
those who have said to the Lord God, " Depart from us,
for we will not know Thy ways." '
The solemnity of this answer seems to have satisfied
Otto and the council : a letter was despatched to John,
couched in respectful terms, recounting the charges
brought against him, and asking him to appear to clear
himself by his own oath and that of a sufficient number
of compurgators. John's reply was short and pithy.
' John the bishop, the servant of the servants of God,
to all the bishops. We have heard tell that you wish to
set up another Pope : if you do this, by Almighty God
I excommunicate you, so that you may not have power
to perform mass or to ordain no one *.'
To this Otto and the synod replied by a letter of
humorous expostulation, begging the Pope to reform
both his morals and his Latin. But the messenger who
bore it could not find John : he had repeated what seems
to have been thought his most heinous sin, by going into
the country with his bow and arrows ; and after a search
had been made in vain, the synod resolved to take a
a • lohannes episcopus, senjus ser-
vorum Dei, omnibus episcopis. Nos
audivimus dicere quia vos vultis
alium papam facere : si hoc facitis,
da Deum omnipotentem excommu-
nico vos, ut non habeatis licentiam
mi<sam celebrare aut nullum ordi-
nare.' — Liudprand, vt supra. The
* da ' is curious, as shewing iStut
progress of the change from Latin
to Italian. The answer sent bj
Otto and the council takes excep-
tion to the double negative.
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
m
decisive step. Otto, who still led their deliberations,
demanded the condemnation of the Pope ; the assembly
deposed him by acclamation, 'because of his reprobate
life/ and having obtained the Emperor's consent, pro-
ceeded in an equally hasty manner to raise Leo,
the chief secretary and a layman, to the chair of the
Apostle.
Otto might seem to have now reached a position
loftier and firmer than that of any of his predecessors.
Within little more than a year from his arrival in Rome,
he had exercised powers greater than those of Charles
himself, ordering the dethronement of one pontiff and the
installation of another, forcing a reluctant people to bend
themselves to his will. The submission involved in his
oath to protect the Holy See was more than compensated
by the oath of allegiance to his crown which the Pope
and the Romans had taken, and by their solemn engage-
ment not to elect nor ordain any future pontiff without
the Emperor's consent ^. But he had yet to learn what
this obedience and these oaths were worth. The Romans
had eagerly joined in the expulsion of John ; they soon
began to regret him. They were mortified to see their
streets filled by a foreign soldiery, the habitual licence
of their manners sternly repressed, their most cherished
privilege, the right of choosing the universal bishop,
grasped by the strong hand of a master who used it
for piuposes in which they did not sympathize. In a
fickle and turbulent people, disaffection quickly turned to
rebellion. One night, Otto*s troops being most of them
CHAP. IX.
Deposition
of John
XII,
* • Civcs fidditatem promittunt electionem domini imperatoris Ot-
hxc addentes et firmiter iurantes toiiis Csesaris Augusti Hliique ipsius
onnquani wt papam electuros aut Ottonis.' — Liudprand, Gesta Ot-
oidinaturos praeter consensum atque toniSf lib. vi.
138
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
Revolt of
the Romans,
dispersed in their quarters at a distance, the Romans rose
in arms, blocked up the Tiber bridges, and fell furiously
upon the Emperor and his creature the new Pope. Su-
perior valour and constancy triumphed over numbers, and
the Romans were overthrown with terrible slaughter ; yet
this lesson did not prevent them from revolting a second
time, after Otto's departure in pursuit of Adalbert John
the Twelfth returned to the city, and when his pontifical
career was speedily closed by the sword of an injured
husband c, the people chose a new Pope in defiance of the
Emperor and his nominee. Otto again subdued and
again forgave them, but when they rebelled for a third
time, in a.d. 966, he resolved to shew them what imperial
supremacy meant. Thirteen leaders, among them the
twelve tribunes, were executed, the consuls were banished,
republican forms entirely suppressed, the government of
the city entrusted to Pope Leo as viceroy. He, too, must
not presume on the sacredness of his person to set up
any claims to independence. Otto regarded the pontiff
as no more than the first of his subjects, the creature of
his own will, the depositary of an authority which must
be exercised according to the discretion of his sovereign.
The citizens had yielded to the Emperor an absolute veto
on papal elections in a.d. 963. Otto obtained from his
nominee, Leo VIII, a confirmation of this privilege, which
it was afterwards supposed that Hadrian I had granted to
Charles, in a decree \vhich may yet be read in the collec-
0 * In timporibus adeo a dyabulo sired a long life for so useful a
est percussus ut infra dienim octo servant.
spacium eodem sit in vulnere mor- He adds a detail too charac-
tuus/ says the chronicler, crediting teristic of the time to be omitted
with but little of his wonted clever- — * Sed eucharistia viaticum, ipsiofr^
ness the supposed author of John's instinctu qui eum percusserat, m
death, who well might have de- percepit.*
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
139
tions of the canon law d. The vigorous exercise of such
a power might be expected to reform as well as to re-
strain the apostolic see ; and it was for this purpose, and
in noble honesty, that the Teutonic sovereigns employed
it But the fortunes of Otto in the city are a type of
those which his successors were destined to experience.
Notwithstanding their clear rights and the momentary
enthusiasm with which they were greeted in Rome, not
all the efforts of Emperor after Emperor could gain any
firm hold on the capital they were so proud of. Visit-
ing it only once or twice in their reigns, they must be
supported among a fickle populace by a large army
of strangers, which melted away with terrible rapidity
under the sun of Italy amid the deadly hollows of the
Campagna©. Rome soon resumed her turbulent inde-
pendence.
Causes partly the same prevented the Saxon princes
from gaining a firm footing throughout Italy, Since
Charles the Bald had bartered away for the crown all
that made it worth having, no Emperor had exercised
substantial authority there. The missi dominici had
ceased to traverse the country ; the local governors had
thrown off control, a crowd of petty potentates had
established principalities by aggressions on their weaker
neighbours. Only in the dominions of great nobles, like
the marquises of Tuscany and Spoleto, and in some of
the cities where the supremacy of the bishop was paving
* Corpus Juris Canonici^ Dist. although the forai in which we
tziii., • In synodo* A decree which have it is evidently of later date.
U probably substantially genuine, « Cf. St. Peter Damiani's lines —
'Roma vorax hominum domat ardua colla vironim,
Roma ferax febrium necis est uberrima frugum,
RomanaB febres stabili sunt iure fideles.'
CHAP. IX.
Ott(^s rule
in Italy.
140
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
Otto's
foreign
policy.
the way for a republican system, could traces of political
order be found, or the arts of peace flourish. Otto, who,
though he came as a conqueror, ruled legitimately as
Italian king, found his feudal vassals less submissive than
in Germany. While actually present he succeeded by
progresses and edicts, and stern justice, in doing some-
thing to still the turmoil ; on his departure Italy relapsed
into that disorganization for which her natural features
are not less answerable than the mixture of her races.
Yet it was at this era, when the confusion was wildest,
that there appeared the first rudiments of an Italian
nationality, based partly on geographical position, partly
on the use of a common language and the slow growth
of peculiar customs and modes of thought. But though
already jealous of the Tedescan, national feeling was still
very far from disputing his sway. Pope, princes, and
cities bowed to Otto as king and Emperor; nor did he
bethink himself of crushing while it was weak a sentiment
whose development threatened the existence of his em-
pire. Holding Italy equally for his own with Germany,
and ruling both on the same principles, he was content
to keep it a separate kingdom, neither changing its insti-
tutions nor sending Saxons, as Charles had sent Franks,
to represent his government ^.
The lofty claims which Otto acquired with the Roman
crown urged him to resume the plans of foreign conquest
which had lain neglected since the days of Charles : the
growing vigour of the Teutonic people, now definitely
separating themselves from surrounding races (this is the
era of the Marks — Brandenburg, Meissen, Schleswig),
placed in his hands a force to execute those plans which
' There was a separate chancellor for Italy, as afterwards for the
kingdom of Burgundy.
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMFERORS,
141
his predecessors had wanted. In this, as in his other
enterprises, the great Emperor was active, wise, suc-
cessfiil. Retaining the extreme south of Italy, and un-
willing to confess the loss of Rome, the Greeks had not
ceased to annoy her German masters by intrigue, and
might now, imder the vigorous leadership of Nicephorus
and Tzimiskes, hope again to menace them in arms.
Policy, and the fascination which an ostentatiously
legitimate court exercised over the Saxon stranger, made
Otto, as Napoleon wooed Maria Louisa, seek for his heir
the hand of the princess Theophano. Liudprand's ac-
count of his embassy represents in an amusing manner
the rival pretensions of the old and new Empires «. The
Greeks, who fancied that with the name they preserved
the character and rights of Rome, held it almost as
absurd as it was wicked that a Frank should insult their
jH^rogative by reigning in Italy as Emperor. They re-
fiised him that title altogether ; and when the Pope
had, in a letter addressed * Imperatori Grcecorum* asked
Nicephorus to gratify the wishes of the Emperor of the
Romans, the Eastern was furious. 'You are no Ro-
mans,' said he, ' but wretched Lombards : what means
this insolent Pope ? with Constantine all Rome migrated
hither/ The wily bishop appeased him by abusing the
Romans, while he insinuated that Byzantium could lay
DO daim to their name, and proceeded to vindicate the
Francia and Saxonia of his master. ' " Roman " is the
most contemptuous name we can use — it conveys the
reproach of every vice, cowardice, falsehood, avarice.
Bat what can be expected from the descendants of the
fratricide Romulus? to his asylum were gathered the
• Liodpnnd, Legatio ConstaiUinopoUtana,
CHAP. IX.
Towards
Byzantium.
142
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
Towards
the West
Franks.
ojGFscourings of the nations : thence came these KXHTfto-
KpcLTopes* Nicephoms demanded the 'theme' or pro-
vince of Rome as the price of compliance ^ ; Tzimiskes
was more moderate, and Theophano became the bride of
Otto II.
Holding the two capitals of Charies the Great, Otto
might vindicate the suzerainty over the West Prankish
kingdom which it had been meant that the imperial title
should carry with it. Arnulf had asserted it by making
Eudes, the first Capetian king, receive the crown . as. his
feudatory : Henry the Fowler had been less successful.
Otto pursued the same course, intriguing with the discon-
tented nobles qf Louis d'Outremer, and receiving their
fealty as Superior of Roman Gaul. These pretensions,
however, could have been made effective only by arms,
and the feudal militia of the tenth century was no such
instrument of conquest as the hosts of Clovis and Charles
had been. The star of the Carolingian of Laon was
paling before the rising greatness of the Parisian Capets :
a Romano-Keltic nation had formed itself, distinct in
tongue from the Franks, whom it was fast absorbing, and
still less willing to submit to a Saxon stranger. Modem
France! dates from the accession of Hugh Capet, A.a
987, and the claims of the Roman Empire were never
afterwards formally admitted.
Of that France, however, Aquitaine was virtually inde-
^ *Sancti imperii nostri olim
servos principes, Beneventanum
scilicet, tradat,' &c. The epithet
is worth noticing.
^ Liudprand calls the Eastern
Franks * Franci Teutonici * to dis-
tinguish them from the Romanized
Franks of Gaul or * Francigense*
as they were frequently called. The
name * Frank ' seems even so^itrijr
as the tenth century to havvten
used in the East as a general name
for the Western peoples of Europe.
Liudprand says that the Oreelc
Emperor included * sub Franconmk
nomine tarn Latinos quam Teoto—
nicos.* Probably this use datev*
from the time of Charles.
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS,
H3
pendent. Lotharingia and Burgundy belonged to it as
little as did England. The former of these kingdoms
had adhered to the West Frankish king, Charles the
Sunple, against the East Frankish Conrad : but now, as
mostly German in blood and speech, threw itself into
the arms of Otto, and was thenceforth an integral part
of the Empire. Burgundy, a separate kingdom, had, by
seeking from Charles the Fat a ratification of Boso's
election, by admitting, in the person of Rudolf the first
Transjurane king, the feudal superiority of Arnulf, ac-
knowledged itself to be dependent on the German crown.
Otto governed it for thirty years, nominally as the guardian
of the young king Conrad (son of Rudolf II).
Otto's conquests to the North and East approved him a
worthy successor of the first Emperor. He penetrated
far into Jutland, annexed Schleswig, made Harold the
Blue-toothed his vassal. The Slavic tribes were obliged
to submit, to follow the German host in war, to allow the
free preaching of the Gospel in their borders. The
Hungarians he forced to forsake their nomad life, and
delivered Europe from the fear of Asiatic invasions by
strengthening the frontier of Austria. Over more distant
lands, Spain and England, it was not possible to recover
the conunanding position of Charles. Henry, as head of
the Saxon name, may have wished to unite its branches
on both sides the sea k, and it was perhaps partly with this
intent that he gained for Otto the hand of Edith, sister
of the English Athelstan. But the claim of supremacy, if
any there was, was repudiated by Edgar, when, exaggerat-
ing the lofty style assumed by some of his predecessors,
he called himself * Basileus and imperator of Britain V
* Cooling, D» Finlbus Imperii. quest. Titles like this used in these
1 Basileus was a favourite title of early English charters prove, it need
die Euffuh kings before the Con- hardly be said, absolutely nothing as
CHAP. IX
Lorraint
and Bur-
gundy.
Denmark
and the
Slaves.
England.
144
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
Extent of
Otto's Em-
pire.
Comparison
between it
and that of
Charles,
thereby seeming to pretend to a sovereignty over all the
nations of the island similar to that which the Roman
Emperor claimed over the states of Christendom.
This restored Empire, which professed itself a continu-
ation of the Carolingian, was in many respects diffeFent
It was less wide, including, if we reckon strictly, only
Germany proper and two-thirds of Italy ; or counting in
subject but separate kingdoms, Burgundy, Bohemia, Mo-
ravia, Poland, Denmark, perhaps Hungary. Its character
was less ecclesiastical. Otto exalted indeed the spiritual
potentates of his realm, and was earnest in spreading Chris-
tianity among the heathen : he was master of the Pope and
Defender of the Holy Roman Church. But religion held
a less important place in his mind and his administration :
he made fewer wars for its sake, held no councils, and did
not, like his predecessor, criticize the discourses of bishops.
It was also less Roman. We do not know whether Otto
associated with that name anything more than the right to
universal dominion and a certain oversight of matters
spiritual, nor how far he believed himself to be treading
in the steps of the Caesars. He could not speak Latin, he
had few learned men around him, he cannot have pos-
sessed the varied cultivation which had been so fhiitfi]] in
the mind of Charles. Moreover, the conditions of his
time were different, and did not permit similar attempts at
wide organization. The local potentates would haye sub-
mitted to no mt'sst dominici ; separate laws and jurisdic-
tions would not have yielded to imperial capitularies; the
to the real existence of any rights
or powers of the English king be-
yond his own borders. What they do
prove (over and above the taste for
florid rhetoric in the royal clerks) is
the impression produced by the im-
perial style, and by the idea of the
Emperor's throne as supported by
the thrones of kings and other lever
potentates. See hereon Frecmaib
Hist, of Norm, ConquesttYoL {.dLJ.
§ 4 ; who however surely draws frooi
the use of such titles in Eng^andi
elusions graver than they
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
145
placiia at whicS those laws were framed or published would
not have been crowded, as of yore, by armed freemen. But
what Otto could he did, and did it to good purpose. Con-
stantly traversing his dominions, he introduced a peace
and prosperity before unknown, and left everywhere the
impress of an heroic character. Under him the Germans
became not only a united nation, but were at once raised
on a pinnacle among European peoples as the imperial
race, the possessors of Rome and Rome's authority.
While the political connection with Italy stirred their
spirit, it brought with it a knowledge and culture hitherto
unknown, and gave the newly-kindled energy an object.
Gennany became in her turn the instructress of the neigh-
bouring tribes, who trembled at Otto's sceptre; Poland
and Bohemia received from her their arts and their
learning with their religion. If the revived Romano-
Germanic Empire was less splendid than the Empire of
the West had been under Charles, it was, within narrower
limits, firmer and more lasting, since based on a social
force which the other had wanted. It perpetuated the
name, the language, the literature, such as it then was, of
Rome ; it extended her spiritual sway ; it strove to repre-
sent that concentration for which men cried, and became
a power to imite and civilize Europe.
The time of Otto the Great has required a fuller treat-
naent, as the era of the Holy Empire's foundation : suc-
ceeding rulers may be more quickly dismissed. Yet
. Otto Ill's reign cannot pass unnoticed : short, sad, full of
Wght promise never fulfilled. His mother was the Greek
princess Theophano; his preceptor, the illustrious Gerbert;
through the one he felt himself connected with the old
Empire, and had imbibed the absolutism of Byzantium :
hy the other he had been reared in the dream of a reno-
L
CHAP. IX.
Otto //,
A.D. 973-
983.
Otto III,
A.D. 983-
looa.
146
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. IX.
His ideas.
Fascination
exercised
over bim by
the name of
Rome,
Pope
Sylvester II,
A J). 1000.
vated Rome, with her memories turned to realities. To
accomplish that renovation, who so fit as he who with the
vigorous blood of the Teutonic conqueror inherited the
venerable rights of Constantinople? It was his design,
now that the solemn millennial era of the founding of
Christianity had arrived, to renew the majesty of the city
and make her again the capital of a world-embracing
Empire, victorious as Trajan's, despotic as Justinian's,
holy as Constantine's. His young and visionary mind
was too much dazzled by the gorgeous fancies it created
to see the world as it was : Germany rude, Italy unquiet,
Rome corrupt and faithless. In a.d. 995, at the age of
^fteen, he took from his grandmother's hands the reins of
government, and entered Italy to receive his crown, and
quell the turbulence of Rome. There he put to death the
rebel Crescentius, in whom modem enthusiasm has seen a
patriotic republican, who, reviving the institutions of Al-
beric, had ruled as consul or senator, sometimes entitling
himself Emperor. The young monarch reclaimed, per-
haps extended, the privilege of Charles and Otto the Great,
by nominating successive pontiffs : first Bruno his cousin
(Gregory V), then Gerbert, whose name of Sylvester II
recalled significantly the ally of Constantine : Gerbert, to
his contemporaries a marvel of piety and learning, in laler
legend the magician who, at the price of his own soul,
purchased preferment from the Enemy, and by him was
at last carried off in the body. With the substitution of
these men for the profligate priests of Italy, began that
Teutonic reform of the Papacy which raised it from tbc
abyss of the tenth century to the point where Hildebrand
found it. The Emperors were working the ruin of their
power by their most disinterested acts.
With his tutor on Peter's chair to second or direct
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
147
him, Otto laboured on his great project in a spirit almost
mystic. He had an intense religious belief in the
Emperor's duties to the world — in his proclamations he
calls himself * Servant of the Apostles/ * Servant of Jesus
Christie' — together with the ambitious antiquarianism of
a fiery imagination, kindled by the memorials of the glory
and power he represented. Even the wording of his laws
witnesses to the strange mixture of notions that filled his
eager brain. ' We have ordained this,' says an edict, * in
order that, the Church of God being freely and firmly
stablished, our Empire may be advanced and the crown of
our knighthood triumph ; that the power of the Roman
people may be extended and the commonwealth be re-
stored ; so may we be found worthy after living righteously
in the tabernacle of this worid, to fly away from the prison
of this life and reign most righteously with the Lord.' To
exclude the claims of the Greeks he used the title * Roman"
orum Imperaior' instead of the simple * Imperaior^ of his
predecessors. His seals bear a legend resembling that
^ by Charies, ^ Renovaiio Imperii Romanorum y even
the * commonwealth,' despite the results that name had
produced imder Alberic and Crescentius, was to be re-
established. He built a palace on the Aventine, then the
most healthy and beautiful quarter of the city ; he devised
* regular administrative system of government for his
capital— naming a patrician, a prefect, and a body of
judges, who were commanded to recognize no law but
J^tinian's. The formula of their appointment has been
preserved to us : in it the Emperor delivering to the judge
^ copy of the code bids him ' with this code judge Rome
and the Leonine city and the whole worid.' He intro-
duced into the simple German court the ceremonious
» Proclamation in Pertz, iJf. G. H, \u
L 2
CHAP. IX.
Schemes of
Otto III,
Changes of
style and
usage.
148
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IX.
magnificence of Byzantium, not without giving oflfence 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 stoiy
of the time, of the jevenge of Stephania, widow of Cre-
scentius, who ensnared him by her beauty, and slew him
by a lingering 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 antiqaam Roman-
orum consuetudinem iam ex magna
parte deletam suis cupiens renovare
temporibus multa faciebat qua A-
versi diverse sentiebant'-Thietmar,
Cbron, ix. ap. Pertz, M, O. H, ui.
i
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
Frankish 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 mediaeval Empire.
The direct line of Otto the Great had now ended, and
though the Franks might elect and the Saxons accept
Henry II 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 he 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
CHAP. IX.
Italy inde'
pendent.
Henry II
Emperor,
* Annaisi Quedlinb., ad ann.
looa.
P Henry had already entered
Italy in 1004.
15©
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. IZ.
Southern
Italy.
4^onrad II.
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 % seldom mention-
ing the Franks, till the reign of Conrad 11 ; after him
the Western becomes Imperafor, the Greek, appearing
more rarely, is Imperator Comtantinopolitanus, Assafled
by the Saracens, masters already of Sicily, these regions
seemed on the eve of being lost to Christendom, and the
Romans sometimes bethought themselves of returning
imder the Byzantine sceptre. As the weakness of the
Greeks in the South favoured the rise of the Norman
kingdom, so did the liberties of the northern cities shoot
up in the absence of the Emperors and the feuds of tbc
princes. Milan, Pavia, Cremona, were only the foremost
among many populous centres of industry, some of them
self-governing, all quickly absorbing or repelling the
rural nobility, and not afraid to display by tumults thdr
aversion to the Germans.
The reign of Conrad II, the first monarch of the
4 Annales Benevenlani, in Pertz, M, G, H.
SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS,
151
great Franconian line, is remarkable for the accession
to the Empire of Burgundy, or, as it is after this time
more often called, the kingdom of Aries r. Rudolf III
the last king, had proposed to bequeath it to Henry II,
and the states were at length persuaded to consent to
its reunion to the crown from which it had been sepa-
rated, though to some extent dependent, since the death
of Lothar I (son of Lewis the Pious). On Rudolfs death
in 1032, Eudes, count of Champagne, endeavoured to
seize it, and entered the north-western districts, from
which he was dislodged by Conrad with some difficulty.
Unlike Italy, it became an integral member of the Ger-
manic realm : its prelates and nobles sat in imperial
diets, and retained till recently the style and tide of
Princes of the Holy Empire. The central government
was, however, seldom effective in these outlying territories,
exposed always to the intrigues, finally to the aggressions,
of Capetian France.
Under Conrad's son Henry the Third the Empire
attained the meridian of its power. At home Otto the
Great's prerogative had not stood so high. The duchies,
always the chief source of fear, were allowed to remain
vacant or filled by the relatives of the monarch, who
himself retained, contrary to usual practice, those of
Franconia and (for some years) Swabia. Abbeys and
sees lay entirely in his gift. Intestine feuds were re-
pressed by the proclamation of a public peace. Abroad,
the feudal superiority over Hungary, which Henry II had
gained by conferring the title of KLing with the hand of
his sister Gisela, was enforced by war, the country made
almost a province, and compelled to pay tribute. In
Rome no German sovereign had ever been so absolute.
* See Appendix, note A.
CHAP. IX.
Henry III.
His reform
of the Pope-
dom.
152
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. IX.
Henry IV,
A.D. TO56--
IIO6.
A disgraceful contest between three claimants of the
papal chair had shocked even the reckless apathy of
Italy. Henry deposed them all, and appointed their
successor: he became hereditary patrician, and wore
constantly the green mantle and circlet of gold which
were the badges of that office, seeming, one might think,
to find in it some further authority than that which the
imperial name conferred. The synod passed a decree
granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme
pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited
the respect of the world even more by habitual simony
than by the flagrant corruption of their manners, were
forced to receive German after German as their bishop,
at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and
so pious. But Henry's encroachments alarmed his own
nobles no less than the Italians, and the reaction, which
might have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his
successor. A mere chance, as some might call it, deter-
mined the course of history. The great Emperor died
suddenly in a.d. 1056, and a child was left at the hefan,
while storms were gathering that might have demanded
the wisest hand.
CHAPTER X.
STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.
Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic no-
minees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the
eleventh century the schemes of polity shadowed forth by
Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last age had
only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest
mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now
advanced to their completion, and proclaimed that war
of the ecclesiastical power against the civil power in the
person of the Emperor, which became the centre of the
subsequent history of both. While the nature of the
struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their
previous connection, the vastness of the subject warns
one from the attempt to draw even its outlines, and re-
stricts our view to those relations of Popedom and
Empire which arise directly out of their respective posi-
tions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal
Christian state.
The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately
following her political establishment to purchase by sub-
mission the support of the civil power, has been already
remarked. The change from independence to supremacy
was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine,
ClIAP. X.
Growth of
the Papal
powtr.
154
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. X.
healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Syl-
vester, and retired to Byzantium that no secular prince
might interfere with the jurisdiction or profane the neigh-
bourhood of Peter's chair, worked great effects through
the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay more,
its groundwork was true. It was the removal of the seat
of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus that
made the Pope the greatest personage in the city, and in
the prostration after Alaric's invasion he was seen to be
so. Henceforth he alone was a permanent and effective,
though still unacknowledged power, as truly superior to
the revived senate and consuls of the phantom republic as
Augustus and Tiberius had been to the faint continuance
of their earlier prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted
the universal jurisdiction of his see », and his persevering
successors slowly enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain,
Africa, dexterously confounding their undoubted metro-
politan and patriarchal rights with those of cecumenical
bishop, in which they were finally merged. By his
writings and the fame of his personal sanctity, by the
conversion of England and the introduction of an im-
pressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than any
other pontiff to advance Rome's ecclesiastical authority.
Yet his tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferen-
tial, to Phocas adulatory; his successors were not con-
secrated till confirmed by the Emperor or the Exarch;
one of them was dragged in chains to the Bosphorus, and
banished thence to Scythia. When the iconoclastic con-
troversy and the intervention of Pipin broke the alle-
giance of the Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians
• • Roma per sedem Beati Petri caput orbis effecta.' — Sec note ',
P- 32.
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY.
155
and Emperors, seemed to step into the position which
Byzantium had lost ^. At Charles's coronation, says the
Saxon poet,
* Et siimmus eundem
Praesul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim
Principibus fuit antiquis/
Their relations were, however, no longer the same. If
the Frank vaunted conquest, the priest spoke only of
free gift. What Christendom saw was that Charles was
crowned by the Pope's hands, and undertook as his
principal duty the protection and advancement of the
Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the
Great's coronation gave an even more favourable opening
to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who summoned
him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath
of fidelity and aid. In the conflict of three powers, the
Emperor, the pontiff, and the people — represented by
their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the
hour — the most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure
eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no minorities,
as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its own
army— the host of churchmen through Europe. Boni-
face's conversion of Germany under its direct sanction,
gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest
European state ; the extension of the rule of Charles and
Ouo diffused in the same measure its emissaries and pre-
tensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the
pnnce to confirm the elected pontiff, which was after-
wards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to
CHAP. X.
Relations of
the Papacy
and the
Empire.
* Claves tibi ad regnum dimi- Muratori, S. R. /. iii. Some, how-
'' — Pope Stephen to Charles
• in Codex Carolinus, ap.
simus — Pope Stephen to Charles ever, prefer to read * ad rogum.'
If
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. Z.
Charles, in the decree quoted as ^ Hadrianus Papa^!
This * tus eligendi et ordinandi summum pontificeml which
Lewis I appears as yielding by the * Ego Ludovicus V "^^^^w
claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt them-
selves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude
in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was for-
mally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII.
We have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by
Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of all, and
most despotically, by Henry III. Along with it there
had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the Papal
chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In
submitting to a fresh coronation, Lewis the Pious ad-
mitted the invalidity of his former self-performed one:
Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration
of John VIII e, that to him alone the Emperor owed his
crown ; and the council of Pavia ^, when it chose him
king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes
knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and
Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian
had not resented ; but the precedent remained, the wea-
pon was only hid behind the pontifical robe to be flashed
out with effect when the moment should come. There
were also two other great steps which papal power had
taken. By the invention and adoption of the False
Decretals it had provided itself with a legal system suited
0 Corpus luris Canonici, Dist.
Ixiii. c. 23.
<* Dist. Ixiii. c. 30. This decree
is, however, in all probability spu-
rious.
• * Nos elegimus merito et ap-
probavimus una cum annisu et voto
patrum amplique senatus et gentis
togatae/ &c., ap. Baron. Ann. EccL
ad ann. 876.
' ' Divina vos pietas B. prindpaiiB.
apostolorum Petri et Pauli inter^
ventione per vicarium ipsoranm
dominum loannem summum pon—
tificem .... ad imperiale culmerm
S. Spiritus iudicio proyexit*
Concil, TieinensBt in Mur. S, R. r^
u.
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY.
157
to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority
through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over
persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical ingenuity found it
easy in one way or another to make this include all
causes and persons whatsoever: for crime is always and
wrong is often sin, nor can aught be anywhere done
which may not affect the clergy. On the gift of Pipin
and Charles, repeated and confirmed by Lewis I,
Charles II, Otto I and III, and now made to rest on the
more venerable authority of the first Christian Emperor,
it could found claims to the sovereignty of Rome, Tus-
cany, and all else that had belonged to the exarchate.
Indefinite in their terms, these grants were never meant
by the donors to convey full dominion over the districts
— that belonged to the head of the Empire — ^but only as
in the case of other church estates, a sort of perpetual
usufruct, a beneficial enjoyment which had nothing to do
with sovereignty. They were, in fact, mere endowments.
Nor had the gifts been ever actually reduced into posses-
sion : the Pope had been hitherto the victim, not the lord,
of the neighbouring barons. They were not, however,
denied, and might be made a formidable engine of attack :
appealing to them, the Pope could brand his opponents as
unjust and impious ; and could summon nobles and cities
to defend him as their liege lord, just as, with no better
original right, he invoked the help of the Norman con-
querors of Naples and Sicily.
The attitude of the Roman Church to the imperial
j)ower at Henry the Third's death was externally respect-
fuL The right of a German king to the crown of the
city was undoubted, and the Pope was his lawful subject.
Hitherto the initiative in reform had come from the civil
magistrate. But the secret of the pontiff's strength lay
CHAP. X.
Temporal
power of
the Popes
158
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. X.
HUdebran-
dine re-
forms.
in this: he, and he alone, could confer the crown, and
had therefore the right of imposing conditions on its re-
cipient. Frequent interregna had weakened the claim of
the Transalpine monarch and prevented his power from
taking firm root ; his title was never by law hereditary : the
holy Church had before sought and might ag^n seek
a defender elsewhere. And since the need of such de-
fence had originated this transference of the Empire from
the Greeks to the Franks, since to render it was the
Emperor's chief function, it was surely the Pope's duty as
well as his right to see that the candidate was capable of
fulfilling his task, to degrade him if he rejected or mis-
performed it.
The first step was to remove a blemish in the consti-
tution of the Church, by fixing a regular body to choose
the supreme pontiff. This Nicholas II did in a.d. 1059,
feebly reserving the rights of Henry IV and his successors.
Then the reforming spirit, kindled by the abuses and de-
pravity of the last century, advanced apace. It had two
main objects — the enforcement of celibacy, especially on
the secular clergy, who enjoyed in this respect considerable
freedom ; and the extinction of simony. In the former,
the Emperors and a large part of the laity were not un-
willing to join : the latter no one dared to defend in
theory. But when Gregory VII declared that it was sin
for the ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions
from a layman, and so condemned the whole system of
feudal investitures to the clergy, he aimed a deadly blow
at all secular authority. Half of the land and wealth of
Germany was in the hands of bishops and abbots, who
would now be freed from the monarch's control to pass
under that of the Pope. In such a state of things govemr
ment itself would be impossible.
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY,
^59
Henry and Gregory already mistrusted each other:
after this decree war was inevitable. The Pope cited his
opponent to appear and be judged at Rome for his vices
and misgovernment. The Emperor « replied by con-
voking a synod, which deposed and insulted Gregory.
At once the daundess monk pronounced Henry excom-
municate, and fixed a day on which, if still unrepentant,
he should cease to reign. Supported by his own princes,
the monarch might have defied a command backed by no
external force ; but the Saxons, never contented since the
first place had passed from their own dukes to the Fran-
conians, only waited the signal to burst into a new revolt,
whilst through all Germany the Emperor's tyranny and
irregularities of life had sown the seeds of disaffection.
Shunned, betrayed, threatened, he rushed into what
seemed the only course left, and Canosa saw Europe's
mightiest prince, titular lord of the world, a suppliant be-
fore the successor of the Apostle. Henry soon found
that iiis humiliation had not served him ; driven back into
opjyosition, he defied Gregory anew, set up an anti-pope,
overthrew the rival whom his rebellious subjects had
raised, and maintained to the end of his sad and chequered
life a power often depressed but never destroyed. Never-
theless had all other humiliation been spared, that one
scene in the yard of the Countess Matilda's castle, an
imperial penitent standing barefoot and woollen-frocked
on the snow three days and nights, till the priest who sat
within should admit and absolve him, was enough to mark
a decisive change, and inflict an irretrievable disgrace on
the crown so abased. Its wearer could no more, with the
same lofty confidence, claim to be the highest power on
K Strictly speaking, Henry was at he was not crowned Emperor at
tlii« time only king of the Romans : Rome till 1084.
CHAP. X.
Henry IV
and Gre-
gory VII.
A.D. 1077.
i6o
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. X.
earth, created by and answerable to God alone. Gregory
had extorted the recognition of that absolute superiority of
the spiritual dominion which he was wont to assert so
sternly ; proclaiming that to the Pope, as God's Vicar, all
mankind are subject, and all rulers responsible : so that
he, the giver of the crown, may also excommunicate and
depose. Writing to William the Conqueror, he says'*:
* For as for the beauty of this world, that it may be at
different seasons perceived by fleshly eyes, God hath dis-
posed the sun and the moon, lights that outshine all
others; so lest the creature whom His goodness hath
formed after His own image in this world should be
drawn astray into fatal dangers, He hath provided in the
apostolic and royal dignities the means of ruling it through
divers offices. ... If I, therefore, am to answer for thee
on the dreadful day of judgment before the just Judge
who cannot lie, the creator of every creature, bethink thee
whether I must not very diligently provide for thy salva-
tion, and whether, for thine own safety, thou oughtest not
without delay to obey me, that so thou mayest possess the
land of the living.'
Gregory was not the inventor nor the first propounder
of these doctrines ; they had been long before a part of
mediaeval Christianity, interwoven with its most vital doc-
trines. But he was the first who dared to apply them to the
world as he found it. His was that rarest and grandest of
gifts, an intellectual courage and power of imaginative be-
lief which, when it has convinced itself of aught, accepts it
fully with all its consequences, and shrinks not from acting
at once upon it. A perilous gift, as the melancholy end
of his own career proved, for men were found less ready
b Letter of Gregory VII to William I, aj). lo8a I quote from Migoe,
cxiviii. p. 568.
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY.
i6i
than he had thought them to follow out with unswerving
consistency like his the principles which all acknowledged.
But it was the very suddenness and boldness of his policy
that secured the ultimate triumph of his cause, awing
men's minds and making that seem realized which had
been till then a vague theory. His premises once ad-
mitted,— and no one dreamt of denying them, — the reason-
ings by which he established the superiority of spiritual to
temporal jurisdiction were unassailable. With his au-
thority, in whose hands are the keys of heaven and hell,
whose word can bestow eternal bliss or plunge in ever-
lasting misery, no other earthly authority can compete or
interfere : if his power extends into the infinite, how much
more must he be supreme over things finite ? It was thus
that Gregory and his successors were wont to argue : the
wonder is, not that they were obeyed, but that they were
not obeyed more implicitly. In the second sentence of
excommunication which Gregory passed upon Henry the
Fourth are these words : —
' Come now, I beseech you, O most holy and blessed
Fathers and Princes, Peter and Paul, that all the world
may understand and know that if ye are able to bind and
to loose in heaven, ye are likewise able on earth, accord-
ing to the merits of ^each man, to give and to take away
empires, kingdoms, princedoms, marquisates, duchies,
countships, and the possessions of all men. For if ye
judge spiritual things, what must we believe to be your
power over worldly things ? and if ye judge the angels
who rule over all proud princes, what can ye not do to
their slaves?'
Doctrines such as these do indeed strike equally at all
temporal governments, nor were the Innocents and Boni-
faces of later days slow to apply them so. On the
CHAP. X.
Results of
the struggle.
M
l62
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. X.
Empire, however, the blow fell first and heaviest As
when Alaric entered Rome, the spell of ages was broken,
Christendom saw her greatest and most venerable insti-
tution dishonoured and helpless ; allegiance was no longer
undivided, for who could presume to fix in each case the
limits of the civil and ecclesiastical jurisdictions? The
potentates of Europe beheld in the Papacy a force which,
if dangerous to themselves, could be made to repel the
pretensions and baffle the designs of the strongest and
haughtiest among them. Italy learned how to meet the
Teutonic conqueror by gaining the papal sanction for the
leagues of her cities. The German princes, anxious to
jiarrow the prerogative of their head, were the natural
allies of his enemy, whose spiritual thunders, more terrible
than their own lances, could enable them to depose an
aspiring monarch, or extort from him any concessions
they desired. Their altered tone is marked by the pro-
mise they required from Rudolf of Swabia, whom they set
up as a rival to Henry, that he would not endeavour to
make the throne hereditary.
It is not possible here to dwell on the details of the
great struggle of the Investitures, rich as it is in the in-
terest of adventure and character, momentous as were its
results for the future. A word or two must sufi&ce to
describe the conclusion, not indeed of the whole drama,
which was to extend over centuries, but of what
may be called its first act. Even that act lasted beyond
the lives of the original performers. Gregory the Seventh
passed away at Salerno in a.d. 1085, exclaiming with his
last breath * I have loved justice and hated iniquity, there-
fore I die in exile.' Twenty-one years later, in a.d. 1106,
Henry IV died, dethroned by an unnatural son whom the
hatred of a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY.
163
him. But that son, the Emperor Henry the Fifth, so far
from conceding the points in dispute, proved an an-
tagonist more ruthless and not less able than his father.
He claimed for his crown all the rights over ecclesiastics
that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at his
coronation in Rome, a.d. i i i 2, Pope Paschal II refused
to complete the rite until he should have yielded, Henry
seized both Pope and cardinals and compelled them by a
rigorous imprisonment to consent to a treaty which he
dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as was natural, dis-
avowed his extorted concessions, and the struggle was
protracted for ten years longer, until nearly half a century
had elapsed from the first quarrel between Gregory VII
and Henry IV. The Concordat of Worms, concluded in
A.D. 1 122, was in form a compromise, designed to spare
either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the Papacy
remained master of the field. The Emperor retained
but one-half of those rights of investiture which had
foraierly been his. He could never resume the position
of Henry III ; his wishes or intrigues might influence the
proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him from open
interference. He had entered the strife in the fulness of
<%nity; he came out of it with tarnished glory and
shattered power. His wars had been hitherto carried on
^th foreign foes, or at worst with a single rebel noble ;
now his former ally was turned into his fiercest assailant,
and had enlisted against him half his court, half the mag-
nates of his realm. At any moment his sceptre might be
shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host
of enemies spring up from every convent and cathedral*
Two other results of this great conflict ought not
to pass unnoticed. The Emperor was alienated from the
Church at the most unfortunate of all moments, the era
M 2
CHAP. Z.
Concordat
of Worms,
A.D. 1 122.
164
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. X.
The Cru-
scuies.
of the Crasades. To conduct a great religious war
against the enemies of the faith, to head the church
militant in her carnal as the Popes were accustomed to
do in her spiritual strife, this was the very " purpose for
which an Emperor had been called into being; and it
was indeed in these wars, more particularly in the first
three of them, that the ideal of a Christian conmionwealth
which the theory of the mediaeval Empire proclaimed,
was once for all and never again realized by the combined
action of the great nations of Europe. Had such an
opportunity fallen to the lot of Henry III, he might have
used it to win back a supremacy hardly inferior to that
which had belonged to the first Carolingians. But Henry
IV's proscription excluded him from aU share in an en-
terprise which he must otherwise have led — nay more,
committed it to the guidance of his foes. The religious
feeling which the Crusades evoked — a feeling which
became the origin of the great orders of chivalry, and
somewhat later of the two great orders of mendicant
friars — turned wholly against the opponent of ecclesiasti-
cal claims, and was made to work the will of the Holy
See, which had blessed and organized the project. A
century and a half later the Pope did not scruple to
preach a crusade against the Emperor himself.
Again, it was now that the first seeds were sown of
that fear and hatred wherewith the German people never
thenceforth ceased to regard the encroaching Romish
court. Branded by the Church and forsaken by the
nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the faithful
burghers of Worms and Li^ge. It soon became the test
of Teutonic patriotism to resist Italian priestcraft.
The changes in the internal constitution of Germany
which the long anarchy of Henry IV's reign had pro-
STRUGGLE OF EMPIRE AND PAPACY,
165
duced are seen when the nature of the prerogative as it
stood at the accession of Conrad II, the first Franconian
Emperor, is compared with its state at Henry V's death.
All fiefs are now hereditary, and when vacant can be
granted afresh only by consent of the States ; the jurisdic-
tion of the crown is less wide ; the idea is beginning to
make progress that the most essential part of the Empire
is not its supreme head but the commonwealth of princes
and barons. The greatest triumph of these feudal mag-
nates is in the establishment of the elective principle,
which when confirmed by the three free elections of
Lothar II, Conrad III, and Frederick I, passes into an
undoubted law. The Prince-Electors are mentioned in
A.D. 1 1 56 as a distinct and important body*. The clergy,
too, whom the policy of Otto the Great and Henry II had
raised, are now not less dangerous than the dukes, whose
power it was hoped they would balance ; possibly more
so, since protected by their sacred character and their
allegiance to the Pope, while able at the same time to
command the arms of their countless vassals. Nor were
the two succeeding Emperors the men to retrieve those
disasters. The Saxon Lothar the Second is the willing
minion of the Pope ; performs at his coronation a menial
service unknown before, and takes a more stringent oath
to defend the Holy See, that he may purchase its sup-
port against the Swabian faction in his own dominions.
Conrad the Third, the first Emperor of the great house
of Hohenstaufen^, represents the anti-papal party; but
CHAP. X.
Limitations
of imperial
prerogative.
' ' Gradnm statim post Principes
Electores.' — Frederick I's Privilege
of Austria, in Pertz, M. G. H. legg.
ii.
^ Hohenstaufen is a castle in
what is now the kingdom of Wiir-
temberg, about four miles from the
Goppingen station of the railway
from Stuttgart to Ulm. It stands,
or rather stood, on the summit of
a steep and lofty conical hill (visible
from several points on the line of
Lothar II,
1125-1138.
Conrad III,
1138-1153.
i66
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. X.
domestic troubles and an unfortunate crusade prevented
him from ejQfecting anything in Italy. He never even
entered Rome to receive the crown.
railway), commanding a boundless
view over the great limestone pla-
teau of the Rauhe Alp, the eastern
declivities of the Schwartzwald, and
the bare and tedious plains of west-
ern Bavaria. Of the castle itself, de-
stroyed in the Peasants* War, there
remain only fragments of the wall-
foundations : in a rude chapel lying
on the hill slope below are some
strange half-obliterated frescoes ;
over the arch of the door is in-
scribed • Hie transibat Caesar.* Fred-
eri ck Barbarossa had another famous
palace at Kaiserslautem, a small town
in the Palatinate, on the railway
from Mannheim to Treves, Ijring in
a wide valley at the western foot of
the Hardt mountains. It was de-
stroyed by the French: and a
house of correction has been baih
upon its site; but in a brewery
hard by may be seen some of the
huge low-browed arches of its lower
story.
CHAPTER XL
THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
The reign of Frederick the First, better known under
his Italian surname Barbarossa, is the most brilliant in
the annals of the Empire. Its territory had been wider
under Charles, its strength perhaps greater under Henry
the Third, but it never appeared in such per\'ading vivid
activity, never shone with such lustre of chivalry, as under
the prince whom his countrymen have taken to be one of
their national heroes, and who is still, as the half-mythic
type of Teutonic character, honoured by picture and
statue, in song and in legend, through the breadth of the
German lands. The reverential fondness of his annalists
and the whole tenour of his life go far to justify this
admiration, and dispose one to believe that nobler motives
were joined with personal ambition in urging him to
assert so haughtily and carry out so harshly those im-
perial rights in which he had such unbounded confidence.
Under his guidance the Transalpine power made its
greatest effort to subdue the two antagonists which then
direatened and were fated in the end to destroy it —
Italian nationality and the Papacy.
Even before Gregory VII's time it might have been
predicted that two such potentates as the Emperor and
the Pope, closely bound together, yet each with preten-
CHAP. XI.
Frederick
of Hoben-
staufen^
I 152-1 189.
His rela-
tions to the
Popedom,
i68
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XI.
sions wide and undefined, must ere long come into
collision. The boldness of that great pontijQf in enforcing,
the unflinching firmness of his successors in maintaining,
the supremacy of clerical authority, inspired their sup-
porters with a zeal and courage which more than com-
pensated the advantages of the Emperor in defending
rights he had long enjoyed. On both sides the hatred
was soon very bitter. But even had men's passions
permitted a reconciliation, it would have been found
difficult to bring into harmony adverse principles, each
irresistible, mutually destructive. As the spiritual power,
in itself purer, since exercised over the soul and directed
to the highest of all ends, eternal felicity, was entitled
to the obedience of all, laymen as well as clergy; so
the spiritual person, to whom, according to the view then
universally accepted, there had been imparted by ordination
a mysterious sanctity, could not without sin be subject to
the lay magistrate, be installed by him in office, be judged
in his court, and render to him any compulsory service.
Yet it was no less true that civil government was indis-
pensable to the peace and advancement of society ; and
while it continued to subsist, another jurisdiction could
not be suffered to interfere with its workings, nor one-
half of the people be altogether removed from its control
Thus the Emperor and the Pope were forced into hos-
tility as champions of opposite systems, however fully
each might admit the strength of his adversary's position,
however bitterly he might bewail the violence of his own
partisans. There had also arisen other causes of quarrel,
less respectable but not less dangerous. The pontiff
demanded and the monarch refused the lands which the
Countess Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the
Holy See ; Frederick claiming them as feudal suzerain^
REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
169
the Pope eager by their means to carry out those
schemes of temporal dominion which Constantine's dona-
tion sanctioned, and Lothar's seeming renunciation of
the sovereignty of Rome had done much to encourage.
As feudal superior of the Norman kings of Naples and
Sicily, as protector of the towns and barons of North Italy
who feared the German yoke, the successor of Peter wore
already the air of an independent potentate.
No man was less likely than Frederick to submit to
these encroachments. He was a sort of imperialist
Hildebrand, strenuously proclaiming, the immediate de-
pendence of his office on God's gift, and holding it every
whit as sacred as his rival's. On his first journey to Rome,
he refused to hold the Pope's stirrup ^ as Lothar had done,
till Pope Hadrian the Fourth's threat that he would with-
hold the crown enforced compliance. Complaints arising
not long after on some other ground, the Pope exhorted
Frederick by letter to shew himself worthy of the kindness
of his mother the Roman Church, who had given him
the imperial crown, and would confer on him, if dutiful,
benefits still greater. This word benefits — benefict'a — ^un-
derstood in its usual legal sense of * fief,' and taken in
connection with the picture which had been set up at Rome
to commemorate Lothar's homage, provoked angry shouts
from the nobles, assembled in diet at Besan9on ; and when
the legate answered, * From whom, then, if not from our
Lord the Pope, does your king hold the Empire?' his life
was not safe from their fury. On this occasion Frederick's
vigour and the remonstrances of the Transalpine prelates
• A great deal of importance bescedener tiet up eneme blankea
seems to have been attached to perde, unde de keiser sal ime den
this symbolic act of courtesy. See stegerip halden dur de sadel nicht
Art. I of the Sacbsenspiegel. * Deme ne winde.'
pavese is ok gesat to ridene to
CHAP. XI.
Contest with
HadrianlV.
I70
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XI.
With Pope
Alexander
IIL
obliged Hadrian to explain away the obnoxious word, and
remove the picture. Soon after the quarrel was renewed
by other causes, and came to centre itself round the Pope's
demand that Rome should be left entirely to his govern-
ment. Frederick, in reply, appeals to the civil law, and
closes with the words, * Since by the ordination of God I
both am called and am Emperor of the Romans, in
nothing but name shall I appear to be ruler if the control
of the Roman city be wrested from my hands.' That
such a claim should need assertion marks the change since
Henry III; how much more that it could not be enforced.
Hadrian's tone rises into defiance ; he mingles the threat
of excommunication with references to the time when the
Germans had not yet the Empire. * What were the Franks
till Zacharias welcomed Pipin? What is the Teutonic
king now till consecrated at Rome by holy hands ? The
chair of Peter has given and can withdraw its gifts.'
The schism that followed Hadrian's death produced a
second and more momentous conflict. Frederick, as head
of Christendom, proposed to summon the bishops of
Europe to a general council, over which he should pre-
side, like Justinian or Heraclius. Quoting the favourite
text of the two swords, * On earth,' he continues, * God
has placed no more than two powers : above there is but
one God, so here one Pope and one Emperor. The
Divine Providence has specially appointed the Roman
Empire as a remedy against contmued schism V The
plan failed; and Frederick adopted the candidate whom
his own faction had chosen, while the rival claimant,
Alexander III, appealed, with a confidence which Ae
issue justified, to the support of sound churchmen through
^ Letter to the German bishops in Radewic; Mar., S.R,I^ t fL
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 <5, tells how the pontiff set
Ws foot on the neck of the prostrate king, with the words,
* The young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under
feetd' It needed not this exaggeration to enhance the
significance of that scene, even more full of meaning for
the fiiture than it was solemn and affecting to the Venetian
crowd that thronged the church and the piazza. For it
was the renunciation by the mightiest prince of his time of
"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.
CHAP. XI.
172
THE HOL Y ROMAN 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 equaOed
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 jiuists of
Rome had ever ascribed to their despotic princes was
directly transferred to the Csesarean 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 siurounded 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 e.' 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 eiun omne suum imperium
et potestatem concesseritV" The Hohenstaufen himself
was not slow to accept these magnificent ascriptions of
dig^iity, 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.
CHAP. XI,
« Document of 1230, quoted by
Voa Raumer, v. p. 81.
' Speech of archbishop of Milan,
in Radewic; Mur., S, R. /., vi.
Frederick
in Italy.
174
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XI.
"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 kingdoms. 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 different
thoughts and hopes, the part of Crescentius^. The dty
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, askhig him to help
8 Frederick's election (at Frank- ^ See also post. Chapter XVL
fort) was made ' non sine quibus- ' ' Senatus Populusque Romanos
dam ItalisB baronibus.' — Otto Fris. i. nrbis 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 Frankish 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 J^.'
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«», crush-
ing under the hoofs of his cavalry the home of freedom
k Otto of Fre3rsing. were declared exempt from all
1 Later in his reign, Frederick jurisdiction but his own.
condescended to negotiate with ™ See the first note to Shelley's
these Roman magistrates against Hellas, Sismondi is mainly answer-
a hostile Pope, and entered into able for this conception of Barba-
a sort of treaty by which they rossa*s position.
CHAP. XI.
The Lom-
bard Cities
176
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XI.
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 *». 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 apparentiy 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-govem-
^ They say rebclliously, says honestam mortem quam ut/ Ac-
Frederick, * Nolumus hunc regnare Letter in Pertz, ilf.G.J?., legj. iL
super nos ... at nos maluimus
o • De tribute CsBsaris nemo cogitabat ;
Omnes erant Cxsares, nemo censum dabat;
Civitas Ambrosii, velut Troia, stabat,
Deos parum, homines minus formidabat.'
Poems relating to the Emperor Frederick of Hohenstaufen, published by
Grimm.
REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA,
177
ment 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 ejQfect; 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 Caroli imitationem ius ecclesiarum statum reipublicae in-
columen et legum integritatem per totum imperium nostrum
servaremus<i.' But the hold the name of Charles had on the
minds of the people, and the way in which he had become,
so to speak, an eponym of Empire, has better witnesses
than grave documents. A rhyming poet sings': —
P Charles the Great was canon- quoted by Von Raumer, ii. 6.
ixed by Frederick's anti-pope and ' Poems relating to Frederick I,
con6rmed afterwards ut supra,
4 Acta ConcU. Hartzbem. iii.,
N
CHAP. XI.
Temporary^
success of
Frederick,
178
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XI.
Victory of
tbeLomhard
League,
Frederick
an German
Icing.
* Quanta sit potentia vel laus Friderid
Cum sit patens omnibus, non est opus diet ;
Qui rebelles lancea fodiens ultrici
ReprsBsentat 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 Frankish 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 ao
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 rebd
' The carroccio was a waggon served the Lombards for a laOyii^
with a flagstaff planted on it, which point in battle.
REION OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
179
disturbed the pubKc 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 the
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, different 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, Ntimberg, 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
€x instinct led Frederick to attach them to the throne,
enfranchising many, granting, with municipal institutions,
an independeht jurisdiction, conferring various exemptions
N 2
OHAP. ZI.
The Ger-
man cidea.
i8o
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. ZI.
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 the traveller the black mouth of a cavern, and tell
* Liibeck, Hamburg, Bremen, iisters have, by their entrance first
and Frankfort. into the North German confeden-
[Since this was first written tion, now into the German Em-
Frankfort has been annexed by pire, lost something of their indc-
Pnissia, and her three surviving pendence.]
REIGN OF FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
i8i
him that within Barbarossa lies amid his knights in an
enchanted sleeps, 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 t)rranny 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.
CHAP. XI.
^ The legend is one which appears under Tarions fixnns in many
countries.
CHAPTER XII.
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
CHAP. XII.
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 titles 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, Dauphin^, 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 outliers. 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. 1566^.
* '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.
monc'-iH. G. H. t. iv. *> Conring, Be Finibus Imperii.
" is curious that this non- It is hardly necessary to observe
CIIAP. Ml.
Limits of
the Empire.
Hungary.
iS4
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xn.
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^.
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 oi
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 *l attended at the Diet held at Merseburg
shortly after Frederick I's coronation, and received from
that the connection of Hungary aided them in grasping and retain-
with the Hapsburgs is of compara- ing the thrones of Hungary and
tively recent origin, and of a purely Bohemia.
dynastic nature. The position of o They however remained extra-
the archdukes of Austria as kings imperial.
of Hungary had nothing to do ^ Letter of Frederick I to Ottc
legally with the fact that many of of Freysing, prefixed to the latter*i
them were also chosen Emperors, History. This king is also called
although practically their possession Svend. '
of the imperial crown had greatly
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
^lunster 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
^^nef; 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-
gained 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. have occasionally visited it ; and
^ Albertus Stadensis apud Con- some few Irish hermits appear to
"ogium, Dtf Finibus Imperii, have been found there by the Nor-
The Irish however are said to wegian colonists in 874.
CHAP. xn.
France.
Sweden,
i86
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII. Nor does it appear that authority was ever exercised
Spain, by any Emperor in Spain. Nevertheless the choice of
Alfonso X by a section of the German electors, in aj).
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^.
England. 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 whicL
Frederick I was addressed by the Plantagenet Henry 11*^^-
English independence was still more compromised in the:
next reign, when Richard I, according to Hoveden^
1^ There is an allusion to this in
the poems of the Cid. Arthur
Duck, De Usu et Autboritate Juris
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 occupation 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-
sition. Describing the Roman coro-
nation of the Emperor Conrad U-
Wippo (c. 16), tells us * His ita per-
actis in duorum regum praesentts
Ruodolfi regis Burgundis et Qino-
tonis regis Anglorum divino offidc
finito imperator duorum regnm m^
dius ad cubiculum suum hoD<»ifio«
ductus est.*
J Letter in Otto Fris. i.: *N<v
bis submittuDtur Francia et Hisp^
nia, Anglia et Dania.'
^ Letter in Radewic tayt, '
num nostrum vobis exponimui. .
Vobis imperandi cedat auctoritat,!
bis non deerit voluntas obscqociidi '-
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS,
187
* Consilio matris su3e deposuit se de regno Anglise et
tradidit illud imperatori (Henrico Vlto) 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 l. But Germany had no
Edward I. Henry VI is said at his death to have
released Richard from his submission (this toa may be
compared with Richard's release to the Scottish William
the Lion), and Edward II declared, * regnum Angliae 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 pxu'posing to infringe on the king's authority in
the realm of England p. One curious pretension of the
CHAP. XU.
1 The alleged instances of ho-
flttge by the Scots to the Saxon
and early Norman kings are al-
alj complicated in some such
They had once held also
the etrldom of Huntingdon from
the English crown, and some have
tapposed (but on no sufficient
groonds) that homage was also done
by them for Lothian.
"* Selden, TiV/m q/'lfonottr, parti,
chap. ii.
^ Edward refused upon the
ground that he was * rex inunctits.*
o Sigismund had shortly before
given great offence in France by
dubbing knights.
P Sigismund answered, * Nihil se
contra superioritatem regis prae-
tcxere.*
i83
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII.
Naples.
Venice.
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. i 060-1 189) 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 imstained by any submission to the
Prankish 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
Prankish rule in Italy to regard the Byzantine sovereigns
4 Selden, Titles of Honour ^ part i. for a long time to style themielTes
chap. ii. Nevertheless, notaries in * Ego M. auctoritate imperiali (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 Constantinopolitan), 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,
Venice never, down to her extinction by France and
Austria in a.d. 1796, 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 Prankish 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 nostnmir * 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
» It is not necessary to prove of this book has questioned its
this letter to have been the com- authenticity, I may mention that
position of Frederick or bis minis- it is to be found not only in
ten. If it be (as it doubtless is) Hoveden, but also in the ' Itine-
coDtemporary, it is equally to the rarium regis Ricardi/ in Ralph de
purpose as an evidence of the Diceto, and in the 'Chronicon
fiecUngs and ideas of the age. Terrae Sanctae.* [See Mr. Stubbs'
As a reriewer of a former edition edition of Hoveden, vol. ii. p. 356.]
CHAP. XII.
The East,
The
Byzantine
Emperors,
190
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. zn.
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. Instead
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 httle 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 beUef to suffer
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
191
an}thing else to come into 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 Constantine or Justinian.
They were weak, although by no means so weak as
modem historians have been till 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
• Basileus,' to which Lewis retorted that he was as good
an emperor as Basil himself, but that, anyhow, Basileus
CHAP. XII.
Rivalry
of the two
Empires,
192
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII. j was only the Greek for rex^ and need not mean * Em-
peror ' at all. Nicephorus would not call Otto I anj^hing
but ' King of the Lombards ^Z 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-
Hnopolitana. Nicephorus says, * Vis
maius scandalum quam quod se im-
peratorem vocat.'
■ Otto of Freysing, i. c. 30.
* * Isaachius a Deo constitutus
Imperator, sacratissimus, excellen-
tissimus, poteutissimus, moderator
Romanorum, Angelus totius orbis,
heres coronae magni Constantini,
dilecto fratri imperii sui, maximo
principi 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 {Historia de Ex"
peditione Friderici Imperatoris) : —
* Dominus Imperator divina se illus-
trante gratia ulterius dissimulare non
valens temerarium fastum regis {sc.
Graecorum) et usurpantem vocabu-
lum falsi imperatoris Romanorum,
haec inter cxtera exorsus est: —
*' Omnibus 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 rcgum vel principum contra-
dictione tranquille tenuerim et in
Romana urbe a summo pontifice
imperiali benedictionc unctus sim et
sublimatus, quia denique Monar-
chiam preedecessores mei impen-
tores Romanorum plusquam per
CCCC annos etiam gloriose tnns-
miserint utpote a Constantinopoli-
tana urbe ad pristinam sedem im-
perii, caput orbis Romam, aoch-
matione Romanorum et principam
imperii, auctoritate quoque summi
pontificis et S. catholicsB ecdcac
translatam, propter tardum et in*
fructuosum Constantinopolitani im-
peratoris auxilium contra tyrannof
ecclesisB, mirandum est admodumcur
frater meus dominus vester Coo-
stantinopolitanus imperator usuipet
ineflicax sibi idem vocabnlmn ct
glorictur stulte alieno sibi pronos
honore, cum liquido noverit me et
nomine dici et re esse Fridericwn
Romanorum imperatorem semper
Augiistum." *
Isaac was so hx moved by Fre-
derick s indignation that in his next
letter he addressed him as * gcne-
rosissimum imperatorem Alemanue,*
and in a third thus : —
* Isaakius iu Christo fidelis diTi>
nitus coronatus, sublimis, potent.
excelsus, haeres coronae magni Coo*
stantini et Moderator Romeon An*
gelus nobilissimo Imperatori anti"
quae Romae, regi Alemaniae et dilecto
fratri imperii sui, salutem,' &c^ ftc;
(Ansbert, ut supra.)
IMPERIAL. TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
193
self * Romanionim ' from his Thracian province. Though
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 imder 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 from 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
aU tides save the highest (the tedious lists of imperial
dignities were happily not yet in being), they did not
therefore endeavom: to imite their several kingdoms, but
continued to go through four distinct coronations at the
four capitals of their Empire ^. These are concisely given
in the verses of Godfrey of Viterbo, a notary of Frederick's
household y : —
*Primas Aqaisgrani locus est, post hsc Arelati,
Inde Modoetiae regali sede locari
Post solet Italiae sunima corona dari :
Caesar Romano cum vult diademate 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 II's
time, ' king of the Romans, always Augustus.' At Monza
(or, more rarely, at Milan) in later times, at Pavia in earlier
CHAP. XII.
■ Baronius, ad ann.
s See Appendix, Note C.
y Godefr. Viterb., Pantbion, in
Mur., S. R, L, torn. vii.
Dignities
and titles.
The four
crowns.
194
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII.
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 «. 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
» Donn'ges, Deutscbes Staats-
recbtf 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
Jrankish), 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 Sulvem, so is he Here der Wakn.
Dy driidde is tho Rome; dy is
guldin, so is he Keyser over alle dy
Werlt.' — Gloss to the Sacbum-
Spiegel t quoted by Pfeffinger. Simi-
larly Peter de Andlo.
d Of. Gewoldus, De SepUmm-'
ratu impefii Romani, One would
expect some ingenious allegoriser
to have discovered that the crovo
of Burgundy must be, and therefore
is, of copper or bronze, making the
series complete, like the four ages
of men in Hesiod. But I have not
been able to find any such.
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS,
^95
that of Italy there was and is inserted a piece of iron, a
nail, it was believed, of the true Cross.
Why, it may well be asked, seeing that the Roman
crown made the Emperor ruler of the whole habitable
globe, was it thought necessary for him to add to it minor
dignities which might be supposed to have been already
included in this supreme one ? The reason seems to be
that the imperial office was conceived of as something
different in kind from the regal, and as carrying with it
not the immediate government of any particular kingdom,
but a general suzerainty over and right of controlling all.
Of this a pertinent illustration is afforded by an anecdote
told of Frederick Barbarossa. Happening once to inquire
of the famous jurists who surrounded him whether it was
really true that he was * lord of the world,' one of them
simply assented, another, Bulgarus, answered, ' Not as
respects ownership/ In this dictum, which is evidently
conformable to the philosophical theory of the Empire, we
have a pointed distinction drawn between feudal sove-
reignty, which supposes the prince original owner of the
soil of his whole kingdom, and imperial sovereignty which
is irrespective of place, and exercised not over things but
over men, as God's rational creatures. But the Emperor,
as has been said already, was also the East Frankish king,
uniting in himself, to use the legal phrase, two wholly dis-
tinct * persons,' and hence he might acquire more direct
and practically useful rights over a portion of his do-
minions by being crowned king of that portion, just as
a feudal monarch was often duke or count of lordships
whereof he was already feudal superior; or, to take a
better illustration, just as a bishop may hold livings in his
own diocese. That the Emperors, while continuing to be
crowned at Milan and Aachen, did not call themselves
o 2
CHAP. XII.
Meaning
of the four
coronations.
tgS
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. ZII.
• Emperor*
not assumed
tUl the
Roman
coronation.
Origin and
restdts of
ibis practice.
kings of the Lombards and of the Franks, was probably
merely because these titles seemed insignificant compared
to that of Roman Emperor.
In this supreme title, as has been said, all lesser honours
were blent and lost, but custom or prejudice forbade the
German king to assume it till actually crowned at Rome
by the Pope®. Matters of phrase and title are never un-
important, least of all in an age ignorant and super-
stitiously antiquarian: and this restriction had the most
important consequences. The first barbarian kings had
been tribe-chiefs ; and when they claimed a dominion
which was imiversal, yet in a sense territorial, they could
not separate their title from the spot which it was their
boast to possess, and by virtue of whose name they ruled.
* Rome,' says the biographer of St. Adalbert, * seeing that
she both is and is called the head of the world and the
mistress of cities, is alone able to give to kings imperial
power, and since she cherishes in her bosom the body of
the Prince of the Apostles, she ought of right to appoint
the Prince of the whole earth ^' The crown was there-
fore too sacred to be conferred by any one but the supreme
Pontiff, or in any city less august than the ancient capital
Had it become hereditary in any family, Lothar I's, for
instance, or Otto's, this feeling might have worn off;
as it was, each successive transfer to a new dynasty, to
• Hence the numbers attached to
the names of the Emperors are often
different in German and Italian
writers, the latter not reckoning
Henry the Fowler nor Comad I,
So Henry HI (of Germany) calls
himself * Imperator Henricns Se-
cundus;' and all distinguish the
years of their regnum from those
of the imperium. Cardinal Baro-
nius will not call Henry V aoythmg
but Henry HI, not recognisiiig
Henry IV's coronation, because it
was performed by an antip<^»e.
' Life of S. Adalbert (written
at Rome early in the elereBth
century, probably by a brother of
the monastery of SS. Bonifiioe tad
Alexius) in Pertz, M, 0,B. ir.
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
»97
Guido, to Otto, to Henry II, to Conrad the Salic, strength-
ened it. The force of custom, tradition, precedent, is in-
calculable, when checked neither by written rules nor free
discussion. What sheer assertion will do is shewn by the
success of a forgery so gross as the Isidorian decretals. No
arguments are needed to discredit the alleged decree of
Pope Benedict VIII g, which prohibited the German prince
from taking the name or oflSce of Emperor till approved
and consecrated by the pontiff, but a doctrine so favour-
able to papal pretensions was sure not to want advocacy ;
Hadrian IV proclaims it in the broadest terms, and
through the efforts of the clergy and the spell of rever-
ence in the Teutonic princes, it passed into an unques-
tioned belief^. That none ventured to use the title till
the Pope conferred it, made it seem in some manner to
depend on his will, enabled him to exact conditions from
every candidate, and gave a colour to his pretended
suzerainty. Since by feudal theory every honour and
estate is held from some superior, and since the divine
commission has been without doubt issued directly to
the Pope, must not the whole earth be his fief, and he
the lord paramount, to whom even the Emperor is a
vassal? This argument, which derived considerable
plausibility from the rivalry between the Emperor and
other monarchs, as compared with the universal and
« Given by Glaber Rudolphus.
It is on the face of it a most im-
pudent forgery : * Ne quisquam
audacter Romani Imperii sceptrum
praepostere gestare princeps ap-
petat neve Imperator dici aut
esse valeat nisi quern Papa Ro-
manus morum probitate aptum
elegerit, eique commiserit insigne
imperiale.'
*» The Sacbsenspiegel says, ' Die
diideschen solen durch recht den
koning kiesen. Svenne die gewiet
wert von den bischopen die dar to
gesat sin, unde uppe den stul to
Aken kumt, so hevet he koning-
like wait unde koningliken namen.
Svenne yn die paues wiet, so heute
he des rikes gewalt unde keiser-
liken namen.'
CHAP. XII.
I9S
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII.
undisputed^ authority of the Pope, was a favourite with
the high sacerdotal party: j&rst distinctly advanced by
Hadrian IV, when he set up the picturei representing
Lothar's homage, which had so irritated the followers
of Barbarossa, though it had already been hinted at in
Gregory VIFs gift of the crown to Rudolf of Suabia,
with the line, —
•Petra dedit Petro, Petrus diadema Rudolfo.*
Nor was it only by putting him at the pontiflTs mercy that
this dependence of the imperial name on a coronation
in the city injured the German sovereign^. With strange
inconsistency it was not pretended that the Emperor's
rights were any narrower before he received the rite : he
i Universal and undisputed in
the West, which, for practical pur-
poses, meant the world. The de-
nial of the supreme jurisdiction of
Peter's chair by the eastern churches
affected very slightly the belief of
Latin Christendom, just as the ex-
istence of a rival emperor at Con-
* Rex venit ante fores nullo prius urbis honore ;
Post homo fit Papae, sumit quo dante coronam.' — ^Radewic
Another version of the first line is, —
* Rex stetit ante fores iurans prius urbis honores.*
stantinople with at least as good
a legal title as the Teutonic Caesar,
was readily forgotten or ignored
by the German and Italian subjects
of the latter.
J Odious especially for the in-
scription,—
'^ Mediaeval history is full of
instances of the superstitious
veneration attached to the rite of
coronation (made by the Church
almost a sacrament), and to the
special places where, or even
utensils with which it was per-
formed. Every one knows the
importance in France of Rheims
and its sacred ampulla; so the
Scottish king must be crowned
at Scone, an old seat of Pictish
royalty — Robert Bruce risked a
great deal to receive his crowii
there; so no Hungarian coronation
was valid unless made with the
crown of St. Stephen ; the posset-
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
Barbarossa^ describes the result of the conquest of
Charles the Great: —
'Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum
Hostibus expulsis, ad nos iustissimus ordo
Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni
Nos penes est. Quemcunque sibi Germania regem
Przficit, hunc dives summisso vertice Roma
Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine 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 °i, there is no documentary trace,
• Whether the poem which Celtes as is commonly supposed, is
passes under the name of Gunther for the present purpose indiflerent.
Ligurinus be his work or that of ™ Zedler, Universal Lexicon^
ftome Kholar in a later age, Conrad s. v. Reich.
CHAP. XII.
The tide
*Holy
Empire.*
200
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII.
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 Austriae
quae clypeus et cor sacri imperii esse dinoscitur © : '
then afterwards, in other manifestos of his reign;
for example, in a letter to Isaac Angelus of Byzan-
tium p, and in the summons to the princes to help
him against Milan : * Quia .... urbis et orbis g^ber-
nacula tenemus .... sacro imperio et divae reipublicae
consulere debemusq;* where the second phrase is a
synonym explanatory of the first. Used occasionally
by Henry VI and Frederick II, it is more frequent
under their successors, William, Richard, Rudolf, till
after Charles IV's time it becomes habitual, for the
last few centuries indispensable. Regarding the origin
of so singular a title many theories have been ad-
vanced. Some declared it a perpetuation of the court
style of Rome and Byzantium, which attached sanctity
to the person of the monarch: thus David Blondel,
contending for the honour of France, calls it a mere
epithet of the Emperor, applied by confusion to his
governmenf. Others saw in it a religious meaning,
referring to Daniel's prophecy, or to the fact that the
Empire was contemporary with Christianity, or to Christ's
" It does not occur before
Frederick I's time in any of the
documents printed by Pertz; and
this is the date which Botclerus also
assigns in his treatise, De Sacro
Imperio Romano^ vindicating the
terms * sacrum * and * Romanum *
against the aspersions of Blondel.
o Pertz, M. G. H., tom. iv.
(Icgum ii.)
P Ibid. iv.
« Radewic. ap. Pert*.
v" Blondellus adv. ChifBetium.
Most of these theories are stated
by Boeclerus. Jordanes (CbriMiea)
says, * Sacri imperii quod non est
dubium sancti Spiritus ordinatione,
secundum qualitatem ipsam et ezi-
gentiam meritorum humanonun
disponi.'
IMPERIAL TITLES AND ' PRE TENS2QNS.
201
birth under it*. Strong churchmen derived it from the
dependence of the imperial crown on the Pope. There
were not wanting persons to maintain that it meant
nothing more than great or splendid. We need not,
however, be in any great doubt as to its true meaning
and purport. The ascription of sacredness to the person,
the palace, the letters, and so forth, of the sovereign, so
common in the later ages of Rome, had been partly re-
tained in the German court. Liudprand calls Otto
* imperator sanctissimus *.' Still this sanctity, which the
Greeks above all others lavished on their princes, is
something personal, is nothing more than the divinity
that always hedges a king. Far more intimate and pecu-
liar was the relation of the revived Roman Empire to the
church and religion. As has been said already, it was
neither more nor less than the visible Church, seen on its
secular side, the Christian society organized as a state
under a form divinely appointed, and therefore the name
* Holy Roman Empire ' was the needful and rightful
counterpart to that of * Holy Catholic Church.' Such
Had long been the belief, and so the title might have had
its origin as far back as the tenth or ninth century, might
even have emanated from Charles himself. Alcuin in
one of his letters uses the phrase * imperium Christianum.'
But there was a further reason for its introduction at this
particular epoch. Ever since Hildebrand had claimed
for the priesthood exclusive sanctity and supreme juris-
diction, the papal party had not ceased to speak of the
■ Marquard Freher's notes to words, ' Ludhuicum comprenderunt
Peter de Andio, book i. chap. vii. sancto, pio, Augusto.* (Quoted by
' So in the song on the capture Gregorovius, Gescbicbte der Stadi
of the Emperor Lewis II by Adal- Rom im Miitelalter, iii. p. 185.)
gisus of Bcnevento, we fijid the
CHAP. XII.
202
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XII.
civil power as being, compared with that of their own
chief, merely secular, earthly, profane. It may be con-
jectured that to meet this reproach, no less injurious than
insulting, Frederick or his advisers began to use in public
documents the expression * Holy Empire;' thereby wish-
ing to assert the divine institution and religious duties
of the oflSce he held. Previous Emperors had called
themselves ' Catholici,' ' Christiani,* * ecclesiae defen-
sores « ; ' now their State itself is consecrated an earthly
theocracy. * Deus Romanum imperium adversus schisma
ecclesiae prseparavit ^,' writes Frederick to the English
Henry II. The theory was one which the best and
greatest Emperors, Charles, Otto the Great, Henry III,
had most striven to carry out ; it continued to be zea-
lously upheld when it had long ceased to be practicable.
In the proclamations of mediaeval kings there is a con-
stant dwelling on their Divine commission. Power in an
age of violence sought to justify while it enforced its
commands, to make brute force less brutal by appeals
to a higher sanction. This is seen nowhere more than
in the style of the German sovereigns : they delight in
the phrases * maiestas sacrosanctay,' * imperator divina or-
dinante providentia,' * divina pietate,' * per misericordiim
Dei;' many of which were preserved till, like those nsed
now by other European kings, like our own * Defender of
the Faith,' they had become at last more grotesque than
solemn. The freethinking Emperor Joseph 11^ at die
end of the eighteenth century, was * Advocate of the
Christian Church/ * Vicar of Christ,' ' Imperial head of
the faithful,' * Leader of the Christian army/ 'Bo*
^ Goldast, Consiitutiones. proper title of the king of HaofSy*
» Pertz, M. G. H., legg. ii. The Austrian court .has leceDlly
y • Apostolic majesty ' was the revived it.
IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
i03
i
tector of Palestine, of general councils, of the Catholic
faithV
The title, if it added little to the power, yet certainly
seems to have increased the dignity of the Empire, and by
consequence the jealousy of other states, of France espe-
cially. This did not, however, go so far as to prevent its
recognition by the Pope and the French king*, and after
the sixteenth century it would have been a breach of
diplomatic courtesy to omit it. Nor have imitators been
wanting: witness such titles as *Most Christian king,'
'Catholic king,' ' Defender of the Faith ^Z
CHAP. XII.
' Moser, Romische Kayser.
* Urban IV used the title in
1259; Francis I (of France) calls
the Empire * sacrosanctum.*
^ One may compare * Holy Rus-
^»'' It is almost superfluous to
observe that the beginning of the
title 'Holy' has nothing to do
^th the beginning of the Em-
pire itself. Essentially and sub-
stantially, the Holy Roman Em-
pire was, as has been shewn
already, the creation of Charles
the Great. Looking at it more
technically, as the monarchy, not
of the whole West, like that of
Charles, but of Germany and
Italy, with a claim, which was
never more than a claim, to uni-
versal sovereignty, its begirming
is fixed by most of the German
writers, whose practice has been
followed in the text, at the coro-
nation of Otto the Great. But
the title was at least one, and
probably two centuries later.
Uninteresting illustration of the power of the imperial idea in a country where one would
'^''e least looked for it, a country almost wholly cut off, during the earlier middle age, from
~5 ecclesiastical as well as the political influences of the European continent, has been sup-
^^ me by the kindness of Sir Henry Maine. In Ireland, before the English Conquest, the
custom was for a chieftain or magnate, who seem to have usually had a superfluity of cattle,
"*?1ve them out among his dependants to be pastured ; and thus the expression 'to receive
'*ck' from any one comes to denote the owning of a subordinate or vassal position, similar
wat of the feudal tenant who receives land as a beneficium from his lord. Now the
^ehon law, after shewing how the inferior princes of the island may receive stock from the
JV^B of Erin— the suzerain of the whole island, who however, even when he existed, had
■^'e more than a titular authority— goes on to say, ' When the King of Erin is without
^PPosition (L e. when he holds Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, which were usually in the
^os of Norsemen or Danes), he receives stock from the King of the Romans,' i. e. the
•^Peror. And the commentary adds that sometimes it is the successor of Patrick who
P^« stock to the King of Erin, thereby setting the primate of Ireland in the position beside
"« Emperor which continental theory assigfned to the Pope.
CHAPTER XIII.
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
CHAP. XIII.
In the three preceding chapters the Holy Empire has
been described in what is not only the most brilliant but
the most momentous period of its history; the period of
its rivalry with the Popedom for the chief place in Chris-
tendom. For it was mainly through their relations with
the spiritual power, by their friendship and protection al
first, no less than by their subsequent hostility, that the
Teutonic Emperors influenced the development of Euro-
pean politics. The reform of the Roman Church which
went on during the reigns of Otto I and his successors
down to Henry III, and which was chiefly due to tbe
efibrts of those monarchs, was the true beginning of the
grand period of the Middle Ages, the first of that ]aog
series of movements, changes, and creations in the eccle-
siastical system of Europe which was, so to speak^ die
master current of history, secular as well as religioii%
during the centuries which followed. The first remit of
Henry IIFs purification of the Papacy was seen in Ifitde*
brand's attempt to subject all jurisdiction to that of Us
own chair, and in the long struggle of the Ii
which brought out into clear light the opposing prddK
sions of the temporal and spiritual powers.
destined in the end to bear far other fruit, the immeJlM^j
eflect of this struggle was to evoke in all classes
FALL OF THE IIOHENSTAUFEN.
205
intense religious feeling ; and, in opening up new fields
of ambition to the hierarchy, to stimulate wonderfully
their power of political organization. It was this im-
pulse that gave birth to the Crusades, and that enabled
the Popes, stepping forth as the rightful leaders of a
religious war, to bend it to serve their own ends : it was
thus too that they struck the alliance — strange as such
an alliance seems now — with the rebellious cities of
Lombardy, and proclaimed themselves the protectors of
municipal freedom. But the third and crowning triumph
of the Holy See was reserved for the thirteenth century.
In the foundation of the two great orders of ecclesiastical
knighthood, the all-powerful all-pervading Dominicans
and Franciscans, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages
culminated : in the overthrow of the only power which
could pretend to vie with her in antiquity, in sanctity, in
universality, the Papacy saw herself exalted to rule alone
over the kings of the earth. Of that overthrow, following
with terrible suddenness on the days of strength and
glory which we have just been witnessing, this chapter
has now to speak.
It happened strangely enough that just while their
ndn was preparing, the house of Swabia gained over
tiieir ecclesiastical foes what seemed likely to prove an
i^dvantage of the first moment. The son and successor
of Barbarossa was Henry VI, a man who had inherited
3fl his Cither's harshness with none of his father's gene-
K)8ity. By his marriage with Constance, the heiress of
^ Norman kings, he had become master of Naples and
Sidy. Emboldened by the possession of what had been
kitherto the stronghold of his predecessors' bitterest
•Bemies, and able to threaten the Pope -from south as
^ as north, Henry conceived a scheme which might
CHAP. XIII.
Henry VI,
II90-II97.
206
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xni.
Philip,
1198-1208.
Innocent
III and
Quo IV.
have wonderfully changed the history of Germany and
Italy. He proposed to the Teutonic magnates to
lighten their burdens by uniting these newly-acquired
countries to the Empire, to turn their feudal lands into
allodial, and to make no further demands for money on
the clergy, on condition that they should pronomice the
crown hereditary in his family. Results of the highest im-
portance would have followed this change, whidi Henry
advocated by setting forth the perils of interregna, and
which he doubtless meant to be but part of an entirely
new system of polity. Already so strong in Germany,
and with an absolute command of their new kingdom,
the Hohenstaufen might have dispensed with the re-
nounced feudal services, and built up a firm centralized
system, like that which was already beginning to develope
itself in France. First, however, the Saxon princes, then
some ecclesiastics headed by Conrad of Mentz, opposed
the scheme ; the pontiff retracted his consent, and Hemy
had to content himself with getting his infant son
Frederick the Second chosen king of the Romans. On
Henry's untimely death the election was set aside, and
the contest which followed between Otto of Brunswick
and Philip of Hohenstaufen, brother of Henry the Sixth,
gave the Popedom, now guided by the genius of Innocent
the Third, an opportunity of extending its sway at tbe
expense of its antagonist. The Pope moved heaven and
earth on behalf of Otto, whose family had been the coo-
\ stant rivals of the Hohenstaufen, and who was hinudf
willing to promise all that Innocent required; but Philip's
personal merits and the vast possessions of his house
gave him while he lived the ascendancy in Gennany.
His death by the hand of an assassin, while it seemed to
vindicate the Pope's choice, left the Swabian party nib*
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
207
out a head, and the Papal nominee was soon recognized
over the whole Empire. But Otto IV became less sub-
missive as he felt his throne more secure. If he was a
Guelf by birth, his acts in Italy, whither he had gone
to receive the imperial crown, were those of a Ghibeline,
anxious to reclaim the rights he had but just forsworn.
The Roman Church at last deposed and excommunicated
her ungrateful son, and Innocent rejoiced in a second
successful assertion of pontifical supremacy, when Otto
was dethroned by the youthful Frederick the Second,
whom a tragic irony sent into the field of politics as the
champion of the Holy See, whose hatred was to embitter
bis life and extinguish his house.
Upon the events of that terrific strife, for which
Emperor and Pope girded themselves up for the last
time, the narrative of Frederick the Second's career, with
its romantic adventures, its sad picture of marvellous
powers lost on an age not ripe for them, blasted as by a
curse in the moment of victory, it is not necessary, were
it even possible, here to enlarge. That conflict did
indeed determine the fortunes of the German kingdom
no less than' of the republics of Italy, but it was upon
Italian ground that it was fought out and it is to Italian
^story that its details belong. So too of Frederick him-
self. Out of the long array of the Germanic successors
of Charles, he is, with Otto III, the only one who comes
before us with a genius and a frame of character that are
not those of a Northern or a Teuton a. There dwelt in
CHAP. XIII.
Otto IV,
1208(1198)
-I2I2.
Frederick
the Second,
1212-1250.
* I quote from the Liber Augus-
talis printed among Petrarch's works
^€ following curious description of
jrederick: ' Fuit armorum strenuus,
*"^guanim peritus, rigorosus, lux-
i^riosus, epicunis, nihil curans vel
credens nisi temporale: fuit malleus
RomansB ecclesiac.*
As Otto III had been called
* mirabilia mundi,' so Frederick II
is often spoken of in his own time
as ' stupor mundi Fridericus.'
2C8
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xm.
Struggle of
Frederick
with the
Papacy,
him, it is true, all the energy and knightly valour of his
father Henry and his grandfather Barbarossa. But along
with these, and changing their direction, were other gifts,
inherited perhaps from his Italian mother and fostered
by his education among the orange-groves of Palermo—
a love of luxury and beauty, an intellect refined, subtle,
philosophical. Through the mist of calumny and fable
it is but dimly that the truth of the man can be discerned,
and the outlines that appear serve to quicken rather than
appease the curiosity with which we regard one of the
most extraordinary personages in history. A sensualist,
yet also a warrior and a politician ; a profoimd lawgiver
and an impassioned poet ; in his youth fired by crusading
fervour, in later life persecuting heretics while himself
accused of blasphemy and unbelief; of winning manners
and ardently beloved by his followers, but with the stain
of more than one cruel deed upon his name, he was the
marvel of his own generation, and succeeding ages
looked back with awe, not unmingled with pity, upon the
inscrutable figure of the last Emperor who had braved
all the terrors of the Church and died beneath her ban,
the last who had ruled from the sands of the ocean to the
shores of the Sicilian sea. But while they pitied thqr
condemned. The undying hatred of the Papacy threw
round his memory a lurid light ; him and him alone of all
the imperial line, Dante, the worshipper of the &npire^
must perforce deliver to the flames of hell^>.
Placed as the Empire was, it was scarcely possible
for its head not to be involved in war with the con-
stantly aggressive Popedom — aggressive in her claims o^^
territorial dominion in Italy as well as of eccleslasdcai^
^ * Qu^ entro h lo secondo Federico.' — Inferno, canto z.
\
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
209
jurisdiction throughout the world. But it was Frederick's
peculiar misfortune to have given the Popes a hold over
him which they well knew how to use. In a moment
of youthful enthusiasm he had taken the cross from the
hands of an eloquent monk, and his delay to fulfil the
vow was branded as impious neglect. Excommunicated
by Gregory IX for not going to Palestine, he went, and
was excommunicated for going: having concluded an
advantageous peace, he sailed for Italy, and was a third
time excommunicated for returning. To Pope Gregory
he was at last after a fashion reconciled, but with the ac-
cession of Innocent IV the flame burst out afresh. Upon
the special pretexts which kindled the strife it is not worth
while to descant ; the real causes were always the same,
and could only be removed by the submission of one or
other combatant. Chief among them was Frederick's
possession of Sicily. Now were seen the fruits which
Barbarossa had stored up for his house when he gained
for Henry his son the hand of the Norman heiress.
Naples and Sicily had been for some two hundred years
recognized as a fief of the Holy See, and the Pope, who
felt himself in danger while encircled by the powers of
his rival, was determined to use his advantage to the full
and make it the means of extinguishing Imperial authority
throughout Italy. But although the struggle was far more
of a territorial and political one than that of the previous
century had been, it reopened every former source of
strife, and passed into a contest between the civil and
the spiritual potentate. The old war-cries of Henry and
Hildebrand, of Barbarossa and Alexander, roused again
the unquenchable hatred of Italian factions : the pontiff
asserted the transference of the Empire as a fief, and
declared that the power of Peter, symbolized by the two
CHAP. xni.
2IO
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xni.
Conrad IV,
1250-1254.
keys, was temporal as well as spiritual : the Emperor
appealed to law, to the indelible rights of Caesar; and
denounced his foe as the antichrist of the New Testa-
ment, since it was God's second vicar whom he was
resisting. The one scoffed at anathema, upbraided the
avarice of the Church, and treated her soldiery, the friars,
with a severity not seldom ferocious. The other solemnly
deposed a rebellious and heretical prince, offered the
imperial crown to Robert of France, to the heir of
Denmark, to Hakon the Norse king ; succeeded at last
in raising up rivals in Henry of Thuringia and William of
Holland. Yet throughout it is less the Teutonic Em-
peror who is attacked than the Sicilian king, the mi-
believer and friend of Mohammedans, the hereditary
enemy of the Church, the assailant of Lombard inde-
pendence, whose success must leave the Papacy defence-
less. And as it was from the Sicilian kingdom that the
strife chiefly arose, so was the possession of the Sicilian
kingdom a source rather of weakness than of strength,
for it distracted Frederick's forces and put him in the
false position of a liegeman resisting his lawful suzerain.
Truly, as the Greek proverb says, the gifts of foes are no
gifts, and bring no profit with them. The Norman kings
were more terrible in their death than in their life : they
had sometimes baffled the Teutonic Emperor; their
heritage destroyed him.
With Frederick fell the Empire. From the ruin that
overwhelmed the greatest of its houses it emerged, living
indeed, and destined to a long life, but so shattered,
crippled, and degraded, that it could never more be to
Europe and to Germany what it once had been. In the
last act of the tragedy were joined the enemy who had
now blighted its strength and the rival who was destined
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
211
to insult its weakness and at last blot out its name. The
murder of Frederick's grandson Conradin — a hero whose
youth and whose chivalry might have moved the pity
of any other foe — was approved, if not suggested, by
Pope Clement; it was done by the minions of Charles
of France.
The Lombard league had successfully resisted Frede-
rick's armies and the more dangerous Ghibeline nobles :
their strong walls and swarming population made defeats
in the open field hardly felt ; and now that South Italy
too had passed away from a German line — first to an
Angevin, afterwards to an Aragonese dynasty — ^it was
plain that the peninsula was irretrievably lost to the
Emperors. Why, however, should they not still be
strong beyond the Alps ? was their position worse than
that of England when Normandy and Aquitaine no
longer obeyed a Plantagenet? The force that had
enabled them to rule so widely would be all the greater
in a narrower sphere.
So indeed it might once have been, but now it was
too late. The German kingdom broke down beneath
the weight of the Roman Empire. To be universal
sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political
existence. The necessity which their projects in Italy
and disputes with the Pope laid the Emperors under of
purchasing by concessions the support of their own
princes, the ease with which in their absence the mag-
nates could usurp, the difficulty which the monarch re-
turning found in resuming the privileges of his crown,
the temptation to revolt and set up pretenders to the
throne which the Holy See held out, these were the
causes whose steady action laid the foundation of that
territorial independence which rose into a stable fabric
p 2
CHAP. zin.
Italy lost to
the Empire,
Decline of
imperial
power in
Germany,
212
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xni.
The Great
Interreg"
num.
Double elec'
Hon of
Richard of
England
and Alfonso
of Castile.
at the era of the Great Interregnum •'. Frederick IL bad
by two Pragmatic Sanctions, a.d. 1220 and 1232, granted,
or rather confirmed, rights ah-eady customary, such as
to give the bishops and nobles legal sovereignty in their
own towns and territories, except when the Emperor
should be present ; and thus his direct jurisdiction became
restricted to his narrowed domain, and to the cities imme-
diately dependent on the crown. With so much less to
do, an Emperor became altogether a less necessary per-
sonage; and hence the seven magnates of the realm,
now by law or custom sole electors, were in no haste
to fill up the place of Conrad IV, whom the supporters
of his father Frederick had acknowledged. William of
Holland was in the field, but rejected by the Swabian
party : on his death a new election was called for, and
at last set on foot. The archbishop of Cologne advised
his brethren to choose some one rich enough to support
the dignity, not strong enough to be feared by the
electors : both requisites met in the Plantagenet Richard,
earl of Cornwall, brother of the English Henry IIL
He received three, eventually four votes, came to Ger-
many, and was crowned at Aachen. But three of the
electors, finding that his bribe to them was lower than
to the others, seceded in disgust, and chose Alfonso X
of Castile c, who, shrewder than his competitor, continued
to watch the stars at Toledo, enjoying the splendours
of his title while troubling himself about it no further
than to issue now and then a proclamation. Meantime
^ The interregnum is by some Conrad IV till RadolTs acoefiiao
reckoned as the two years before in 1273.
Richard's election ; by others, as ^ Sumamed, from his identific
the whole period from the death tastes, * the Wise*
of Frederick II or that of his son
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEJSt.
213
the condition of Germany was frightful. The new Didius
Julianus, the chosen of princes baser than the praetorians
whom they copied, had neither the character nor the
outward power and resources to make himself respected.
Every floodgate of anarchy was opened: prelates and
barons extended their domains by war: robber-knights
infested the highways and the rivers : the misery of the
weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong, were such
as had not been seen for centuries. Things were even
worse than under the Saxon and Franconian Emperors ;
for the petty nobles who had then been in some measure
controlled by their dukes, were now, after the extinction
of the great houses, left without any feudal superior.
Only in the cities was shelter or peace to be found.
Those of the Rhine had already leagued themselves for
mutual defence, and maintained a struggle in the interests
of commerce and order against universal brigandage,
-At last, when Richard had been some time dead, it was
felt that such things could not go on for ever : with no
i:>ublic law, and no courts of justice, an Emperor, the
embodiment of legal government, was the only resource.
The Pope himself, having now sufficiently improved the
^veakness of his enemy, found the disorganization of
Germany beginning to tell upon his revenues, and threat-
ened that if the electors did not appoint an Emperor,
he would. Thus urged, they chose, in a.d. 1273, Ru-
dolf, count of Hapsburg, founder of the house of
Austria<i.
^ ' Electorcs imperii ad indictum
«t mandatum domini papae apud
Franchenftirte super electione con-
vienentes, comitem Rudolfum . . . .
in regem elegerunt/ — Ann. S. Rudb.
Salisb. ad ann. (Pertz, M.G.H» ix.)
Hapsburg is a castle (built about
A. D. 1020) in the Aargau on the
banks of the Aar, and near the line of
railway from Olten to Zurich, from a
point on which a glimpse of it may
be had. 'Within the ancient walls of
CHAP. XIII.
State of
Germany
during the
Interreg-
num.
Rudolf of
Hapsburg,
1272-1292.
214
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIII.
Change in
the position
of the Em-
pire.
From this point there begins a new era. We have
seen the Roman Empire revived in a.d. 800, by a prince
whose vast dominions gave ground to his claim of
universal monarchy; again erected in a.d. 962, on the
narrower but firmer basis of the German kingdom. We
have seen Otto the Great and his successors during the
three following centuries, a line of monarchs of unrivalled
vigour and abilities, strain every nerve to make good the
pretensions of their office against the rebels in Italy and
the ecclesiastical power. These efforts had now failed
signally and hopelessly. Each successive Emperor had
entered the strife with resources scantier than his pre-
decessors, each had been more decisively vanquished by
the Pope, the cities, and the princes. The Roman
Empire might, and, so far as its practical utility was con-
cerned, ought now to have been suffered to expire ; nor
could it have ended more gloriously than with the last
of the Hohenstaufen. That it did not so expire, but
lived on six hundred years more, till it became a piece
of antiquarianism hardly more venerable than ridiculous
— till, as Voltaire said, all that could be said about it was
that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire —
was owing partly indeed to the belief, still unshaken, that
it was a necessary part of the world's order, yet chiefly
to its connection, which was by this time indissoluble,
with the German kingdom. The Germans had con-
founded the two characters of their sovereign so long,
and had grown so fond of the style and pretensions of
Vindonissa,' says Gibbon, * the castle
of Hapsburg, the abbey of Konigs-
felden, and the town of Brugg have
successively arisen. The philoso-
phic traveller may compare the
monuments of Roman conquests,
of feudal or Austrian tyranny, of
monkish superstition, and of iii>
dustrious freedom. If he be trnlj
a philosopher, he will applaud the
merit and happiness of his owo
time.'
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN'.
215
a dignity whose possession appeared to exalt them above
the other peoples of Europe, that it was now t6o late
for them to separate the local from the universal monarch.
If a German king was to be maintained at all, he must
be Roman Emperor; and a German king there must
still be. Deeply, nay, mortally wounded as the event
proved his power to have been by the disasters of the
Empire to which it had been linked, the time was by
no means come for its extinction. In the unsettled state
of society, and the conflict of innumerable petty poten-
tates, no force save feudalism was able to hold society
together ; and its efficacy for that purpose depended, as
the anarchy of the recent interregnum shewed, upon the
presence of the recognized feudal head.
That head, however, was no longer what he had been.
The relative position of Germany and France was now
exactly the reverse of that which they had occupied two
centuries earlier. Rudolf was as conspicuously a weaker
sovereign than Philip III of France, as the Franconian
Emperor Henry III had been stronger than the Capetian
Philip I. In every other state of Europe the tendency
of events had been. to centralize the administration and
increase the power of the monarch, even in England not
to diminish it: in Germany alone had political union
become weaker, and the independence of the princes
more confirmed. The causes of this change are not far
to seek. They all resolve themselves into this one, that
the German king attempted too much at once. The
rulers of France, where manners were less rude than
in the other Transalpine lands, and where the Thu-d
Estate rose into power more quickly, had reduced one
by one the great feudataries by whom the first Capetians
had been scarcely recognized. The English kings had
CHAP. XIII.
Decline of
the regal
power in
Germany as
compared
with France
and Eng-
land,
2l6
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIII.
annexed Wales, Cumbria, and part of Ireland, had
obtained a prerogative great if not uncontrolled, and
exercised no doubtful sway through every corner of their
country. Both had won their successes by the concen-
tration on that single object of their whole personal
activity, and by the skilful use of every device whereby
their feudal rights, personal, judicial, and legislative, could
be applied to fetter the vassal. Meantime the German
I monarch, whose utmost efforts it would have needed to
tame his fierce barons and maintain order through wide
territories occupied by races unlike in dialect and customs,
had been struggling with the Lombard cities and the
Normans of South Italy, and had been for full two
centuries the object of the unrelenting enmity of the
Roman pontiff. And in this latter contest, by which
more than by any other the fate of the Empire was
decided, he fought under disadvantages far greater than
his brethren in England and France. William the
Conqueror had defied Hildebrand, William Rufus had
resisted Anselm ; but the Emperors Henry the Fourth
and Barbarossa had to cope with prelates who were
Hildebrand and Anselm in one; the spiritual heads of
Christendom as well as the primates of their special realm,
the Empire. And thus, while the ecclesiastics of Ger-
many were a body more formidable from their possessions
than those of any other European country, and enjoying
far larger privileges, the Emperor could not, or could
with far less effect, win them over by invoking against the
Pope that national feeling which made the cry of Galilean
liberties so welcome even to the clergy of France.
After repeated defeats, each more crushing than the
last, the imperial power, so far from being able to look
down on the papal, could not even maintain itself on an
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
217
al footing. Against no pontiff since Gregory VII
the monarch's right to name or confirm a pope,
isputed in the days of the Ottos and of Henry III^
n made good. It was the turn of the Emperor to
?l a similar claim of the Holy See to the function of
ewing his own election, examining into his merits,
rejecting him if unsound, that is to say, impatient
Driestly tyranny. A letter of Innocent III, who was
first to make this demand in terms, was inserted by
gory IX in his digest of the Canon Law, the inex-
stible armoury of the churchman, and contiiiued to
quoted thence by every canonist till the end of the
eenth century «. It was not difficult to find grounds
which to base such a doctrine. Gregory VII deduced
idth characteristic boldness from the power of the
s, and the superiority over all other dignities which
5t needs appertain to the Pope as arbiter of eternal
l1 or woe. Others took their stand on the analogy
clerical ordination, and urged that since the Pope in
secrating the Emperor gave him a title to the obedience
all Christian men, he must have himself the right of
roving or rejecting the candidate according to his
its. Others again, appealing to the Old Testament,
wed how Samuel discarded Saul and anointed David
his room f, and argued that the Pope now must have
CHAP. xin.
: Relations of
the Papacy
and the
Empire.
Corpus Juris Canonici^ Deer,
r. i. 6, cap. 34, Venerahilem :
et authoritas examinandi per-
m clectam in regem et pro-
eiidem ad imperium, ad nos
lai, qui eum inungimus, con-
unus, et coronamus.'
l>ewis II, not presaging the
rc, uses this parallel in his letter
>re refencd to) to Basil : ' Nam
Francoruni principes primo reges,
deinde vero imperatores, dicti sunt
ii dum taxat qui a Romano pontifice
ad hoc oleo sancto perfusi sunt.
.... Porro si calumpniaris Ro-
manum pontiticem, quod gesserit,
poteris calumpniari et Samuel,
quod spreto Sau!e, quern ipse unxe-
rat, David in regem ungere non
renuerit.'
2l8
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIII.
powers at least equal to those of the Hebrew prophets. But
the ascendancy of the doctrine dates from the time of
Pope Innocent III, whose ingenuity discovered for it an
historical basis. It was by the favour of the Pope, he de-
clared, that the Empire was taken away from the Greeks
and given to the Germans in the person of Charles?,
and the authority which Leo then exercised as God's
representative must abide thenceforth and for ever in his
successors, who can therefore at any time recall the gift,
and bestow it on a person or a nation more worthy than
its present holders. This is the famous theory of the
Translation of the Empire, which plays so large a part
in controversy down till the seventeenth century^, a tfaeoiy
with plausibility enough to make it generally successftdt
yet one which to an impartial eye appears far removed
from the truth of the facts K Leo III did not suppose,
any more than did Charles himself, that it was by his sole
pontifical authority that the crown was g^ven to the
Frank ; nor do we find such a notion put forward by any
of his successors down to the twelfth century. Gregory
VII in particular, in a remarkable letter dilating on his
prerogative, appeals to the substitution by papal inter-
ference of Pipin for the last Merovingian king, and even
goes back to cite the case of Theodosius humbling himself
K ' Illis principibus/ writes In-
nocent, * ius et potestatem eligendi
regem [Romanonim] in imperato-
rem postmodum promovendum re-
coguoscimus, ad quos de iure ac
antiqua consuetudine noscitur per-
tinere, praBsertim quum ad eos ius
et potestas huiusmodi ab apostolica
sede pervenerit, qux Romanum
imperium in persona magnifici
Caroli a Grzcis transtulit in Ger-
manos.* — ^Decr. Greg. L 6^ a^ 34*
Venerc^ilem,
^ Its inflaence, howerer, as DS-
linger {Das Kaistrthum KarU im
Grossen tind seiner Naeiffii^w)
remarks, first became gmt wkm
this letter, some forty or fifty
after Innocent wrote it, was h
in the digest of the canoo law.
1 Vid. supra, pp. 53-58.
J
FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN'.
219
before St. Ambrose, but says never a word about this
* translatio/ excellently as it would have served his
purpose.
Sound or unsound, however, these arguments did their
work, for they were urged skilfully and boldly, and none
denied that it was by the Pope alone that the crown could
be lawfully imposed k. In some instances the rights
claimed were actually made good. Thus Innocent III
withstood Philip and overthrew Otto IV; thus another
^ughty priest commanded the electors to choose the
^ndgrave of Thuringia (a.d. 1246), and was by some
of them obeyed ; thus Gregory X compelled the recogni-
^on of Rudolf. The further pretensions of the Popes
^^ the vicariate of the Empire during interregna the
Germans never admitted I Still their place was now
generally felt to be higher than that of the monarch, and
"^eir control over the three spiritual electors and the
whole body of the clergy was far more effective than his.
^ spark of national feeling was at length kindled by the
CHAP. XIII.
^ VJpon this so-called * Translation
®* tlxe Empire/ many books remain
^ Us: many more have probably
I**^lied. A good although far
"^Oa impartial summary of the
controversy may be found in Va-
S^es, Bt Ludibriis Aula Romana
" f^^nsferendo Imperio Romano,
* •Vacante imperio Romano,
c^^m in illo ad saecularem iudicem
^^ueat haberi recursus, ad sum-
^^m pontificem, cui in persona
"• I*ctri terreni simul et ccelestis
^perii iura Deus ipse commisit,
^^perii praedicti iurisdictio regi-
n^«n et dispositio devolvitur/ — Bull
S» fratrum (of John XXI, in a.d.
*Bi6), in Bullar, Rom. So again :
' MtcndcntcS quod Imperii Romani
regimen cura et administratio tem«
pore quo illud vacare contingit ad
nos pertinet, sicut dignoscitur per-
tinere.* So Boniface VIII, refusing
to recognize Albert I, because he
was ugly and one-eyed (' est homo
monoculus et vultu sordido, non
potest esse Imperatflr*), and had
taken a wife from the serpent brood
of Frederick II (*de sanguine vi-
perali Friderici'), declared himself
Vicar of the Empire, and assumed
the crown and sword of Constantine.
Pope John VIII, in the ninth cen-
tury, dated his documents during
vacancies of the imperial throne,
' imperatore domino nostro lesu
Christo,' a form not uncommon in
the Middle Ages.
220
THE IIOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIII.
exactions and shameless subservience to France of the
papal court at Avignon ^ ; and the infant democracy of
industry and intelligence represented by the cities and
by the English Franciscan Occam, supported Lewis IV
in his conflict with John XXII, till even the princes who
had risen by the help of the Pope were obliged to oppose
him. In their famous meeting at Rhense in 1338, the
electors of the Empire formally declared that the imperial
dignity was derived from God alone, that it was by thdr
choice that the sovereign obtained his right to the title of
King and Emperor, and that in consequence he did not
need to be approved or confirmed by the Apostolic chair.
The Diet held at Frankfort in the same year confirmed
this declaration, and even asserted the lawfulness of hii
assuming the imperial title before coronation by the
Pope. The same sentiment dictated the reforms of Con-
stance, but the imperial power which might have floated
onwards and higher on the turning tide of popular opmioo
lacked men equal to the occasion: the Hapsboif
Frederick the Third, timid and superstitious, abased him-
self before the Romish court, and his house has genenDf
adhered to the alliance then struck.
™ Avignon was not yet in the and pontiffs mtny of them FMdi
territory of France : it lay within by extraction sjrmpathiied, il «■
the bounds of the kingdom of natural, with princcf of thdr •*■
Aries. But the French power was race,
nearer than that of the Emperor;
CHAPTER XIV.
THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION: THE SEVEN
ELECTORS.
The reign of Frederick the Second was not less fatal
to the domestic power of the German king than to the
European supremacy of the Emperor. His two Prag-
matic Sanctions had conferred rights that made the
feudal aristocracy almost independent, and the long
anarchy of the Interregnum had enabled them not only
to use but to extend and fortify their power. Rudolf of
Hapsburg had striven, not wholly in vain, to coerce their
insolence, but the contest between his son Albert and
Adolf of Nassau which followed his death, the short and
troubled reign of Albert himself, the absence of Henry
Ac Seventh in Italy, the civil war of Lewis of Bavaria
and Frederick duke of Austria, rival claimants of the
imperial throne, the difficulties in which Lewis, the
SDCcessful competitor, found himself involved with the
Pope — all these circumstances tended more and more
to narrow the influence of the crown and complete the
emancipation of the turbulent nobles. They now became
virtually supreme in their own domains, enjoying full
jurisdiction, certain appeals excepted, the right of legis-
lation, privileges of coining money, of levying tolls and
taxes : some were without even a feudal bond to remind
tiicm of their allegiance. The numbers of the immediate
nobility — those who held directly of the crown — had
CHAP. XIV.
Territorial
Sovereignty
of the
Princes.
Adolf,
1392-1:98.
Albert /,
1 298-1308.
Henry VII,
130S-1314.
Lewis IV,
222
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV.
Policy
of the
Emperors.
increased prodigiously by the extinction of the dukedoms
of Saxony, Franconia, and Swabia : along the Rhine the
lord of a single tower was usually a sovereign prince.
The petty tyrants whose boast it was that they owed
fealty only to God and the Emperor showed themselves
in practice equally regardless of both powers. Pre-
eminent were the three great houses of Austria, Bavaria,
and Luxemburg, this last having acquired Bohemia,
A.D. 1309; next came the electors, already considered
collectively more important than the Emperor, and form-
ing for themselves the first considerable principalities.
Brandenburg and the Rhenish Palatinate are strong in-
dependent states before the end of this period; Bo-
hemia and the three archbishoprics almost from its
beginning.
The chief object of the magnates was to keep Ac
monarch in his present state of helplessness. Till Ac
expenses which the crown entailed were found ruinous
to its wearer, their practice was to confer it on some
petty prince, such as were Rudolf and Adolf of Nassra
and Gtinther of Schwartzburg, seeking when they could
to keep it from settling in one family. They bound the
newly elected to respect all their present inmiumtics»
including those which they had just extorted as the price
of their votes ; they checked all his attempts to recover
lost lands or rights : they ventured at last to depose thdr
anointed head, Wenzel of Bohemia. Thus fettered, the
Emperor sought only to make the most of his short
tenure, using his position to aggrandize his family and
raise money by the sale of crown estates and privflegei.
His individual action and personal relation to the subject
was replaced by a merely legal and formal one: he
represented order and legitimate ownership, and 80 &r
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION.
223
was still necessary to the political system. But pro-
gresses through the country were abandoned : unlike his
predecessors, who had resigned their patrimony when
Ibey assumed the sceptre, he lived mostly in his own
states, often without the Empire's bounds.
How thoroughly the national character of the office
was gone is shewn by the repeated attempts to bestow it
on foreign potentates, who could not fill the place of a
German king of the good old vigorous type. Not to
speak of Richard and Alfonso, Charles of Valois was
proposed against Henry VII, Edward III of England
actually elected against Charles IV (his parliament for-
bade him to accept), George Podiebrad, king of Bohemia,
against Frederick HI. Sigismund was virtually a Hun-
garian king. The Emperor's only hope would have been
in the support of the cities. During the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries they had increased wonderfully in
population, wealth, and boldness: the Hanseatic con-
federacy was the mightiest power of the North, and cowed
"ie Scandinavian kings : the towns of Swabia and the
Rhine formed great commercial leagues, maintained
regular wars against the counter-associations of the
nobility, and seemed at one time, by an alliance with
tne Swiss, on the point of turning West Germany into a
federation of free municipalities. Feudalism, however,
^^ still too strong; the cavalry of the nobles was
irresistible in the field, and the thoughtless Wenzel let
slip a golden opportunity of repairing the losses of two
centuries. After all, the Empire was perhaps past re-
^^emption, for one fatal ailment paralyzed all its efforts,
^e Empire was poor. The crown lands, which had
suffered heavily under Frederick II, were further usurped
during the confusion that followed ; till at last, through
CHAP. XIV.
Power of
the Cities.
Financial
distress.
224
THE IIOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV.
the reckless prodigality of sovereigns who sought only
their immediate interest, little was left of the vast and
fertile domains along the Rhine from which the Saxon
and Franconian Emperors had drawn the chief part of
their revenue. Regalian rights, the second fiscal resource,
had fared no better — tolls, customs, mines, rights of
coining, of harbouring Jews, and so forth, were either
seized or granted away : even the advowsons of churches
had been sold or mortgaged; and the imperial treasury
depended mainly on an inglorious traflSc in honours and
exemptions. Things were so bad imder Rudolf that the
electors refused to make his son Albert king of the
Romans, declaring that, while Rudolf lived, the public
revenue which with difficulty supported one monarch,
could much less maintain two at the same time*. Sigis-
mund told his Diet, * Nihil esse imperio spoliatius, nihil
egentius, adeo ut qui sibi ex Germanise principibus suc-
cessurus esset, qui praeter patrimonium nihil aliud
habuerit, apud eum non imperium sed potius servitium
sit futurum^.' Patritius, the secretary of Frederick III,
declared that the revenues of the Empire scarcely covered.
the expenses of its ambassadors «. Poverty such a^
these expressions point to, a poverty which becames
greater after each election, not only involved the failures
» Quoted by Moser, Romtscbe
Kayser, from Cbron. Hir.^aug.:
* Regni vires temporum iniuria
nimium contritae vix uni alendo
regi sufficerent, tantum abesse ut
sumptus in nutriendos duos reges
ferre queant.'
^ At Rupert's death, under
whom the miscliief had increased
greatly, there were, we are told,
many bishops better otf than the
Emperor.
<: * Proventus Imperii ita roioimh a
sunt ut legationibus viz suppetant. ... '
— Quoted by Moser. In liOg:s«
Maximilian told his Diet * Oaais
romische Reich sei jelziger Zismt
ein grosser Last und falle dain^a
kleiner Beth;' and Granvella,C3iar1c3
V's minister, said at the Diet ^
Spcyer : • The Emperor has, ftx
the support of his dignity, noft t
hazelnut's worth of piofit from
Empire.*
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION.
225
of the attempts which were sometimes made to recover
usurped rights d, but put every project of reform within or
war without at the mercy of a jealous Diet. The three
orders of which that Diet consisted, electors, princes, and
cities, were mutually hostile, and by consequence selfish ;
their niggardly grants did no more than keep the Empire
from dying of inanition.
The changes thus briefly described were in progress
when Charles the Fourth, king of Bohemia, son of that
blind king John of Bohemia who fell at Cressy, and
grandson of the Emperor Henry VII, was chosen to
ascend the throne. His skilful and consistent policy
aimed at settling what he perhaps despaired of reforming,
and the famous instrimient which, under the name of the
Goldeh Bull, became the comer-stone of the Germanic
constitution, confessed and legalized the independence of
tile electors and the powerlessness of the crown. The
^ost conspicuous defect of the existing system was the
uncertainty of the elections, followed as they usually were
W a civil war. It was this which Charles set himself to
redress.
The kingdoms founded on the ruins of the Roman
^^pire by the Teutonic invaders presented in their
original form a rude combination of the elective with the
*^^reditary principle. One family in each tribe had, as
t^e offspring of the gods, an indefeasible claim to rule,
o^t from among the members of such a family the war-
norswere free to choose the bravest or the most popular
^ tingo. That the German crown came to be purely
Albert I tried in vain to wrest the Swedish Ynglings, the Bavarian
^'^c tolls of the Rhine from the Agilolfings, may thus be compared
grasp of the Rhenish electors. with the Achjemenids of Persia or
* The ^thelings of the line of the heroic houses of early Greece,
^rdic, among the West Saxons,
CHAP. xrv.
Charles IV
(AJ). 1347-
1378), and
bis electoral
constitution.
German
kingdom not
originally
elective, .
226
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV.
Electoral
body in
primitive
times.
elective, while in France, Castile, Aragon, England, and
most other European states, the principle of strict here-
ditary succession established itself, was due to the failure
of heirs male in three successive dynasties ; to the restless
ambition of the nobles, who, since they were not, like
the French, strong enough to disregard the royal power,
did their best to weaken it; to the intrigues of tiie church-
men, zealous for a method of appointment prescribed by
their own law and observed in capitular elections ; to the
wish of the Popes to gain an opening for their own in-
fluence and make eflfective the veto which they claimed;
above all, to the conception of the imperial office as one
too holy to be, in the same manner as the regal, trans-
missible by blood. Had the German, like other feudal
kingdoms, remained merely local, feudal, and national,
it would without doubt have ended by becoming a here-
ditary monarchy. Transformed as it was by the Roman.
Empire, this could not be. The headship of the humaiiL
race being, like the Papacy, the common inheritance o^
all mankind, could not be confined to any family, nor
pass like a private estate by the ordinary rules of de-
scent.
The right to choose the war-chief belonged, in t!a.c
earliest ages, to the whole body of freemen. Their soi^
frage, which must have been very irregularly exerdsedi
became by degrees vested in their leaders, but the assent .
of the multitude, although ensured already, was needed
to complete the ceremony. It was thus that Henry tli«
Fowler, and St. Henry, and Conrad the Franconian dulc«
were chosen^. Though even tradition might have CXXD''
' Wippo, describing the elec- et Wormatiac conTCQenint cnocri
' tion of Conrad the Franconian, primates et, ut ita dicam, tti^
. says, * Inter confinia Moguiitiae et viscera regni.* So Bruno say*
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION.
227
memorated what extant records place beyond a doubt,
it was commonly believed, till the end of the sixteenth
century, that the elective constitution had been esta-
blished, and the privilege of voting confined to seven
persons, by a decree of Gregory V and Otto III, which a
famous jurist describes as * lex a pontifice de imperatorum
comitiis lata, ne ius eligendi penes populum Romanum
in posterum esset 8/ St. Thomas says, * Election ceased
from the times of Charles the Great to those of Otto III,
when Pope Gregory V established that of the seven
princes, which will last as long as the holy Roman
Church, who ranks above all other powers, shall have
judged expedient for Christ's faithful people ^.' Since it
tended to exalt the papal power, this fiction was accepted,
no doubt honestly accepted, and spread abroad by the
dergy. And indeed, like so many other fictions, it had
a sort of foundation in fact. The death of Otto III,
tlie fourth of a line of monarchs among whom son had
regularly succeeded to father, threw back the crown
^to the gift of the nation, and was no doubt one of
^e chief causes why it did not in the end become here-
ditary!.
^t Henry IV was elected by and Italians were incensed at the
™* *populus* So Amandus, se- preference shown to Germany. So
ffetary of Frederick Barbarossa, too Radulfus de Columna.
J^ describing his election, says, ^^ Quoted by Gewoldus, De Sep-
I k/^ iUustres heroes ex Lom- temviratu Sacri Imperii Romania
wdia, Tuscia, lanuensi et aliis himself a violent advocate of Gre-
**^ dominiis, ac maior et potior gory*s decree, though living as late
^ principum ex Transalpino as the days of Ferdinand II. As
jegno.'— Quoted by Mur. Antiq. late as a.d. 1648 we find Pope
^' iii. And see many other Innocent X maintaining that the
J^orities to the same effect, col- sacred number Seven of the electors
^^ by Pfeffinger, Vitriarius was * apostolica auctoritate olim
**'«fra/w. praefinitus.' — Bull Zelo Domus in
' Alciatus, De Formula Romani Bullar. Rom.
^ptrti. He adds that the Gauls ^ Sometimes we hear of a decree
Q 2
CHAP. XIV.
228
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIT.
Encroach'
ments of the
great nobles.
Thus, under the Saxon and Franconian sovereigns, the
throne was theoretically elective, the assent of the chiefs
and their followers being required, though little more
likely to be refused than it was to an English or a French
king ; practically hereditary, since both of these d3masties
succeeded in occupying it for four generations, the father
procuring the son's election during his own lifetime.
And so it might well have continued, had the right of
choice been retained by the whole body of the aristocracy.
But at the election of Lothar II, a.d. 1125, we find a
certain small number of magnates exercising the so-called
right of praetaxation ; that is to say, choosing alone the
future monarch, and then submitting him to the rest for
their approval. A supreme electoral college, once formed,
had both the will and the power to retain the crown in.
their own gift, and still further exclude their inferiors
from participation. So before the end of the Hohen-
staufen dynasty, two great changes had passed upon
the ancient constitution. It had become a fiindamentsd
doctrine that the Germanic throne, unlike the throats
of other countries, was purely elective ^i nor could
influence and the liberal oflfers of Henry VI prevail
the princes to abandon what they rightly judged the
stone of their powers. And at the same time the
of praetaxation had ripened into an exclusive privilege <^
made by Pope Sergins IV and his tur ut non per saogniDts pr^X**
cardinals (of course eqnally fabulous ginem sed per principom ^&^*
with Otto's). So John Villani, tionem reges creentur.' — Otto _ *
iv. 2. Freysing. Gulielmus Brito, writi*'
^ In 1 152 we read, * Id iuris not much later, says (quoted ^.
Romani Imperii apex habere dici- Freher), —
'Est etenim talis d3rnastia Theutonicorum
Ut nullus regnet super illos, ni prius ilhun
EUgat unanimis cleri populique Toluntaib'
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION.
229
election, vested in a small body l : the assent of the rest
of the nobility being at first assumed, finally altogether
dispensed with. On the double choice of Richard and
Alfonso, A..D. 1257, the only question was as to the
majority of votes in the electoral college: neither then
nor afterwards was there a word of the rights of the other
princes, counts and barons, important as their voices had
been two centuries earlier.
The origin of that college is a matter somewhat in-
tricate and obscure. It is mentioned a.d. 1152, and in
somewhat clearer terms in 1 198, as a distinct body; but
without anything to shew who composed it. First in
A.D. 1:563 does a letter of Pope Urban IV say that by
immemorial custom the right of choosing the Roman
king belonged to seven persons, the seven who had just
divided their votes on Richard of Cornwall and Alfonso
of Castile. Of these seven, three, the archbishops of
Mentz, Treves, and Cologne, pastors of the richest Trans-
alpine sees, represented the German church: the other
four ought, according to the ancient constitution, to have
been the dukes of the four nations, Franks, Swabians,
Saxons, Bavarians, to whom had also belonged the four
great oflSces of the imperial household. But of these
dukedoms the two first named were now extinct, and
their place and power in the state, as well as the house-
hold oflQces they had held, had descended upon two
principalities of more recent origin, those, namely, of the
Palatinate of the Rhine and the Margraviate of Branden-
b^g. The Saxon duke, though with greatly narrowed
dominions, retained his vote and office of arch-marshal,
aiid the claim of his Bavarian compeer would have been
* Innocent III, during the con- speaks of * principes ad quos princi-
^t between Philip and Otto IV, paliter spectat regis Romani electio.'
CHAP. XIV.
The Seven
Electors.
230
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV,
Golden
Bull of
Charles IV,
A.D. 1356.
equally indisputable had it not so happened that both he
and the Palsgrave of the Rhine were members of the
great house of Wittelsbach. This house had acquired
the dukedom of Bavaria in 11 80 and the Palatinate,
which represented the vote of the extinct dukedom of
Lorraine, in 12 14; but as both dignities were united
in one person, no difficulty arose until the death of
duke Otto the Illustrious in 1253. When his sons
shared his dominions, Lewis becoming Palsgrave, and
Henry duke of Bavaria, nothing was settled as to the
vote and other rights of an elector, and before long both
sons claimed these, and both with apparently reasonable
grounds. The number seven had now, however, become
recognized as sacred : the king of Bohemia ™ would not
relinquish the place which he laid claim to as cupbearer;
and the other electors were unwilling to see two votes
enjoyed by one family. Thus a contest, which more
than once nearly led to war, arose between the rival lines
of Wittelsbach, and between the Bavarian line (whose
title was thought the weaker of the two) and the king of
Bohemia. Rudolf, who in 1289 pronounced in favour of
Bohemia, and Lewis IV, who directed that the vote
should be exercised by the two lines alternately, in vain
attempted to settle it, nor was it laid to rest until the
issuing and confirming, at the Diet of Ntimberg and Meti ^
in 1356, of Charles IV's Golden Bull. This instrument, ^
thenceforth regarded as a fundamental law of the Empire,^ -
^ The claim of the King of properly German. * Rez BdiemicsE
Bohemia seems to have been made qui pncema est non eligit quia Doc:^«
technically in respect of his office est Teutonicus ' (Albert. Stadfs
of cup-bearer, practically because aj). i 240. So the SaebserupiegdKL:^
he was the equal in power and * Die schenke des rikes die koaiD .^^
rank of any of the other electors, von behemen, die ne heuet
It was disputed partly on the kore, umme dat be nicht dttc
ground that his kuigdom was not nis.*
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION
231
after finally assigning the disputed vote and office of cup-
bearer to Bohemia (of which Charles was then king) pro-
ceeds to lay down a variety of rules for the conduct of
imperial elections. Frankfort is fixed as the place of
election ; the archbishop of Mentz named convener of
the electoral college; to Bohemia is given the first, to
the Count Palatine the second place among the secular
electors. A majority of votes was in all cases to
be decisive. As to each electorate there was attached a
great office, it was supposed that this was the title by
which the vote was possessed; though it was in truth
rather an effect than a cause. The three prelates were
archchancellors of Germany, Gaul and Burgundy, and Italy
respectively : Bohemia cupbearer, the Palsgrave seneschal.
Saxony marshal, and Brandenburg chamberlain^^.
o The names and offices of the of Marsilius of Padua, Dt Imperio
seven are concisely given in these Romano: —
lines, which appear in the treatise
• Moguntinensis, Trevirensis, Coloniensis,
Quilibet imperii sit Cancellarius horum;
£t Palatinus dapifer, Dux portitor cnsis,
Marchio praepositus camerae, pincema Bohemus,
Hi statuunt dominum cunctis per saecula summum.'
It is worth while to place beside in which the coronation feast of
^his the first stanza of Schiller's Rudolf is described ;
ballad, Der Graf von Hapsburg,
*Zu Aachen in seiner Kaiserpracht
Im alterthiimlichen Saale,
Sass Konig Rudolphs heilige Macht
Beim festlichen Kronungsmahle.
Die Speisen trug der Pfalzgraf des Rheins,
Es schenkte der Bohme des perlenden Weins,
Und alle die Wahler, die sieben,
Wie der Sterne Chor um die Sonne sich stellt,
Umstanden geschaftig den Herrscher der Welt,
Die Wiirde des Amtes zu iiben.*
Xt is a poetical licence, however (as was far away at home, mortified
Schiller himselfadmits), to bring the at his own rejection, and already
Hohemian there, for King Ottac^r meditating war.
CHAP. xiv.
232
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. ZIV.
Eighth
Electorate.
Ninth
Electorate.
These arrangements, under which disputed elections
became far less frequent, remained undisturbed till the
breaking out of the Thirty Years' War, when the Emperor
Ferdinand II by an unwarranted stretch of prerogative
deprived (in 1621) the Palsgrave Frederick (king of
Bohemia and husband of Elizabeth, the daughter of
James I of England) of his electoral vote, and transferred
it (1623) to his own partisan, Maximilian of Bavaria. At
the peace of Westphalia the Palsgrave was reinstated as
eighth elector, Bavaria retaining her vote and rank, but
with a provision that if the Bavarian branch of the house
of Wittelsbach should come to an end, the Palsgrave
should step into its place, which accordingly happened on
the extinction of the Bavarian line in 1777. The sacred
number having been once broken through, less scruple
was felt in making further changes. In a.d. 1692, the
Emperor Leopold I conferred a ninth electorate on the
house of Brunswick-Ltineburg which was then in posses-
sion of the duchy of Hanover, and succeeded to the
throne of Great Britain in 17 14; and in a.d. 1708, the
assent of the Diet thereto was obtained. It was in this
way that English kings came to vote at the election of a
Roman Emperor.
It is not a litde curious that the only potentate who
continued down to our own days actually to entide
himself Elector o should be one who never joined in
o The electoral prince (Kurfurst)
of Hessen-Cassel. His retention of
the title had this advantage, that
it enabled the Germans readily to
distinguish electoral Hesse (Kur-
Hes-sen) from the Grand Duchy
(Hessen-Darmstadt) and the land-
graviate (Hessen-Homburg.) This
last relic of the electoral system passed
away in 1866, when the elector of
Hessen was dethroned, and his ter-
ritories (to the great tatisfactioa
of the inhabitants, whom he had
worried by a long course of petty
tyrannies) annexed to the Prussian
kingdom, along with Hanover,
Nassau, and the free city of Frank-
fort.
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION.
233
electing an Emperor^ having been under the arrange-
ments of the old Empire a simple Landgrave. In
A.D. 1803, Napoleon, among other sweeping changes
in the Germanic constitution, procured the extinction of
the electorates of Cologne and Treves, annexing their
territories to France, and gave the title of Elector, as the
highest after that of king, to the Duke of Wtirtemberg,-
the Margrave of Baden, the Landgrave of Hessen-Cassel,
and the archbishop of SalzburgP. Three years afterwards
the Empire itself ended, and the title became meaning-
less.
As the Germanic Empire is the most conspicuous ex-
ample of a monarchy not hereditary that the world has
ever seen, it may not be amiss to consider for a moment
what light its history throws upon the character of elective
monarchy in general, a contrivance which has always had,
and will probably always continue to have, seductions for
a certain class of political theorists.
First of all then it deserves to be noticed how difficult,
one might almost say impossible, it was found to maintain
in practice the elective principle. In point of law, the
imperial throne was from the tenth century to the nine-
teenth absolutely open to any orthodox Christian candi-
date. But as a matter of fact, the competition was
confined to a few very powerful families, and there was
always a strong tendency for the crown to become
hereditary in some one of these. Thus the Franconian
Emperors held it from a.d. 1024 till 11 25, the Hohen-
staufen, themselves the heirs of the Franconians, for a
P France having annexed the for the archbishopric of Salzburg
whole left bank of the Rhine, the had been secularized for the arch-
ardiicpiscopal chair of Mentz was duke Ferdinand of Austria, in order
transferred to Regensburg. It was to compensate him for the loss of
DOW the only spiritual electorate, Tuscany.
CHAP. XIV.
Objects of
an elective
monarchy :
bow far
attained in
Germany.
Choice of
thefitte&t.
1
234
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV.
Restraint
of the
sovereign.
Reeogni"
tion of tie
popular
will.
century or more; the house of Luxemburg (kings of
Bohemia) enjoyed it through three successive reigns, and
when in the fifteenth century it fell into the tenacious
grasp of the Hapsburgs, they managed to retain it thence-
forth (with but one trifling interruption) till it vanished
out of nature altogether. Therefore the chief benefit
which the scheme of elective sovereignty seems to
promise, that of putting the fittest man in the highest
place, was but seldom attained, and attained even then
rather by good fortune than design.
No such objection can be brought against the second
ground on which an elective system has sometimes been
advocated, its operation in moderating the power of the
crown, for this was attained in the fullest and most ruin-
ous measure. We are reminded of the man in the &ble,
who opened a sluice to water his garden, and saw his
house swept away by the furious torrent The power of
the crown was not moderated but destroyed. Each suc-
cessful candidate was forced to purchase his title by the
sacrifice of rights which had belonged to his predece8S0il»
and must repeat the same shameful policy later in hb
reign to procure the election of his son. Feeling at the
same time that his family could not make sure of keqmV
the throne, he treated it as a life-tenant is apt to treat bb
estate, seeking only to make out of it the largest preseni
profit. And the electors, aware of the strength of tbdr
position, presumed upon it and abused it to assert an in-
dependence such as the nobles of other countries oookl
never have aspired to.
Modern political speculation supposes the method of
appointing a ruler by the votes of his subjects, as opposed
to the system of hereditary succession, to be an assertioi
by the people of their own will as the ultimate fountain of
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION,
235
authority, an acknowledgment by the prince that he is no
more than their minister and deputy. To the theory of
the Holy Empire nothing could be more repugnant. This
will best appear when the aspect of the system of election
at diflferent epochs in its history is compared with the
corresponding changes in the composition of the electoral
body which have been described as in progress from the
nintii to the fourteenth century. In very eariy times, the
tribe chose a war chief, who was, even if he belonged to
the most noble family, no more than the first among his
peers, with a power circumscribed by the will of his sub-
jects. Several ages later, in the tenth and eleventh cen-
turies, the right of choice had passed into the hands of the
magnates, and the people were only asked to assent. In
the same measure had the relation of prince and subject
taken a new aspect. We must not expect to find, in such
rude times, any very clear apprehension of the technical
quality of the process, and the throne had indeed become
for a season so nearly hereditary that the election was
often a mere matter of form. But it seems to have been
regarded, not as a delegation of authority by the nobles
and people, with a power of resumption implied, but
rather as their subjection of themselves to the monarch
who enjoys, as of his own right, a wide and ill-defined
prerogative. In yet later times, when, as has been shewn
above, the assembly of the chieftains and the applauding
shout of the host had been superseded by the secret
conclave of the seven electoral princes, the strict legal
view of election became fully established, and no one
was supposed to have any title to the crown except what
a majority of votes might confer upon him. Meantime,
however, the conception of the imperial office itself had
been thoroughly penetrated by religious ideas, and the
CHAP. XIF.
236
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIV.
Conception
of the
electoral
function.
General
results of
Charles
IV*s policy.
fact that the sovereign did not, like other princes, reign
by hereditary right, but by the choice of certain persons,
was supposed to be an enhancement and consecration of
his dignity. The electors, to draw what may seem a
subtle, but is nevertheless a very real distinction, selected,
but did not create. They only named the person who
was to receive what it was not theirs to give. God, say
the mediaeval writers, not deigning to interfere visibly in
the affairs of this world, has willed that these seven
princes of Germany should discharge the function which
once belonged to the senate and people of Rome, that of
choosing his earthly viceroy in matters temporal But it
is immediately from Himself that the authority, of this
viceroy comes, and men can have no relation towards
him except that of obedience. It was in this period,
therefore, when the Emperor was in practice the mere
nominee of the electors, that the belief in his divine right
stood highest, to the complete exclusion of the mutual
responsibility of feudalism, and still more of any notion
of a devolution of authority from the sovereign people.
Peace and order appeared to be promoted by the
institutions of Charles IV, which removed one fruitfiil
cause of civil war. But these seven electoral princes
acquired, with their extended privileges, a marked and
dangerous predominance in Germany. They had once
already in their famous meeting at RhenseQ in 1338,
acted as an independent body, repudiating in the name
4 Rhense is a hamlet on the left
bank of the Rhine, some four or five
miles above Coblentz. A little way
north of it, and on the very shore,
between the stream and the railway,
stands, half hidden by walnut-trees,
the so-called Konigsstuhl, a modern
restoration of the building erected
by Charles IV in 1376 for the meet-
ings of the electors, who from loog
time past had been woot to a^
semblehere. It was the point when
the territories of the four Rheniih
electors touched one another. Here
several imperial electkxu wtn
made : the last, Rupert's, in 140a
CHANGES IN THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION
337
of the nation the extravagant claims of the Pope, and
declaring that it was by their election alone that the
Emperor acquired his rights. The position which
they had then assimied in a heartily patriotic spirit,
was now legalized and made permanent They were to
enjoy full regalian rights in their territories ^ ; causes were
not to be evoked from their courts, save when justice
should have been denied : their consent was necessary to
all public acts of consequence. Their persons were held
to be sacred, and the seven mystic luminaries of the Holy
Empire, typified by the seven lamps of the Apocalypse,
soon gained much of the Emperor's hold on popular
reverence, as well as that actual power which he lacked.
To Charles, who viewed the German Empire much as
Rudolf had viewed the Roman, this result came not
unforeseen. He saw in his office a means of serving
personal ends, and to them, while appearing to exalt by
elaborate ceremonies its ideal dignity, he deliberately
sacrificed what real strength was left. The object which
he sought steadily through life was the prosperity of the
Bohemian kingdom, and the advancement of his own
house. In the Golden Bull, whose seal bears the legend, —
*Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi'/
there is not a word of Rome or of Italy. To Germany
» Goethe, whose imagination of the great offices and the territo-
was wonderfully attracted bv the rial independence of the German
^kndours of the old Empire, has princes. Two lines express con-
giren in the second part of FauU cisely the fiscal rights granted by
a sort of fancy sketch of the origin the Emperor to the electors : —
' Dann Steuer Zins und Beed', Lehn und Geleit und iSoU,
Berg- Salz- und Miinz-regal euch angehoren soil.'
Maximilian said of Charles IV : ■ This line is said to be as old as
' Carolo quarto pestilentior pestis the time of Otto IIL
nunquam alias contigit Germaniae/
CHAP. XIV.
238
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. nv.
he was indirectly a benefactor, by the foundation of tl
University of Prague, the mother of all her schools
otherwise her bane. He legalized anarchy, and called
a constitution. The sums expended in obtaining tl
ratification of the Golden Bull, in procuring the electic
of his son Wenzel, in aggrandizing Bohemia at the e;
pense of Germany, had been amassed by keeping
market in which honours and exemptions, with wh
lands the crown retained, were put up openly to be b
for. In Italy the Ghibelines saw, with shame and rag
their chief hasten to Rome with a scanty retinue, ai
return from it as swiftly, at the mandate of an Avignone
Pope, halting on his route only to traffic away the la
rights of his Empire. The Guelf might cease to hate
power he could now despise.
Thus, alike at home and abroad, the German king lu
become practically powerless by the loss of his feud
privileges, and saw the authority that had once been fa
parcelled out among a crowd of greedy and t}Tannic
nobles. Meantime how had it fared with the righ
which he claimed by virtue of the Imperial crown?
CHAPTER XV.
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
That the Roman Empire survived the seemingly
mortal wound it had received at the era of the Great
Interregnum, and continued to put forth pretensions
which no one was likely to make good where the
Hohenstaufen had failed, has been attributed to its
identification with the German kingdom, in which some
life was still left. But this was far from being the only
cause which saved it from extinction. It had not ceased
to be upheld in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by
the same singular theory which had in the ninth and
tenth been strong enough to re-establish it in the West.
The character of that theory was indeed somewhat
changed, for if not positively less religious, it was less
exclusively so. In the days of Charles and Otto, the
Empire, in so far as it was anything more than a tradition
from times gone by, rested solely upon the belief that
with the visible Church there must be coextensive a
single Christian state under one head and governor. But
now that the Emperor's headship had been repudiated by
the Pope, and his interference in matters of religion de-
nounced as a repetition of the sin of Uzziah; now that
the memory of mutual injuries had kindled an unquench-
able hatred between the champions of the ecclesiastical
and those of the civil power, it was natural that the latter,
CHAP. XV.
Theory of
the Roman
Empire in
the four'
teentb and
fifteenth
centuries.
240
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
while they urged, fervently as ever, the divine sanction
given to the imperial ofl5ce, should at the same time be
led to seek some further basis whereon to establish its
claims. What that basis was, and how they were g^ded
to it, will best appear when a word or two has been said
on the nature of the change that had passed on Europe in
the course of the three preceding centuries, and the pro-
gress of the human mind during the same period.
Such has been the accumulated wealth of literature,
and so rapid the advances of science among us since the
close of the Middle Ages, that it is not now possible by
any effort fully to enter into the feelings with which the
relics of antiquity were regarded by those who saw in
them their only possession. It is indeed true that modem
art and literature and philosophy have been produced by
the working of new minds upon old materials: that in
thought, as in nature, we see no new creation. But with
us the old has been transformed and overlaid by the new
till its origin is forgotten: to them ancient books were
the only standard of taste, the only vehicle of truth, the
only stimulus to reflection. Hence it was that the most
learned man was in those days esteemed the greatest:
hence the creative energy of an age was exactly pro-
portioned to its knowledge of and its reverence for the
written monuments of those that had gone before. For
until they can look forward, men must look back : till
they should have reached the level of the old civilization,
the nations of mediaeval Europe must continue to Kfe
upon its memories. Over them, as over us, the common
dream of all mankind had power; but to them, as to
the ancient world, that golden age which seems now to
glimmer on the horizon of the future was shrouded in
ihe clouds of the past. It is to the fifteenth and sixteendi
I
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
241
centuries that we are accustomed to assign that new birth
of the human spirit — if it ought not rather to be called
a renewal of its strength and quickening of its sluggish
life — ^with which the modem time begins. And the date
is well chosen, for it was then first that the transcendentiy
powerful influence of Greek literature began to work upon
the world But it must not be forgotten that for a long
time previous there had been in progress a great revival
of learning, and still more of zeal for learning, which
being caused by and directed towards the literature and
institutions of Rome, might fidy be called the Roman
Renaissance. The twelfth century saw this revival begin
with that passionate study of the legislation of Justinian,
whose influence on the doctrines of imperial prerogative
has been noticed aheady. The thirteenth witnessed the
rapid spread of the scholastic philosophy, a body of
systems most alien, both in subject and manner, to any-
thing that had arisen among the ancients, yet one to
whose development Greek metaphysics and the theology
of the Latin fathers had largely contributed, and the spirit
of whose reasonings was far more free than the presumed
orthodoxy of its conclusions sufl'ered to appear. In the
fourteenth century there arose in Italy the first great
masters of painting and song; and the literature of the
new languages, springing into the fubess of life in the
Divina Commedia, adorned not long after by the names
of Petrarch and Chaucer, assumed at once its place as
a great and ever-growing power in the affairs of men.
Now, along with the literary revival, partly caused by,
partly causing it, there had been also a wonderful stirring
and uprising in the mind of Europe. The yoke of
church authority still pressed heavily on the souls of men;
yet some had been found to shake it off, and many more
CHAP. XV.
Revival of
learning
and litera-
ture, A.D.
1 100-1400.
Growing
freedom of
spirit.
243
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
Influence
(jf thought
upon the
arrange'
ments of
society.
murmured in secret. The tendency was one which
shewed itself in various and sometimes apparently oppo-
site directions. The revolt of the Albigenses, the spread
of the Cathari and other so-called heretics, the excitement
created by the writings of Wickliffe and Huss, witnessed
to the fearlessness wherewith it could assail the dominant
theology. It was present, however skilfully disguised,
among those scholastic doctors who busied themselves
with proving by natural reason the dogmas of the Church:
for the power which can forge fetters can also break
them. It took a form more dangerous because of a more
direct application to facts, in the attacks, so often repeated
from Arnold of Brescia downwards, upon the wealth and
corruptions of the clergy, and above all of the papal
court. For the agitation was not merely specuhtive.
There was beginning to be a direct and rational interest
in life, a power of applying thought to practical end%
which had not been seen before. Man's life among \k
fellows was no longer a mere wild beast struggle ; man's
soul no more, as it had been, the victim of ungovemed
passion, whether it was awed by supernatural teirors or
captivated by examples of surpassing holiness. Mannen
were still rude, and governments unsettled; but sodeQr
was learning to organize itself upon fixed principles; to
recognize, however faintly, the value of order, indmtiyf
equdity; to adapt means to ends, and conceive of the
common good as the proper end of its own existence.
In a word, Politics had begun to exist, and with dia»
there had appeared the first of a class of persons whois
friends and enemies may both, though with diffcmt
meanings, call ideal politicians; men who, hovewr
various have been the doctrines they have held, howcw
impracticable many of the plans they have advanced, tawe
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
243
been nevertheless alike in their devotion to the highest
interests of humanity, and have frequently been derided
as theorists in their own age to be honoured as the pro-
phets and teachers of the next.
Now it was towards the Roman Empire that the hopes
and sympathies of these political speculators as well as of
the jurists and poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centu-
ries were constantiy directed. The cause may be gathered
from the circumstances of the time. The most remark-
able event in the history of the last three hundred years
had been the formation of nationalities, each distinguished
by a peculiar language and character, and by steadily
increasing differences of habits and institutions. And as
upon this national basis there had been in most cases
established strong monarchies, Europe was broken up
into disconnected bodies, and the cherished scheme of
a united Christian state appeared less likely than ever to
he realized. Nor was this all. Sometimes through race-
hatred, more often by the jealousy and ambition of their
sovereigns, these countries were constantly involved in
'^ with one another, violating on a larger scale and with
Dttore destructive results than in time past the peace of
^e religious community ; while each of them was at the
same time torn within by frequent insurrections, and
<iesolated by long and bloody civil wars. The new
tonalities were too fully formed to allow the hope that
^y their extinction a remedy might be applied to these
evils. They had grown up in spite of the Empire and
^e Church, and were not likely to yield in their strength
^liat they had won in their weakness. But it still appeared
possible to soften, if not to overcome, their antagonism,
^at might not be looked for from the erection of a pre-
siding power common to all Europe, a power which, while it
R 2
CHAP. XV.
Separation
of ibe peo-
ples of Eu-
rope into
hostile
kingdoms :
consequent
need 0/ an
intema-
tioncd
power*
244
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XY.
The Popes
as inter-
national
Judges.
should oversee the internal concerns of each country, not de-
throning the king, but treating him as an hereditary viceroy,
should be more especially charged to prevent strife between
kingdoms, and to maintain the public order of Europe by
being not only the fountain of international law, but also
the judge in its causes and the enforcer of its sentences ?
To such a position had the Popes aspired. They were
indeed excellently fitted for it by the respect which the
sacredness of their office commanded ; by their control of
the tremendous weapons of excommunication and inter-
dict ; above all, by their exemption from those narrowii^
influences of place, or blood, or personal interest, which it
would be their chiefest duty to resist in others. And there
had been pontiffs whose fearlessness and justice were
worthy of their exalted office, and whose interference was
gratefully remembered by those who found no other
helpers. Nevertheless, judging the Papacy by its conduct
as a whole, it had been tried and found wanting. Even
when its throne stood firmest and its purposes were molt
pure, one motive had always biassed its decisions— •
partiality to the most submissive. Dtuing the greater
part of the fourteenth century it was at Avigncm the
willing tool of France : in the pursuit of a temporal prs-
cipality it had mingled in and been contaminated by the
unhallowed politics of Italy; its supreme council, the
college of cardinals, was distracted by the intrigues of tiO
bitterly hostile factions. And while the power of the
Popes had declined steadily, though silently, since the
days of Boniface the Eighth, the insolence of the gieit
prelates and the vices of the inferior clergy had provoked
throughout Western Christendom a reaction against the
pretensions of all sacerdotal authority. As there ii no
theory at first sight more attractive than that whidi
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
24s
entrusts all government to a supreme spiritual power,
which, knowing what is best for man, shall lead him to
his true good by appealing to the highest principles of his
nature, so there is no disappointment more bitter than
that of those who find that the holiest ofiice may be
polluted by the lusts and passions of its holder ; that craft
and hypocrisy lead while fanaticism follows; that here
too, as in so much else, the corruption of the best is worst
Some such disappointment there was in Europe now,
and with it a certain disposition to look with favour on
the secular power : a wish to escape from the unhealthy
atmosphere of clerical despotism to the rule of positive
law, harsher, it might be, yet surely less corrupting.
Espousing the cause of the Roman Empire as the chief
opponent of priestly claims, this tendency found it, with
shrunken territory and diminished resources, fitter in some
respects for the office of an international judge and
mediator than it had been as a great national power.
For though far less widely active, it was losing that local
character which was fast gathering round the Papacy.
With feudal rights no longer enforcible, and removed, ex-
^Pt in his patrimonial lands, from direct contact with the
object, the Emperor was not, as heretofore, conspicu-
ously a German and a feudal king, and occupied an ideal
position far less marred by the incongruous accidents of
0"th and training, of national and dynastic interests.
To that position three cardinal duties were attached,
"c who held it must typify spiritual unity, must preserve
P^^ce, must be a fountain of that by which alone among
Imperfect men peace is preserved and restored, law and
justice. The first of these three objects was sought not
only on religious grounds, but also from that longing for
^ wider brotherhood of humanity towards which, ever
CHAP. XV.
Duties at-
tributed to
the Empire,
246
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
since the barrier between Jew and Gentile, Greek and
barbarian, was broken down, the aspirations of the higher
minds of the worid have been constantly directed. Placed
in the midst of Europe, the Emperor was to bind its tribes
into one body, reminding them of their common faith,
their common blood, their common interest in each other^s
welfare. And he was therefore above all things, pro-
fessing indeed to be upon earth the representative of the
Prince of Peace, bound to listen to complaints, and to
redress the injuries inflicted by sovereigns or peoples upon
each other ; to punish oflfenders against the public order
of Christendom ; to maintain through the world, looking
down as from a serene height upon the schemes and
quarrels of meaner potentates, that supreme good without
which neither arts nor letters, nor the gentler virtues of
life, can rise and flourish. The mediaeval Empire was in
its essence what the modem despotisms that mimic it
profess themselves: the Empire was peace*: the oldest
and noblest title of its head was * Imperator pacificus^'
* Sec esp. ^gidi, Ber Fursten-
ratb nacb dent Luneviller Frieden,
and the passages by him quoted.
^ The archbishop of Mentz ad-
dresses Conrad II on his election
thus : ' Deus quum a te muha
requirat turn hoc potissimum de-
siderat ut facias iudicium et iusti-
tiam et pacem patriae quae respicit
ad te, ut sis defensor ecclesiarum et
clericorum, tutor viduarum et orpha-
norum.' — Wipo, Vita Chuonradi,
c. 3, ap. Pertz. So Pope Urban IV
writes to Richard: *Ut Imperii Ro-
mani fastigium et eius culmen prae-
sidens specialis advocati et defensoris
prsBcipui circa ecclesiam gerat offi-
cium et . . . inimicis constematis
eiusdem in pacis pulchritudine se-
deat populus Christiaims et rcqrie
opulenta quiescat.' — Raynald. Am,
Eccl. ad ann. 1 363.
Compare also the ' Edictmn de
crimine Isbssb maiestatis ' issued hf
Henrj VII in Italy: « Ad reprimaidi
multorum facinora qui ruptii f>
tins debitae fidelitatis haboiii ad-
versus Romannm imperimn, in CMi
tranquillitate totius orbis regukritM
requiescit, hostili animo armati OQt-
entur nedum humana, Temm eliiB
divina prtecepta, quibus iobetiin|Mrf
omnis anima Romanorom priacipi
sit subiecta, scelestisstmit haaoO'
bus et rebellionibus demoliri,* ft&^
Pertz, M. G, H., legg. ii. p. 544.
See also a curious passage in tbe
Life of St Adalbert, deschbii^ tbc
I
TE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
247
I that he might be the peacemaker, he must be the
)under of justice and the author of its concrete
odiment, positive law ; chief legislator and supreme
:e of appeal, like his predecessor, the compiler of the
pus luris, the one and only source of all legitimate
ority. In this sense, as governor and administrator,
as owner, is he, ia the words of the jurists. Lord of
world ; not that its soil belongs to him in the same
e in which the soil of France or England belongs to
r respective kings : he is the steward of Him who has
ived the heathen for his possession and the uttermost
s of the earth for his inheritance. It is, therefore, by
alone that the idea of pure right, acquired not by force
by legitimate devolution from those whom God him-
had set up, is visibly expressed upon earth. To find
external and positive basis for that idea is a problem
ch it has at all times been more easy to evade than to
e, and one peculiarly distressing to those who could
her explain the phenomena of society by reducing it
ts original principles, nor inquire historically how its
;ting arrangements had grown up. Hence the attempt
represent human government as an emanation from
ne: a view from which all the similar but far less
cally consistent doctrines of divine right which have
i^ailed in later times are borrowed. As has been said
ady, there is not a trace of the notion that the Emperor
ns by an hereditary right of his own or by the will of
people, for such a theory would have seemed to the
1 of the middle ages an absurd and wicked perversion
he true order. Nor do his powers come to him from
>e who choose him, but from God, who uses the
aning of the reign at Rome of civitatis : cum afflicto paupere ex-
Smperor Otto III, and his cousin ultant agmina viduarum, quia novus
nominee Pope Gregory V : imperator dat iura populis ; dat
tantur cum primatibus minores iura novus papa.'
CHAP. XV.
Divine
right of tbi
Emperor.
246
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
electoral princes as mere instruments of nomination. Having
such an origin, his rights exist irrespective of their actual
exercise, and no voluntary abandonment, not even an ex-
press grant, can impair them. Boniface the Eighth^ reminds
the king of France, and imperialist lawyers till the seven-
teenth century repeated the claim, that he, like other princes,
is of right and must ever remain subject to the Roman Em-
peror. And the sovereigns of Europe long continued to
address the Emperor in language, and yield to him a preced-
ence, which admitted the inferiority of their own position^.
There was in this theory nothing that was absurd,
though much that was impracticable. The ideas on which
it rested are still unapproached in grandeur and simplicity,
still as far in advance of the average thought of Eurqpe,
: and as unlikely to find men or nations fit to apply them,
\ as when they were promulgated five hundred years ago.
j The practical evil which the establishment of such a
universal monarchy was intended to meet, that of wars
and hardly less ruinous preparations for war between the
^ 'Vicarius lesu Christi et succes- ^ So Alfonso, king of Napki»
sor Petri transtulit potestatem imperii writes to Frederick III : * Not tfl§%
a Grascis in Germ anosutipsi German! omnes debemus reTereatiam Ib-
. . . possint eligere regem Roma- peratori, tanquam summo legii ^
norum qui est promovendus in Impe- est Caput ex Dux regum.' — (^olc4
ratorem et monarcham omnium re- by PfefEnger, i. 379. AodFnuidil
gum et principum terrenonim. Nee (of France), speaking of a prop0ie4
insurgat superbia Gallicoram quae di- combined expedition against thi
cat quod non recognoscit superio- Turks, says, 'Caesari nihiloiirfMl
rem : mentiuntur, quia de iure sunt principem ea in expeditioQe looMl
et esse debent sub rege Romanorum non gravarer ex officio cederfr*"
et Imperatore.' — Speech of Boniface Marquard Freher, Script rer. GeflB-
VIII, April 30, 1303 — Pfeffinger, iii. 425. For a long time no Eofo-
Corp. iur. publ. i. 377. It is curious pean sovereign saye the Empevoc
to compare with this the words ad- ventured to use the title of 'lb'
dressed nearly five centuries earlier jesty.' The imperial chanoeiy OQt-
by Pope John VIII to Lewis, king of ceded it in 1633 to the kiop of
Bavaria : * Si sumpseritis Romanum England and Sweden ; in 164I t*
imperium, omnia regna vobis sub- the king of France.^Zedler, Vwh
iecta existent.' — Jafi^, Reg. Pont, vtr&al Lexicon, t. y. Bilajestit
p. 281.
J
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
249
States of Europe, remains what it was then. The remedy
which mediaeval theory proposed has been in some
measure applied by the construction and reception of
international law; the greater difficulty of erecting a
tribunal to arbitrate and decide, with* the power of en-
forcing its decisions, is as far from a solution as ever.
It is easy to see how it was to the Roman Emperor,
and to him only, that the duties and privileges above
mentioned could be attributed. Being Roman, he was
of no nation, and therefore fittest to judge between con-
tending states, and appease the animosities of race. His
was the imperial tongue of Rome, not only the vehicle of
religion and law, but also, since no other was understood
everywhere in Europe, the necessary medium of diplo-
matic intercourse. As there was no Church but the Holy
Roman Church, and he its temporal head, it was by him
that the communion of the saints in its outward form, its
secular side, was represented, and to his keeping that the
sanctity of peace must be entrusted. As direct heir of
those who from Julius to Justinian had shaped the existing
aw of Europe «, he was, so to speak, legality personified^;
^e only sovereign on earth who, being possessed of
ower by an unimpeachable tide, could by his grant con-
^ upon others rights equally valid. And as he claimed
perpetuate the greatest political system the world had
^wn, a system which still moves the wonder of those
) see before their eyes empires as much wider than the
lan as they are less symmetrical, and whose vast and
olex machinery far surpassed anything the fourteenth
CHAP. XA
>r with the progress of so-
ld the growth of commerce
feudal customs were through
ter part of Western Europe,
^cially in Germany, either
ay to or being remodelled
and supplemented by the civil law.
' * Imperator est animata lex in
terris.* — Quoted by Von Raumer,
v. 81, from a letter of the bishop*
of Salzburg and Regensburg to
Pope Gregory IX.
Roman
Empire
why an in-
temational
power.
250
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XV,
lllustra-
tions.
Right of
creating
Kings.
century possessed or could hope to establish, it was not
strange that he and his government (assuming them to
be what they were entitled to be) should be taken as the
ideal of a perfect nionarch and a perfect state.
Of the many applications and illustrations of these doc-
trines which mediaeval documents furnish, it will suffice to
adduce two or three. No imperial privilege was prized
more highly than the power of creating kings, for there
was none which raised the Emperor so much above them.
In this, as in other international concerns, the Pope
soon began to claim a jurisdiction, at first concurrent,
then separate and independent. But the older and more
reasonable view assigned it, as flowing from the posses-
sion of supreme secular authority, to the Emperor ; and
it was from him that the rulers of Burgundy, Bohemia,
Hungary, perhaps Poland also, received the regal titled
The prerogative was his in the same manner in which
that of conferring titles is still held to belong to the
sovereign in every modem kingdom. And so when
Charles the Bold, last duke of French Burgundy, pro-
posed to consolidate his wide dominions into a kingdom,
it was from Frederick III that he sought permission to do
so. The Emperor, however, was greedy and suspidooSi
the Duke uncompliant ; and when Frederick found that
terms could not be arranged between them, he stole away
« Thus we are told of the Em-
peror Charles the Bald, that he
confirmed the election of Boso, king
of Burgundy and Provence, * Dedit
Bosoni Provinciam {sc. Carolus
Calvus), et corona in vertice capitis
imposita, eum regem appellari iussit,
ut more priscorum imperatonim
regibus vidcretur doniinari.* — Re-
gin. Chron. ad ann. 877. This state-
ment is incorrect, but it evidences
the views of the time. Frederick II
made his son Enzio (that
Enzio whose romantic histoiy e*^
one who has seen Bologna wil ^
member) king of Sardima, and al»
erected the duchy of Austria i*to
a kingdom, although for flo*^
reason the title seems oerer I*
have been used; and Lewis IV gM*
to Humbert of Dauphin^ the tilk
of King of Vienne, AJ). 133^
Otto III is said to havecooiondilhi
title of King on Boleslas of Fdvi
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
2ts\
suddenly, and left Charles to carry back, with ill-concealed
mortification, the crown and sceptre which he had brought
ready-made to the place of interview ^.
In the same manner, as representing what was common
to and valid throughout all Europe, nobility, and more
particularly knighthood, centred in the Empire. The
great Orders of Chivalry were international mstitutions,
whose members, having consecrated themselves a mili-
tary priesthood, had no longer any country of their own,
and could therefore be subject to no one save the
Emperor and the Pope. For knighthood was constructed
on the analogy of priesthood, and knights were conceived
as being to the world in its secular aspect exactly what
priests, and more especially the monastic orders, were to
it in its religious aspect : to the one body was given the
sword of the flesh, to the other the sword of the spirit;
each was universal, each had its autocratic head^. Sin-
gularly, too, were these notions brought into harmony
with the feudal polity. Caesar was lord paramount of the
world : its countries great fiefs, whose kings were his
tenants in chief, the suitors of his court, owing to him
homage, fealty, and military service against the infidel.
One illustration more of the way in which the empire
was held to be something of and for all mankind, cannot
be omitted. Although from the practical union of the
imperial with the German throne none but Germans were
chosen to fill iti, it remained in point of law absolutely
^ The Duke of Lithuania is
said to have treated with Sigismund
for the bestowal on him of the title
of King. — Cf. Pfeffinger, Corp. iur.
pubL i. 424.
^ It is probably for this reason
that the Ordo Romanus directs
the Emperor and Empress to be
crowned (in St. Peter's) at the altar
of St. Maurice, the patron saint of
knighthood.
J See especially Gerlach Bux-
torfF, Dissertatio ad Auream BuU
lam; and Augustinus Stenchus,
De Imperio Romano; quoted by
Marquard Freher. It was keenly
debated, while Charles V and
Francis I (of France) were rival
CHAP. XV.
Chivalry.
252
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XV.
Persons
eligible as
Emperors.
free from all restrictions of country or birth. In an age
of the most intense aristocratic exclusiveness, the highest
office in the world was the only secular one open to all
Christians. The old writers, after debating at length the
qualifications that are or may be desirable in an Emperor,
and relating how in pagan times Gauls and Spaniards,
Moors and Pannonians, were thought worthy of the purple,
decide that two things, and no more, are required of the
candidate for Empire : he must be free-born, and he must
be orthodox ^.
It is not without a certain surprise that we see those
who were engaged in the study of ancient letters, or felt
candidates, whether any one but
a German was eligible. By birth
Charles was either a Spaniard or
a Fleming ; but this difficulty his
partisans avoided by holding that
he had been, according to the civil
law, in potestate of Maximilian his
grandfather. However, to say no-
thing of the Guidos and Berengars
of earlier days, the examples of
Richard and Alfonso are conclusive
as to the eligibility of others than
Germans. Edward III of England
was, as has been said, actually
elected ; Henry VIII was a candi-
date. And attempts were frequently
made to elect the kings of France.
— Cf. Pfeffinger, Vitriarius illus-
tratus, 69 sqq.
k The mediaeval practice seems to
have been that which still prevails
in the Roman Catholic Church —
to presume the doctrinal orthodoxy
and extenial conformity of every
citizen, whether lay or clerical,
until the contrary be proved. Of
course when heresy was rife it
went hard with suspected men,
unless they could either clear them-
selves or submit to recant. But
no one was required to pledge him-
self beforehand, as a qualification
for any office, to certain doctrines.
And thus, important as an Em-
peror's orthodoxy was, he does not
appear to have been subjected to
any test (in the modem sense of
the word), although the Pope pfe-
tended to the right of catechising
him in the faith and rejecting him
if unsound. . In the Ordo Ronunmi
we find a long series of qnestfom
which the Pontiff was to administer,
but it does not appear, and is in the
highest degree unlikely, that such
a programme was ever carried ooL
At the German coronation bow-
ever (performed in earlier days at
Aachen, afterwards at Franldbrt),
the custom was for the Emperor
before he was anointed to declare
his orthodoxy by an oath taken od
the famous copy of the Goq>di
which was held to have been used
by Charles, and on a casket con-
taining earth soaked with the bk)od
of the martyr Stephen.
The charge of heresy was one of
the weapons used with most effect
against Frederick II.
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNA TIONAL PO WER,
«53
indirectly their stimulus, embrace so fervently the cause of
the Roman Empire. Still more diflficult is it to estimate
the respective influence exerted by each of the three
revivals which it has been attempted to distinguish. The
spirit of the ancient world by which the men who led
these movements fancied themselves animated, was in
truth a pagan, or at least a strongly secular spirit, in
many respects inconsistent with the associations which
had now gathered round the imperial ofl&ce. And this
hostility did not fail to shew itself when at the beginning
of the sixteenth century, in the fulness of the Renaissance,
a direct and for the time irresistible sway was exercised
by the art and literature of Greece, when the mythology
of Euripides and Ovid supplanted that which had fired
the imagination of Dante and peopled the visions of
St. Francis ; when men forsook the image of the samt in
the cathedral for the statue of the nymph in the garden ;
when the uncouth jargon of scholastic theology was
equally distasteful to the scholars who formed their style
upon Cicero and the philosophers who drew their inspira-
tion from Plato. That meanwhile the admirers of anti-
quity did ally themselves with the defenders of the Empire,
was due partly indeed to the false notions that were
entertained regarding the early Caesars, yet still more to
the common hostility of both schools to the Papacy. It
was as successor of old Rome, and by virtue of her
traditions, that the Holy See had established so wide
a dominion ; yet no sooner did Arnold of Brescia and his
republicans arise, claiming liberty in the name of the
ancient constitution of the Roman city, than they found in
the Popes their bitterest foes, and turned for help to the
secular monarch against the clergy. With similar aversion
did the Romish court view the revived study of the
ancient jurisprudence, so soon as it became, in the hands
CHAP. XV.
The Em-
pire and
the new
learning.
254
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
The doc-
trine of
the Em-
pire's rights
and func-
tions never
carried out
in fact.
of the school of Bologna and afterwards of the jurists of
France, a power able to assert its independence and resist
ecclesiastical pretensions. In the ninth century, Pope
Nicholas the First had himself judged in the famous case
of Teutberga, wife of Lothar, according to the civil law :
in the thirteenth, his successors ^ forbade its study, and
the canonists strove to expel it from Europe ™. And as
the current of educated opinion among the laity was
beginning, however imperceptibly at first, to set against
sacerdotal tyranny, it followed that the Empire would find
sympathy in any effort it could make to regain its lost
position. Thus the Emperors became, or might have
become had they seen the greatness of the opportunity
and been strong enough to improve it, the exponents and
guides of the political movement, the pioneers, in part at
least, of the Reformation. But the revival came too late
to arrest, if not to adorn, the decline of their office. The
growth of a national sentiment in the several countries d
Europe, which had already gone too far to be arrested,
and was urged on by forces far stronger than the theories
of catholic unity which opposed it, imprinted on the
resistance to papal usurpation, and even on the instioctf
of political freedom, that form of narrowly local patriotism
which they long retained and have not yet wholly lost It
can hardly be said that upon any occasion, except the
gathering of the council of Constance by Sigismund, did
the Emperor appear filling a truly international place. For
the most part he exerted in the politics of Europe no in-
fluence greater than that of other princes. In actual re-
sources he stood below the kings of France and Englandi
1 Honorius n in 1229 forbade more sweeping prohibitioo.
it to be studied or taught ia the ™ See v. Savigny, History 4
University of Paris. Innocent IV Roman Law in the Middk Af^
published some years later a still vol. iii. pp. 81, 341-347.
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
255
far below his vassals the Visconti of Milan» Yet this help-
lessness, such was men's faith or their timidity, and such
their unwillingness to make prejudice bend to facts, did not
prevent his dignity from being extolled in the most sono-
rous language by writers whose imaginations were enthrall-
ed by the halo of traditional glory which surrounded it.
We are thus brought back to ask. What was the con-
nection between imperialism and the literary revival ?
To moderns who think of the Roman Empire as the
heathen persecuting power, it is strange to find it depicted
as the model of a Christian commonwealth. It is stranger
still that the study of antiquity should have made men
advocates of arbitrary power. Democratic Athens, oli-
garchic Rome, suggest to us Pericles and Brutus: the
modems who have striven to catch their spirit have been
men like Algernon Sidney, and Vergniaud, and Shelley.
*The explanation is the same in both cases o. The ancient
x^orld was known to the earlier middle ages by tradition,
freshest for what was latest, and by the authors of the
lEmpire. Both presented to them the picture of a mighty
despotism and a civilization brilliant far beyond their own.
'Writings of the fourth and fifth centuries, unfamiliar to us,
^ere to them authorities as high as Tacitus or Livy ; yet
Yirgil and Horace too had sung the praises of the first
and wisest of the Emperors. To the enthusiasts of poetry
and law, Rome meant universal monarchy p ; to those of
religion, her name called up the undimmed radiance of the
Church under Sylvester and Constantine. Petrarch, the
apostle of the dawning Renaissance, is excited by the least
attempt to revive even the shadow of imperial greatness :
» Charles the Bold of Burgundy regal title,
was a potentate incomparably o Cf. Sismondi, Republiques Ita-
stronger than the Emperor Frede- liennes^ iv. chap, xxvii.
rick III from whom he sought the p See Dante, Paradiso, canto vi.
CHAP. XV.
Attitude
of the men
of letters.
Petrarch.
2!;6
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
Dante.
as he had hailed Rienzi, he welcomes Charles IV
into Italy, and execrates his departure. The following
passage is taken from his letter to the Roman people
asking them to receive back Rienzi : — * When was there
ever such peace, such tranquillity, such justice, such honour
paid to virtue, such rewards distributed to the good and
punishments to the bad, when was ever the state so wisely
guided, as in the time when the world had obtained one
head, and that head Rome; the very time wherein God
deigned to be bom of a virgin and dwell upon earth. To
every single body there has been given a head; the whole
world therefore also, which is called by the poet a great
body, ought to be content with one temporal head. For
every two-headed animal is monstrous ; how much more
horrible and hideous a portent must be a creature with
a thousand different heads, biting and fighting against one
another I If, however, it is necessary that there be more
heads than one, it is nevertheless evident that there oqg^
to be one to restrain all and preside over all, that so the
peace of the whole body may abide unshaken. Assuredly
both in heaven and in earth the sovereignty of one has
always been best.'
His passion for the heroism of Roman conquest and
the ordered peace to which it brought the world, is the
centre of Dante's political hopes: he is no more an exiled
Ghibeline, but a patriot whose fervid imagination sees
a nation arise regenerate at the touch of its rightful lord.
Italy, the spoil of so many Teutonic conquerors, is the
garden of the Empire which Henry is to redeem : Rome
the mourning widow, whom Albert is denounced for
neglecting q. Passing through purgatory, the poet
4 * Vieni a veder la tua Roma, che piagae
Vedova, sola, e di e notte chiama:
"Cesare mio, perch^ non m' accompagne?'
Purgatorio, canto tL lia.
»r>
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
257
Rudolf of Hapsburg seated gloomily apart, mourning
his sin in that he left unhealed the wounds of Italy '. In
the deepest pit of hell's ninth circle lies Lucifer, huge,
three-headed ; in each mouth a sinner whom he crunches
between his teeth, in one mouth Iscariot the traitor to
Christ, in the others the two traitors to the first Emperor
of Rome, Brutus and Cassius \ To multiply illustrations
firom other parts of the poem would be an endless task ;
for the idea is ever present in Dante's mind, and displays
itself in a hundred unexpected forms. Virgil himself is
selected to be the guide of the pilgrim through hell and
purgatory, not so much as being the great poet of anti-
quity, as because he *was bom under Julius and lived
beneath the good Augustus;' because he was divinely
charged to sing of the Empire's earliest and brightest
glories. Strange, that the shame of one age should be
the glory of another. For Virgil's melancholy panegyrics
upon the destroyer of the republic are no more like
Dante's appeals to the coming saviour of Italy than is
Caesar Octavianus to Henry count of Luxemburg.
The visionary zeal of the man of letters was seconded
by the more sober devotion of the lawyer. Conqueror,
theologian, and jurist, Justinian is a hero greater than
either Julius or Constantine, for his enduring work bears
him witness. Absolutism was the civilian's creed * : the
phrases * legibus solutus,' • lex regia,' whatever else tended
in the same direction, were taken to express the preroga-
tive of him whose official style of Augustus, as well as
the vernacular name of ' Kaiser,' designated the legitimate
' PvrgaioriOt canto vii. 94. says that there were on the con-
• In/emOt canto xxxiv. 52. trary more Guelfs than Gbibelines
< Not that the doctots of the among the jurists of Bologna. —
dnl law were necessarily political Roman Law in tbi Middle Ages,
paitizans of the Emperors. Savigny vol. iii. p. 80.
S
CHAP. XV.
Attitude of
(be Jurists,
258
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
Imitationsof
old Rome.
successor of the compiler of the Corpus Juris. Since it
was upon this legitimacy that his claim to be the fountain
of law rested, no pains were spared to seek out and ob-
serve every custom and precedent by which old Rome
seemed to be connected with her representative.
Of the many instances that might be collected, it would
be tedious to enumerate more than a few. The offices
of the imperial household, instituted by Constantine the
Great, were attached to the noblest families of Germany.
The Emperor and Empress, before their coronation at
Rome, were lodged in the chambers called those of
Augustus and Livia'"; a bare sword was borne before
them by the praetorian prefect; theu* processions were
adorned by the standards, eagles, wolves and dragons,
which had figured in the train of Hadrian or Theodosius'.
The constant title of the Emperor himself, according to
the style introduced by Probus, was * semper Augastns^'
or * perpetuus Augustus,' which erring etymology translated
' at all times increaser of the Empire T/ Edicts issued by
a Franconian or Swabian sovereign were inserted as
Novels z in the Corpus Juris, in the latest editions of
which custom still allows them a place. The pontifiaUuf
maxmus of his pagan predecessors was supposed to be
preserved by the admission of each Emperor as a canoo
of St. Peter's at Rome and St. Mary's at Aachen ». Soot-
" Cf. Palgrave, Normandy and Germ. iii. The question whether^
England^ vol. ii. (of Otto and Adel- seven electors vote as smgvii<Kf^
held). The Ordo Romanus talks a collegium^ is solved by sbeviBS
of a * Camera luliae ' in the Lateran that they have stepped into the
palace, reserved for the Empress. place of the senate and people "
* See notes to Chron. Casin, in Rome, whose duty it was to ckooN
Muratori, S.R. 7. iv. 515. the Emperor, though (it is oiMf
y Zu aller Zeiten Mehrer des added) the soldiers soaicli*||
Reichs. usurped it. — Peter de Andk^ ^
> Novella Constitutiones, Imperio Romano.
* Marquard Freher, Scr. rer.
? EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
2S9
we even find him talking of his coYisulship ^.
sts invariably number the place of each sovereign
Augustus downwards c. The notion of an unin-
ed succession, which moves the stranger's wonder-
ile as he sees ranged round the magnificent Golden
f Augsburg the portraits of the Caesars, laurelled,
ed, and periwigged, from Julius the conqueror of
0 Joseph the partitioner of Poland, was to those
tions not an article of faith only because its denial
conceivable.
all this historical antiquarianism, as one might call
:h gathers round the Empire, is but one instance,
1 the most striking, of that eager wish to cling to
. forms, use the old phrases, and preserve the old
ions to which the annals of mediaeval Europe bear
;. It appears even in trivial expressions, as when
dsh chronicler says of evil bishops deposed, Trihu
unty or talks of the 'senate and people of the
,' when he means a council of chiefs surrounded
owd of half-naked warriors. So throughout Europe
s and edicts were drawn up on Roman precedents ;
ie-guilds, though often traceable to a different source,
nted the old collegia; villenage was the offspring
system of coloni under the later Empire. Even in
Britain, the Teutonic invaders used Roman en-
ind stamped their coins with Roman devices ; called
Ives ' Basileis ' and * Augusti ^J Especially did the
IS Charles, in a capitulary was one hundred and twentieth
) a revised edition of the from Augustus. Some chroniclers
I law issued in a.d. 8oi, call Otto the Great Otto II, count-
\.nno consulatus nostri ing in Salvius Otho, the successor
of Galba.
^ See p. 45 and note to p.
H3-
CHAP. XV.
So Otto III calls himself
Senatus populique Roman!.*
icis II, the last Emperor,
Reverence
for ancient
forms and
phrases in
the Middle
Ages.
S 2
26o
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
Absence of
the idea of
change or
progress.
cities perpetuate Rome through her most lasting boon
to the conquered, municipal self-government; those of
later origin emulating in theu* adherence to antique s^k
others who, like Nismes and Cologne, Ztirich and Angs*
burg, could trace back theu* institutions to the colonuB and
municipia of the first centuries. On the walls and gates
of hoary Niirnberg^ the traveller still sees emblazoned the
imperial eagle, with the words ' Senatus populusqae
Norimbergensis,' and is borne in thought from the qcdet
provincial town of to-day to the stirring republic of the
middle ages : thence to the Forum and die Capitol of her
greater prototype. For, in truth, through all that period
which we call the Dark and Middle Ages, men's minds
were possessed by the belief that all things continued as
they were from the beginning, that no chasm never to be
recrossed lay between them and that ancient world to
which they had not ceased to look back. We who are
centuries removed can see that there had passed a great
and wonderful change upon thought, and art, and litem*
ture, and politics, and society itself : a change whose best
illustration is to be found in the process whereby there
arose out of the primitive basilica the Romanesque
cathedral, and from it in turn the endless varieties of
Gothic. But so gradual was the change tHat each generatioa
felt it passing over them no more than a man feda that
perpetual transformation by which his body is renewed
from year to year; while the few who had kamiiv
enough to study antiquity through its contempomy,
records, were prevented by the utter want of critidsBi
and of that which we call historical feeling, from seeiqg
' NUrnberg herself was not of citiei to rorel comnnuiitiei Si
Roman foundation. But this makes some of the Swiss cantons. Ital
the imitation all the more curious, we find 'Senatus popolnsqiie Ui^
The fashion even passed from the nensis.'
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
261
how prodigious was the contrast between themselves and
those whom they admired. There is nothing more
modem than the critical spirit which dwells upon the
difference between the minds of men in one age and in
another; which endeavours to make each age its own
interpreter, and judge what it did or produced by a re-
lative standard. Such a spirit was, before the last century
or two, wholly foreign to art as well as to metaphysics.
The converse and the parallel of the fashion of calling
mediaeval oflBces by Roman names, and supposing them
therefore the same, is Xo be found in those old German
pictures of the siege of Carthage or the battle between
Poms and Alexander, where in the foreground two armies
of knights, mailed and mounted, are charging each other
like Crusaders, lance in rest, while behind, through the
smoke of cannon, loom out the Gothic spires and towers
of the beleaguered city. And thus, when we remember
that the notion of progress and development, and of
change as the necessary condition thereof, was unwelcome
or miknown in mediaeval times, we may better understand,
though we do not cease to wonder, how men, never doubt-
ing that the political system of antiquity had descended
to them, modified indeed, yet in substance the same,
should have believed that the Frank, the Saxon, and the
Swabian ruled all Europe by a right which seems to us
not less fantastic than that fabled charter whereby Alex-
ander the Great bequeathed his empire to the Slavic race
for the love of Roxolana.
It is a part of that perpetual contradiction of which the
history of the Middle Ages is full, that this belief had
hardly any influence on practical politics. The more
abjecdy helpless the Emperor becomes, so much the
more sonorous is the language in which the dignity of
CHAP. zv.
262
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. .W,
his crowTi is described. His power, we are told, is
eternal, the provinces having resumed their allegiance
after the barbarian irruptions s ; it is incapable of diminu-
tion or injury : exemptions and grants by him, so far as
they tend to limit his own prerogative, are invalid ^ : all
Christendom is still of right subject to him, though it may
contumaciously refuse obedience*. The sovereigns of
Europe are solemnly warned that they are resisting the
power ordained of GodK No laws can bind the Em-
peror, though he may choose to live according to them:
no court can judge him, though he may condescend to
be sued in his own: none may presume to arraign the
conduct or question the motives of him who is answerable
only to God \ So writes JEneas Sylvius, while Frederick
s ^neas Sylvius, Be Ortu et reticus, quia diceret contn delcr-
Authoritate Imperii Romani. minationem ecclesie et textnin S.
^ Thus some civilians held Con- evangelii, dum dicit, ** Ezirit edio-
stantine's Donation null ; but the turn a Csesare Augusto at dooh
canonists, we are told, were clear as beretur universus orbii.'' Iti ct
to its legality. recognovit Christus ImperatORB
* * Et idem dico de istis aliis re- ut dominum.' — Bartolut, Comm^
gibus et principibus, qui negant se tary on the Pandects^ zlviii. L S4»
esse subditos regi Romanorum, ut De CapHws et postlimimo ntenk,
rex Francix, Augliae, et similes. Si ^ Peter de Andlo, nudtit kdt
enim fatentur ipsum esse Dominum (see esp. cap. viii.), and other «n('
universalem, licet ab illo universali ings of the time. Cf. DaBle'*
domino se subtrahant ex privilegio letter to Henry VII : ' RomanoiA
vel ex praescriptione vel consimili, potestas nee metif Italic nee tri"
non ergo desuut esse cives Romani, comis Sicilis margine coirctaW*
per ea quae dicta sunt. Et per hoc Nam etsi vim passa in aognMl*
omnes gentes quae obediunt S. niatri gubemacula sua contrazit voSlfp^
ccclesix sunt de populo Romano, tamen de inviolabili iure flocl^
Et forte si quis diceret dominum Amphitritis attingens viz ab intf*'
Imperatorcm non esse dominum et unda Oceani se drcumdngi ^
nionarcham totius orbis, esset hae- natur. Scriptum est enim
*'Nascetur pulchra Troianus origine Oesar,
Imperium Oceano, famam qui terminet astris."'
I So Fr. Zoannetus, in the sixteenth power ordained of God.
; century, declares it to be a mortal 1 ^neas Sylvius PiccoloBi**
! tin to resist the Empire, as the (afterwards Pope Pius II), Ar 0^
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
263
he Third, chased from his capital by the Hungarians, is
^ndering from convent to convent, an imperial beggar;
^hile the princes, whom his subserviency to the Pope has
riven into rebellion, are oiBfering the imperial crown to
•odiebrad the Bohemian king.
But the career of Henry the Seventh in Italy is the
lost remarkable illustration of the Emperor's position:
nd imperialist doctrines are set forth most strikingly in
he treatise which the greatest spirit of the age wrote to
lerald or commemorate the advent of that hero, the De
Monarchia of Dante ™. Rudolf, Adolf of Nassau, Albert
oi Hapsburg, none of them crossed the Alps or attempted
:o aid the Italian Ghibelines who battled away in the
name of their throne. Concerned only to restore order
and aggrandize his house, and thinking apparently that
nothing more was to be made of the imperial crown,
Rudolf was content never to receive it, and purchased
he Pope's goodwill by surrendering his jurisdiction in the
-apital, and his claims over the bequest of the Countess
Matilda. Henry the Luxemburger ventured on a bolder
ourse; urged perhaps only by his lofty and chivalrous
pirit, perhaps in despair at eflfecting anything with his
lender resources against the princes of Germany. Cross-
^8r from his Burgundian dominions with a scanty follow-
^g of knights, and descending from the Cenis upon Turin,
^e found his prerogative higher in men's belief after sixty
•''ears of neglect than it had stood under the last Hohen-
^taufen. The cities of Lombardy opened their gates;
^^ilan decreed a vast subsidy ; Guelf and Ghibeline exiles
^-^uthoritate Imperii Romani. Cf. chia was written in the view of
^^Uch Buxtorff, DissertaHo ad Henry's expedition. But latterly
-^f^reant Bullam. weighty reasons have been advanced
*** It has hitherto been the com- for believing that its date must be
^on opinion that the De Mortar- placed some years later.
CHAP. XV.
Henry VII,
A.D. 1308-
264
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
Death of
Henry VII.
Later Em-
perors in
Italy.
alike were restored, and imperial vicars appointed every-
where : supported by the Avignonese pontiff, who dreaded
the restless ambition of his French neighbour, king Philip
IV, Henry had the interdict of the Church as well as the
ban of the Empire at his command. But the illusion of
success vanished as soon as men, recovering from their
first impression, began to be again governed by their ordi-
TiBTy passions and interests, and not by an imaginative
reverence for the glories of the past. Tumults and revdts
broke out in Lombardy ; at Rome the king of Naples
held St. Peter's, and the coronation must take place in
St. John Lateran, on the southern bank of the Tiber.
The hostility of the Guelfic league, headed by the Flo-
rentines, Guelfs even against the Pope, obliged Hemy to
depart from his impartial and republican policy, and to
purchase the aid of the Ghibeline chiefs by granting them
the government of cities. With few troops, and encom-
passed by enemies, the heroic Emperor sustained an
unequal struggle for a year longer, till, in aj). 1313, be
sank beneath the fevers of the deadly Tuscan summer.
His German followers believed, nor has history whoDjr
rejected the tale, that poison was given him by a Domi-
nican monk, in sacramental wine.
Others after him descended from the Alps, but they
came, like Lewis the Fourth, Rupert, Sigismund, 9l the
behest of a faction, which found them useful took for •
time, then flung them away in scorn ; or like Charles the
Fourth and Frederick the Third, as the humble miniotf
of a French or Italian priest. With Henry the Seven*
ends the history of the Empire in Italy, and Dante's book
is an epitaph instead of a prophecy. A sketch of *•
argument will convey a notion of the feelings with whi*
the noblest Ghibelines fought, as well as of the spirit •
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
265
which the Middle Age was accustomed to handle such
subjects.
Weary of the endless strife of princes and cities, of the
factions within every city against each other, seeing muni-
cipal freedom, the only mitigation of turbulence, vanish
with the rise of domestic tyrants, Dante raises a passion-
ate cry for some power to still the tempest, not to quench
liberty or supersede local self-government, but to correct
and moderate them, to restore unity and peace to hapless
Italy. His reasoning is throughout closely syllogistic : he
is alternately the jurist, the theologian, the scholastic
metaphysician : the poet of the Divina Commedia is
betrayed only by the compressed energy of diction, by his
clear vision of the unseen, rarely by a glowing metaphor.
Monarchy is first proved to be the true and rightful
form of governmental. Men's objects are best attained
during universal peace : this is possible only under a
monarch. And as he is the image of the Divine unity,
so man is through him made one, and brought most near
to God. There must, in every system of forces, be a
*primum mobile;' to be perfect, every organization must
have a centre, into which all is gathered, by which all is
controlled <>. Justice is best secured by a supreme arbiter
of disputes, himself unsolicited by ambition, since his
dominion is already bounded only by ocean. Man is best
and happiest when he is most free ; to be free is to exist
for one's own sake. To this grandest end does the
» More than half a century
earlier the envoys of the Norwegian
king, in urging the ' chiefs of the
republic of Iceland assembled at
their Althing to accept Hakon as
their suzerain, had argued that
monarchy was the only rightful
form of government, and had ap-
pealed to the fact that in all con-
tinental Europe there was no such
thing as an absolutely independent
republic.
o Suggesting the celestial hier-
archies of Dionysius the Areopagite.
CHAP. XV.
I)ante*s
feelings and
theories.
The* Be
Monorchia*
266
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
monarch and he alone guide us ; other forms of govern-
ment are perverted p, and exist for the benefit of som^
class ; he seeks the good of all alike, being to that
end appointed^.
Abstract arguments are then confirmed from
Since the world began there has been but one period
perfect peace, and but one of perfect monarchy, that".
namely, which existed at our Lord's birth, under the
of Augustus ; since then the heathen have raged, and
kings of the earth have stood up ; they have set themselves
against their Lord, and his anointed the Roman prince
The universal dominion, the need for which has been
established, is then proved to belong to the Romanrz.
Justice is the will of God, a will to exalt Rome she^iw^
through her whole history *. Her virtues deserved
Virgil is quoted to prove those of -^neas, who by desce
and marriage was the heir of three continents: of
through Assaracus and Creusa; of Africa by Elects*
(mother of Dardanus and daughter of Atlas) and Did
of Europe by Dardanus and Lavinia. God's favour
approved in the fall of the shields to Numa, in the
culous deliverance of the capital from the Gauls, in fl
hailstorm after Cannae. Justice is also the advantage
the state : that advantage was the constant object of t*
virtuous Cincinnatus, and the other heroes of the repw
lie. They conquered the world for its own good,
therefore justiy, as Cicero attests*; so that their sway
» Quoting Aristotle's Politics. Principi,' haying quoted *i
^ * Non enim cives propter con- fremuenint gentes.'
sules nee gens propter regem, sed e * Especially in the oppor
converso consules propter cives, rex death of Alexander the Gretl
propter gentem.* * Cic. Be Off., ii. • Ita ot
' * Reges et principes in hoc patrocinium orbis terramm p-
Le
St?
►ry.
JLo
\
tfa
il
aan
-lew
•^ceD
Kndoj
was
unico coucordantes, ut advcrsentur quam imperium potent nomiiL
Domino suo et uncto suo Romano
HE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
267
50 much 'imperium' as ' patrocinium orbis terranim/
ire herself, the fountain of all right, had, by their
Taphical position and by the gift of a genius so
•ous, marked them out for universal dominion : —
*£xcudent alii spirantia moUius aera,
Credo equidem: vivos ducent de marmore vultus;
Orabunt causas melius, ccelique meatus
Describent radio, et surgentia sidera dicent:
Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento;
HsB tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
Parcere subiectis, et debellare superbos.'
nally, the right of war asserted, Christ's birth, and
1 under Pilate, ratified their government. For Chris-
doctrine requires that the procurator should have
. a lawful judge ^, which he was not unless Tiberius
a lawful Emperor.
he relations of the imperial and papal power are then
lined, and the passages of Scripture (tradition being
ted), to which the advocates of the Papacy appeal,
elaborately explained away. The argument from the
and moonv does not hold, since both lights existed
'e man's creation, and at a time when, as still sinless,
ceded no controlling powers. Else accidentia would
preceded propria in creation. The moon, too, does
receive her being nor all her light from the sun, but
•
Si Pilati imperium non de device as typifying the accord of the
jit, peccatum in Christo non spiritual and temporal powers which
deo punitum.' was brought about at the accession
There is a curious seal of the of Otto, the Guelfic leader, and the
ror Otto IV (figured in J. M. favoured candidate of Pope Inno-
iccius, De veteribus Germano- cent III.
■jtque aliarum nationum sigil- The analogy between the lights
on which the sun and moon of heaven and the potentates of
jpresented over the head of the earth is one which mediaeval writers
eror. Heineccius says he cannot are very fond of. It seems to have
in it, but there seems to be no originated with Gregory VII.
Q why we should not take the
CHAP. XV.
The • De
Monorchia*
268
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XV.
SO much only as makes her more effective. So there is
no reason why the temporal should not be aided in a cor-
responding measure by the spiritual authority. This diffi-
cult text disposed of, others fall more easily; Levi and
Judah, Samuel and Saul, the incense and gold offered bj
the Magi^c; the two swords, the power of binding and
loosing given to Peter. Constantine's donation was
illegal : no single Emperor nor Pope can disturb the ever-
lasting foundations of their respective thrones: the one
had no right to bestow, nor the other to receive, such a
gift. Leo the Third gave the Empire to Charles wrong-
fully : * usurpatio iuris nonfacit lus* It is alleged that all
things of one kind are reducible to one individual, and so
all men to the Pope. But Emperor and Pope differ in
kind, and so far as they are men, are reducible only ^
God, on whom the Empire immediately depends; fori^
existed before Peter's see, and was recognized by P«J
when he appealed to Caesar. The temporal power of the
Papacy can have b'een given neither by natural law, nor
divine ordinance, nor universal consent : nay, it is against
its own Form and Essence, the life of Christ, who said,
* My kingdom is not of this world.'
Man's nature is twofold, corruptible and incorruptiUc'
he has therefore two ends, active virtue on earth, and tbe
enjoyment of the sight of God hereafter; the one to
be attained by practice conformed to the precepts of
philosophy, the other by the theological virtues. Hence
two guides are needed, the Pontiff and the Emperor, tbe
latter of whom, in order that he may direct mankind ^
accordance with the teachings of philosophy to tempo**
» Typifying the spiritual and to Christ from that whicbhilVi*'
temporal powers. Dante meets this can rightfully demand,
by distinguishing the homage paid
i
THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER,
269
blessedness, must preserve universal peace in the world.
Thus are the two powers equally ordained of God, and
the Emperor, though supreme in all that pertains to the
secular world, is in some things dependent on the Pontiff,
since earthly happiness is subordinate to eternal. *Let
Caesar, therefore, shew towards Peter the reverence where-
with a firstborn son honours his father, that, being illu-
mined by the light of his paternal favour, he may the
more excellently shine forth upon the whole world, to the
rule of which he has been appointed by Him alone who
is of all things, both spiritual and temporal, the King and
Governor.' So ends the treatise.
Dante's arguments are not stranger than his omissions.
No suspicion is breathed against Constantine's donation ;
no proof is adduced, for no doubt is felt, that the Empire
of Henry the Seventh is the legitimate continuation of
that which had been swayed by Augustus and Justinian.
Yet Henry was a German, sprung from Rome's barbarian
foes, the elected of those who had neither part nor share
in Italy and her capital.
CBAP. XV.
The ^ Be
Monarchia:
conclusion.
CHAPTER XVI.
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
CHAP. XVI.
' It is related/ says Sozomen in the ninth book of his
Ecclesiastical History, 'that when Alaric was hasteniog
against Rome, a holy monk of Italy admonished him to
spare the city, and not to make himself the cause of such
fearful ills. But Alaric answered, "It is not of my own
will that I do this ; there is One who forces me on, and
will not let me rest, bidding me spoil Rome \" '
Towards the close of the tenth century the Bohemiatt
Woitech, famous in after legend as St. Adalbert, forsook
his bishopric of Prague to journey into Italy, and settled
himself in the Roman monastery of Sant' Alessio. After
some few years passed there in religious solitude, he was
summoned back to resume the duties of his see, and
laboured for awhile among his half-savage countrymen.
Soon, however, the old longing came over him : he le*
sought his cell upon the brow of the Aventine, and thcr^
wandering among the ancient shrines, and taking on him-
self the menial ofl&ces of the convent, he abode hq>pQ^
for a space. At length the reproaches of his metropolitan,
the archbishop of Mentz, and the express conunands of
» Hist. Eccl. I. ix. c. 6: rbv U fii&irrm,, ical kwirdrra f^tiifi^
<p6pcu, ws ovx ^fc<*^ t6,S€ kmxfip fit vop^ccV.
dXXd Tii aw§x^* kvox^^ avrbv
HE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
271
Gregory the Fifth, drove him back over the Alps,
le set off in the train of Otto the Third, lamenting,
his biographer, that he should no more enjoy his
ed quiet in the mother of martyrs, the home of the
ties, golden Rome. A few months later he died a
T among the pagan Lithuanians of the Baltic ^.
arly four hundred years later, and nine hundred after
ime of Alaric, Francis Petrarch writes thus to his
I John Colonna : —
hinkest thou not that I long to see that city to which
has never been any like nor ever shall be ; which
an enemy called a city of kings ; of whose people
h been written, " Great is the valour of the Roman
le, great and terrible their name ;" concerning whose
ampled glory and incomparable empire, \vhich was,
is, and is to be, divine prophets have sung ; where
he tombs of the apostles and martyrs and the bodies
many thousands of the saints of Christ «?'
was the same irresistible impulse that drew the
or, the monk, and the scholar towards the mystical
rhich was to mediaeval Europe more than Delphi had
to the Greek or Mecca to the Islamite, the Jerusalem
iristianity, the city which had once ruled the earth,
low ruled the world of disembodied spirits ^. For
e the two Lives of St. Adal-
Pertz, M. G. H., iv., evi-
compiled soon after his
lother letter of Petrarch's
n Colonna, written immedi-
fter his arrival in the city,
:s to be quoted, it is so like
. stranger would now write
ir his first day in Rome : —
aesens nihil est quod incho-
are ausim, miraculo rerum tanta-
rum et stuporis mole obrutus . . .
praesentia yero, mirum dicta, nihil
imniinuit sed auxit omnia : vere
maior fuit Roma maioresque sunt
reliquiae quam rebar: iam non
orb em ab hac urbe domitum sed
tam sero domitum miror. Vale.*
d The idea of the continuance
of the sway of Rome under a new
character is one which mediseval
CHAP. XVI.
272
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XVI.
there was then, as there is now, something in Rome to
attract men of every class. The devout pilgrim came to
pray at the shrine of the Prince of the Apostles, too
happy if he could carry back to his monastery in the
forests of Saxony or by the bleak Atlantic shore the bone
of some holy martyr; the lover of learning and poetry
dreamed of Virgil and Cicero among the shattered
columns of the Forum ; the Germanic kings, in spite of
pestilence, treachery and seditions, came with their hosts
to seek in the ancient capital of the world the fountain of
temporal dominion. Nor has the spell yet wholly lost its
power. To half the Christian nations Rome is the
metropolis of religion, to all the metropolis of art In her
streets, and hers alone among the cities of the worii
may every form of human speech be heard : she is more
glorious in her decay and desolation than the stateliest
seats of modem power.
But while men thought thus of Rome, what was Rome
herself?
The modem traveller, after his first few dajrs in RonKi
when he has looked out upon the Campagna firom the
summit of St. Peter's, paced the chilly corridors of the
Vatican, and mused under the echoing dome of the PW-
theon, when he has passed in review the monuments of
regal and republican and papal Rome, begins to seek fbf
some relics of the twelve hundred years that lie between
Constantine and Pope Julius the Second. * Where,' he
asks, * is the Rome of the Middle Ages, the Rome rf
Alberic and Hildebrand and Rienzi? the Rome
writers delight to illustrate. In and afterwards ardibiihop <■
Appendix, Note D, there is quoted Tours), written in the bi^iiM^
as a specimen a poem upon Rome, of the twelfth ceatnrj.
by Hildebert (bishop of Le Mans,
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES,
273
dug the graves of so many Teutonic hosts ; whither the
pilgrims flocked ; whence came the commands at which
kings bowed ? Where are the memorials of the brightest
age of Christian architecture, the age which reared Cologne
and Rheims and Westminster, which gave to Italy the
cathedrals of Tuscany and the wave-washed palaces of
Venice?'
To this question there is no answer. Rome, the
mother of the arts, has scarcely a building to commemo-
rate those times, for to her they were times of turmoil
and misery, times in which the shame of the present was
embittered by recollections of a brighter past. Neverthe-
less a minute scrutiny may still discover, hidden in dark
comers or disguised under an unbecoming modern
dress, much that carries us back to the mediaeval town,
and helps us to realize its social and political condition.
Therefore a brief notice of the state of Rome during the
Middle Ages, with especial reference to those monuments
which the visitor may still examine for himself, may not
be without its use, and is at any rate no unfitting pendant
to an account of the institution which drew from the city
its name and its magnificent pretensions. Moreover, as
will appear more fully in the sequel, the history of the
Roman people is an instructive illustration of the influence
of those ideas upon which the Empire itself rested, as
well in their weakness as in their strength «.
It is not from her capture by Alaric, nor even from the
more destructive ravages of the Vandal Genseric, that the
material and social ruin of Rome must be dated, but
• In writing this chapter I have in Mittelalter. Unfortunately no
derived much assistance from the English translation of it exists ; but
admirable work of Ferdinand Gre- I am informed by the author that
gorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom one is likely ere long to appear.
CHAP. XVI.
274
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Causes of
the rapid
decay of
the cify.
rather from the repeated sieges which she sustained in the
war of Belisarius with the Ostrogoths. This struggle
however, long and exhausting as it was, would not have
proved so fatal had the previous condition of the city
been sound and healthy. Her wealth and population in
the middle of the fifth century were probably little inferior
to what they had been in the most prosperous dajrs of
the imperial government. Biit this wealth was entirely
gathered into the hands of a small and effeminate aristo-
cracy. The crowd that filled her streets was composed
partly of poor and idle freemen, unaccustomed to arms
and debarred from political rights ; partly of a far more
numerous herd of slaves, gathered from all parts of the
world, and morally even lower than their masters. There
was no middle class, and no system of municipal institu-
tions, for although the senate and consuls with many of
the lesser magistracies continued to exist, they had for
centuries enjoyed no effective power, and were nowise
fitted to lead and rule the people. Hence it was that
when the Gothic war and the subsequent inroads of the
Lombards had reduced the great families to beggary, the
framework of society dissolved and could not be replaced.
In a state rotten to the core there was no vital force left
for reconstruction. The old forms of political activity
had been too long dead to be recalled to life : the people
wanted the moral force to produce new ones, and all the
authority that could be said to exist in the midst of
anarchy tended to centre itself in the chief of the new
religious society.
So far Rome's condition was like that of the other
great towns of Italy and Gaul. But in two points her
case differed from theirs, and to these the difference »
her after fortunes may be traced. Her bishop had do
--HE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES,
275
)oral potentate to overshadow his dignity or check his
ition, for the vicar of the Eastern court lived far away
avenna, and seldom interfered except to ratify a papal
ion or punish a more than commonly outrageous sedi-
Her population received an all but imperceptible
lion of that Teutonic blood and those Teutonic
)ms by whose stern discipline the inhabitants of
lern Italy were in the end renovated. Everywhere
)ld institutions had perished of decay ; in Rome alone
J was nothing except the ecclesiastical system out of
h new ones could arise. Her condition was there-
the most pitiable in which a community can find
', one of struggle without purpose or progress. The
3ns were divided into three orders : the military class,
iding what was left of the ancient aristocracy; the
y, a host of priests, monks and nuns, attached to the
itless churches and convents; and the people or
, as they are called, a poverty-stricken rabble without
J, without industry, without any municipal organiza-
to bind them together. Of these two latter classes
Pope was the natural leader, the first was divided into
ons headed by some three or four of the great fami-
whose quarrels kept the town in incessant bloodshed.
internal history of Rome from the sixth to the
fth century is an obscure and tedious record of the
ests of these factions with each other, and of the
ocracy as a whole with the slowly growing power
tie Church.
he revolt of the Romans from the Iconoclastic Em-
)rs of the East, followed as it was by the reception of
Franks as patricians and emperors, is an event of
highest importance in the history of Italy and of the
edom. In the domestic constitution of Rome it made
T 2
CHAP. XVI.
Peculiari-
ties in the
position
of Rome.
Her condi-
tion in the
ninth and
tenth cen-
turies.
276
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
little change. With the instinct of a profound genius,
Charles the Great saw that Rome, though it might be
ostensibly the capital, could not be the real centre of his
dominions. He continued to reside in Germany, and did
not even build a palace at Rome. For a time the awe of
his power, the presence of his missus or lieutenant, and
the occasional visits of his successors Lothar and Lewis 11
to the city, repressed her internal disorders. But after
the death of the prince last named, and still more after
the dissolution of the Carolingian Empire itself, Rome
relapsed into a state of profligacy and barbarism to which,
even in that age, Europe supplied no parallel, a barbarism
which had inherited all the vices of civilization without
any of its virtues. The papal office in particular seems
to have lost its religious character, as it had certainly lost
all claim to moral purity. For more than a century the
chief priest of Christendom was no more than a tool of
some ferocious faction among the nobles. Criminal
means had raised him to the throne ; violence, sometimes
going the length of mutilation or murder, deprived him
of it. The marvel is, a marvel in which papal historians
have not unnaturally discovered a miracle, that after
sinking so low, the Papacy should ever have risen agaia
Its rescue and exaltation to the pinnacle of glory was
accomplished not by the Romans but by the efforts of
the Transalpine Church, aiding and prompting the Saxon
and Franconian Emperors. Yet even the religious refooa
did not abate intestine turmoil, and it was not till tht
twelfth century that a new spirit began to work in pofitte
which ennobled if it could not heal the sufferings of the
Roman people.
Ever since the days of Alberic their pride had revoted
against the haughty behaviour of the Teutonic emperoA
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
277
From still earlier times they had been jealous of sacer-
dotal authority, and now watched with alarm the rapid
extension of its influence. The events of the twelfth
century gave (hese feelings a definite direction. It was
the time of the struggle of the Investitures, in which
Hildebrand and his disciples had been striving to draw
all the things of this world as well as of the next into
their grasp. It was the era of the revived study of
Roman law, by which alone the extravagant pretensions
of the decretalists could be resisted. The Lombard and
Tuscan towns had become flourishing municipalities, in-
dependent of their bishops, and at open war with their
Emperor. While all these things were stirring the minds
of the Romans, Arnold of Brescia came preaching reform,
denouncing the corrupt life of the clergy, not perhaps,
like some others of the so-called schismatics of his time,
denying the need of a sacerdotal order, but at any rate
urging its restriction to purely spiritual duties. Oh the
minds of the Romans such teaching fell like the spark
upon dry grass; they threw off the yoke of the Pope^,
drove out the imperial prefect, reconstituted the senate
and the equestrian order, appointed consuls, struck their
own coins, and professed to treat the German Emperors
as their nominees and dependants. To have success-
fully imitated the republican constitution of the cities of
northern Italy would have been much, but with this they
were not content. Knowing in a vague ignorant way
that there had been a Roman republic before there was
a Roman empire, they fed their vanity with visions of a
' Republican forms of some sort was by him chiefly that the spirit
had existed before Arnold's arrival, of hostility to the clerical power
trot we hear the name of no other was infused into the minds of the
leader mentioned ; and doubtless it Romans.
CHAP. XVI.
Growth of
a republican
feeling :
hostility to
the Popes.
Arnold of
Brescia.
278
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Short-
sighted
policy of the
Emperors.
renewal of all their ancient forms, and saw in fancy their
senate and people sitting again upon the Seven Hills and
ruling over the kings of the earth. Stepping, as it were,
into the arena where Pope and Emperor wfere contending
for the headship of the world, they rejected the one as a
priest, and declaring the other to be only their creature,
they claimed as theirs the true and lawful inheritance
of the world-dominion which their ancestors had won.
Antiquity was in one sense on their side, and to us now
it seems less strange that the Roman people should aspire
to rule the earth than that a German barbarian should
rule it in their name. But practically the scheme was
absurd, and could not maintain itself against any serious
opposition. As a modern historian aptly expresses it,
'they were setting up ruins:' they might as well have
raised the broken columns that strewed their Forum and
hoped to rear out of them a strong and stately temple.
The reverence which the men of the Middle Ages felt for
Rome was given altogether to the name and to the place,
nowise to the people. As for power, they had none:
so far from holding Italy in subjection, they could scarcdy
maintain themselves against the hostility of Tusculum.
But it would have been well worth the while of the Teu-
tonic Emperors to have made the Romans their a]lie8»
and bridled by their help the temporal ambition of the
Popes. The offer was actually made to them, first to
Conrad the Third, who seems to have taken no notice of
it ; and afterwards, as has been already stated, to Frede-
rick the First, who repelled in the most contumelious
fashion the envoys of the senate. Hating and fearing
the Pope, he always respected him : towards the Romans
he felt all the contempt of a feudal king for burghers, and
of a German warrior for Italians. At the demand of
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
279
Pope Hadrian, whose foresight thought no heresy so
dangerous as one which threatened the authority of the
clergy, Arnold of Brescia was seized by the imperial
prefect, put to death, and his ashes cast into the Tiber,
lest the people should treasure them up as relics. But
the martyrdom of their leader did not quench the hopes
of his followers. The republican constitution continued
to exist, and rose from time to time, during the weakness
or the absence of the Popes, into a brief and fitful
activity^. Once awakened, the idea, seductive at once
to the imagination of the scholar and the vanity of the
Roman citizen, could not wholly disappear, and two cen-
turies after Arnold's time it found a more brilliant if less
disinterested exponent in the tribune Nicholas Rienzi.
The career of this singular personage is misunderstood
by those who suppose him to have been possessed of
profound political insight, a republican on modem prin-
ciples. He was indeed, despite his overweening conceit,
and what seems to us his charlatanry, both a patriot and
a man of genius, in temperament a poet, filled with
soaring ideas. But those ideas, although dressed out in
gaudier colours by his lively fancy, were after all only the
old ones, memories of the long-faded glories of the
heathen republic, and a series of scornful contrasts levelled
at her present oppressors, both of them shewing no vista
of future peace except through the revival of those ancient
names to which there were no things to correspond. It
CHAP. XVI.
' The series of papal coins is
interrupted (with one or two slight
exceptions) from a.d. 984 (not long
after the time of Alberic) to a.d.
1304. In their place we meet with
various coins struck by the muni-
cipal authorities, some of which
bear on the obverse the head of
the Apostle Peter, with the legend
Roman. Pricipe : on the reverse
the head of the Apostle Paul,
legend, Senat. Popul. Q^ R. Grego-
rovius, ut supra.
Character
and career
of the
tribune
Rienzi.
28o
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVL
was by declaiming on old texts and displaying old monu-
ments that the tribune enlisted the support of the Roman
populace, not by any appeal to democratic principles;
and the whole of his acts and plans, though they astonished
men by their boldness, do not seem to have been re-
garded as novel or impracticable ^, In the breasts of men
like Petrarch, who loved Rome even more than they
hated her people, the enthusiasm of Rienzi found a sym-
pathetic echo : others scorned and denounced him as an
upstart, a demagogue, and a rebel. Both friends and
enemies seem to have comprehended and regarded as
natural his feelings and designs, which were altogether
those of his age. Being, however, a mere matter of
imagination, not of reason, having no anchor, so to speak,
in realities, no true relation to the world as it then stood,
these schemes of republican revival were as transient and
unstable as they were quick of growth and gay of colour.
As the authority of the Popes became consolidated, and
free municipalities disappeared elsewhere throughout Italy,
the dream of a renovated Rome at length withered up
and fell and died. Its last struggle was made in the con-
spiracy of Stephen Porcaro, in the time of Pope Nicholas
the Fifth ; and from that time onward there was no ques-
tion of the supremacy of the bishop within his holy dty.
^ Rienzi called himself Augustus
as well as tribune ; * tribuno Au-
gusto de Roma.* (He pretended,
or his friends pretended for him —
it was at any rate believed — that
he was an illegitimate son of the
Emperor Henry the Seventh.) He
cited, on his appointment, the Pope
and cardinals to appear before the
people of Rome and give an account
of their conduct; and after them
the Emperor. 'Ancora dtao lo
Bavaro (Lewis the Fourth). Pfeoi
citao 11 elettori de lo imperio id
Alemagna, e disse '* Voglio vedere
che rascione haco nella dettiooc^*
che trovasse scritto che punto
alcuno tempo la elettioDe recadcn
a li Romani.' — Vita di Cola S
Rienzi^ c. xxvi (written bj a cop-
temporary ). I give the speUiog >i
it stands in Muratori'i edition.
I
i
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
281
It is never without a certain regret that we watch the
disappearance of a belief, however illusive, around which
the love and reverence for mankind once clung. But this
illusion need be the less regretted that it had only the
feeblest influence for good on the state of mediaeval Rome.
During the three centuries that lie between Arnold of
Brescia and Porcaro, the disorders of Rome were hardly
less violent than they had been in the Dark Ages, and to
all appearance worse than those of any other European
city. There was a want not only of fixed authority, but
of those elements of social stability which the other cities
of Italy possessed. In the greater republics of Lombardy
and Tuscany the bulk of the population were artizans,
hard working orderly people; while above them stood
a prosperous middle class, engaged mostly in com-
merce, and having in their system of trade-guilds an
organization both firm and flexible. It was by foreign
trade that Genoa, Venice, and Pisa became great, as
it was the wealth acquired by manufacturing industry
that enabled Milan and Florence to overcome and
incorporate the territorial aristocracies which surrounded
them.
Rome possessed neither source of riches. She was
ill-placed for trade; having no market she produced no
goods to be disposed of, and the unhealthiness which
long neglect had brought upon her Campagna made its
fertility unavailable. Already she stood as she stands
now, lonely and isolated, a desert at her very gates. As
there was no industry, so there was nothing that deserved
to be called a citizen class. The people were a mere
rabble, prompt to follow the demagogue who flattered
their vanity, prompter still to desert him in the hour of
danger. Superstition was with them a matter of national
CHAP. XVI.
Causes of
the failure
of the
struggle
for inde-
pendence.
Internal
condition
of the city.
The people.
282
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XVI.
The nobi-
lity.
The bishop.
pride, but they lived too near sacred things to feel much
reverence for them : they ill-treated the Pope and fleeced
the pilgrims who crowded to their shrines : they were
probably the only community in Europe who sent no
recruit to the armies of the Cross. Priests, monks, and
all the nondescript hangers on of an ecclesiastical court
formed a large part of the population ; while of the rest
many were supported in a state of half mendicancy by
the countless religious foundations, themselves enriched
by the gifts or the plunder of Latin Christendom. The
noble families were numerous, powerful, ferocious ; they
were surrounded by bands of unruly retainers, and waged
a constant war against each other from their castles in the
adjoining country or in the streets of the city itsel£ Had
things been left to take their natural course, one of these
families, the Colonna, for instance, or the Orsini, would
probably have ended by overcoming its rivals, and have
established, as was the case in the republics of Romagna
and Tuscany, a 'signoria' or local tyranny, like those
which had once prevailed in the cities of Greece. But
the presence of the sacerdotal power, as it had hindered
the growth of feudalism, so also it stood in the way of
such a development as this, and in so far aggravated the
confusion of the city. Although the Pope was not as yet
recognized as legitimate sovereign, he was not only the
most considerable person in Rome, but the only QOt
whose authority had anything of an official character.
But the reign of each pontiff was short; he had no mili-
tary force, he was frequently absent from his see. He
was, moreover, very often a member of one of the great
families, and, as such, no better than a faction leader at
home, while venerated by the rest of Europe as the
universal priest.
J
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
283
It remains only to speak of the person who should
have been to Rome what the national king was to the
cities of France, or England, or Germany, that is to say,
of the Emperor. As has been said already, his power was
a mere chimera, chiefly important as furnishing a pretext
to the Colonna and other Ghibeline chieftains for their
opposition to the papal party. Even his abstract rights were
matter of controversy. The Popes, whose predecessors
had been content to govern as the lieutenants of Charles
and Otto, now maintained that Rome as a spiritual city
could not be subject to any temporal jurisdiction, and
that she was therefore no part of the Roman Empire,
though at the same time its capital. Not only, it was
urged, had Constantine yielded up Rome to Sylvester and
his successors, Lothar the Saxon had at his coronation
formally renounced his sovereignty by doing homage to
the pontiff and receiving the crown as his vassal. The
Popes felt then as they feel now, that their dignity and
influence would suffer if they should even appear to admit
in their place of residence the jurisdiction of a civil
potentate, and although they could not secure their own
authority, they were at least able to exclude any other.
Hence it was that they were so uneasy whenever an
Emperor came to them to be crowned, that they raised up
diflSculties in his path, and endeavoured to be rid of him
as soon as possible. And here something must be said of
the programme, as one may call it, of these imperial visits
to Rome, and of the marks of their presence which the
Germans left behind them, remembering always that after
the time of Frederick the Second it was rather the excep-
tion than the rule for an Emperor to be crowned in his
capital at all.
The traveller who enters Rome now, if he comes, as he
CHAP. XVI.
The Em-
peror.
Visits of the
Emperors
to Rome.
284
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XVI.
Their ap-
proach.
most commonly does, by way of Civita Vecchia, slips in
by the railway before he is aware, is huddled into a vehicle
at the terminus, and set down at his hotel in the middle of
the modem town before he has seen anything at alL If
he comes overland from Tuscany along the bleak road
that passes near Veii and crosses the Milvian bridge, he
has indeed from the slopes of the Ciminian range a
splendid prospect of the sea-like Campagna, girdled in by
glittering hills, but of the city he sees no sign, save the
pinnacle of St. Peter's, until he is within the walls. Far
otherwise was it in the Middle Ages. Then travellers of
every grade, from the humble pilgrim to the new-made
archbishop who came in the pomp of a lengthy train to
receive from the Pope the pallium of his oflSce, approached
from the north or north-east side ; following a track along
the hilly ground on the Tuscan side of the Tiber until
they halted on the brow of Monte Mario ' — the Mount of
Joy — and saw the city of their solemnities lie spread
before them, from the great pile of the Lateran far away
upon the Coelian hill, to the basilica of SL Peter's at their
feet. They saw it not, as now, a sea of billowy cupolas,
but a mass of low red-roofed houses, varied by tall brick
towers, and at rarer intervals by masses of ancient mini
then larger far than now ; while over all rose those two
monuments of the best of the heathen Emperors, monn-
ments that still look down, serenely changeless, on the
armies of new nations and the festivals of a new religion
— the columns of Marcus Aurelius and Trajan.
1 The Germans called this hill, Mario, is not known, nofen k be^
which is the highest in or near as some think, a comiptkm of
Rome, conspicuous from a beau- Mons Mains.
tiful group of stone-pines upon It was on this hill that Otfeo the
its brow, Mons Gaudii ; the ori- Third hanged CresccDtiui and Ui
gin of the Italian name, Monte followers.
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
385
From Monte Mario the Teutonic host descended, when
they had paid their orisons, into the Neronian field, the
piece of flat land that lies outside the gate of St. Angelo.
Here it was the custom for the elders of the Romans to
meet the elected Emperor, present their charters for con-
firmation, and receive his oath to preserve their good
customs J. Then a procession was formed: the priests
and monks, who had come out with hymns to greet the
Emperor, led the way ; the knights and soldiers of Rome,
such as they were, came next ; then the monarch, followed
by a long array of Transalpine chivalry. Passing into
the city they advanced to St. Peter's, where the Pope,
surrounded by his clergy, stood on the great staircase of
the basilica to welcome and bless the Roman king. On
the next day came the coronation, with ceremonies too
elaborate for description \ ceremonies which, we may well
believe, were seldom duly completed. Far more usual
were other rites, of which the book of ritual makes no
mention, unless they are to be counted among the * good
customs of the Romans ;' the clang of war bells, the battle
cry of German and Italian combatants. The Pope, when
he could not keep the Emperor from entering Rome, re-
quired him to leave the bulk of his host without the walls,
and if foiled in this, sought his safety in raising up plots
and seditions against his too powerful friend. The Roman
CHAP. XVI.
J I quote this from the Ordo
Romanus as it stands in Muratori's
third Dissertation in the Antiqui-
taies Italia medii avi.
^ Great stress was laid on one
part of the procedure, — the holding
by the Emperor of the Pope's
stirrup for him to mount, and the
leading of his palfrey for some
distance. Frederick Barbarossa's
omission of this mark of respect
when Pope Hadrian IV met him on
his way to Rome, had nearly caused
a breach between the two poten-
tates, Hadrian absolutely refusing
the kiss of peace until Frederick
should have gone through the form,
which he was at last forced to
do in a somewhat ignominious
way.
TTuir en-
trance.
Hostility 0/
Pope and
people to the
Germans.
286
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVL
people, on the other hand, violent as they often were
against the Pope, had nevertheless a sort of national pride
in him. Very different were their feelings towards the
Teutonic chieftain, who came from a far land to receive
in their city, yet without thanking them for.it, the ensign
of a power which the prowess of their forefathers had won.
Despoiled of their ancient right to choose the universal
bishop, they clung all the more desperately to the belief
that it was they who chose the miiversal prince ; and were
mortified afresh when each successive sovereign con-
temptuously scouted their claims, and paraded before
their eyes his rude barbarian cavalry. Thus it was that a
Roman sedition was the all but invariable accompaniment
of a Roman coronation. The three revolts against Otto the
Great have been already described. His grandson Otto the
Third, in spite of his passionate fondness for the dty, was
met by the same faithlessness and hatred, and departed at
last in despair at the failiu-e of his attempts at conciliation I
A century afterwards Henry the Fifth's coronation pro-
duced violent tumults, which ended in his seizing the Pope
and cardinals in St. Peter's, and keeping them prisonen
till they submitted to his terms. Remembering this, Pope
Hadrian the Fourth would fain have forced the troops of
Frederick Barbarossa to remain without the walls, but the
rapidity of their movements disconcerted his plans and
1 A remarkable speech of ex- partes imperii nostri addiud, qoo
postulation made by Otto III to the patres vestri cum orbem ditione pi^
Roman people (after one of their merent numquam pedem posnerant;
revolts) from the tower of his house scilicet ut nomen vestrum et gfcmaB
on the Aventine has been preserved ad fines usque dilatarem ; Tos filioi
to us. It begins thus : * Vosne adoptavi : vos cunctis pnetnlL'—
estis mei Romani? Propter vos VitaS.Bemwardi;ia'Peitg,M.O.
quidcm meam patriam, propinquos H., t, iv.
quoque reliqui ; amore vestro Sax- (It is from this form 'Thcotifciii'
ones et cunctos Theotiscos, sangui- that the Italian ' Tedesco ' teems to
nem meum, proieci ; vos in remotas have been derived.)
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
287
inticipated the resistance of the Roman populace. Having
established himself in the Leonine city"^, Frederick bar-
icaded the bridge over the Tiber, and was duly crowned in
5L Peter's. But the rite was scarcely finished when the Ro-
nans, who had assembled in arms on the Capitol, dashed
)ver the bridge, fell upon the Germans, and were with difii-
:ulty repulsed by the personal efforts of Frederick. Into the
:ity he did not venture to pursue them, nor was he at any pe-
iod of his reign able to make himself master of the whole of
t. Finding themselves similarly baffled, his successors at last
accepted their position, and were content to take the crown
3n the Pope's conditions and depart without further question.
Coming so seldom and remaining for so short a time,
it is not wonderful that the Teutonic Emperors should, in
iie seven centuries from Charles the Great to Charles the
Rifth, have left fewer marks of their presence in Rome
ban Titus or Hadrian alone have done ; fewer and less
onsiderable even than those which tradition attributes to
lose whom it calls Servius Tullius and the elder Tarquin.
""hose monuments which do exist are just sufficient to
lake the absence of all others more conspicuous. The
lost important dates from the time of Otto the Third,
le only Emperor who attempted to make Rome his per-
lanent residence. Of the palace, probably nothing more
lan a tower, which he built on the Aventine, no trace has
een discovered ; but the church, founded by him to re-
eive the ashes of his friend the martyred St. Adalbert,
:iay still be seen upon the island in the Tiber. Having
sceived from Benevento relics supposed to be those of
Bartholomew the Apostle*^, it became dedicated to that
™ The Leonine city, so called " It would seem that Otto was
rom Pope Leo IV, lay between the deceived, and that in reality they are
•Vatican and St. Peter's and the river, the bones of St. Paulinus of Nola.
CHAP. XVI.
Memorials
of the Ger-
manic Em-
perors in
Rome.
Of Otto
the Third.
288
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Of Otto
the Second.
Of Fred-
erick the
Second.
saint, and is at present the church of San Bartolommeo in
Isola, whose quaintly picturesque bell-tower of red brick,
now grey with extreme age, looks out from among the
orange trees of a convent garden over the swift-eddjing
yellow waters of the Tiber.
Otto the Second, son of Otto the Great, died at Rome,
and lies buried in the crypt of St. Peter's, the only Em-
peror who has found a resting-place among the graves of
the Popes <>. His tomb is not far from that of his nephew
Pope Gregory the Fifth : it is a plain one of rougfalf
chiselled marble. The lid of the superb porphjny sa^
cophagus in which he lay for a time now serves as the
great font of St. Peter's, and may be seen in the baptismal
chapel, on the left of the entrance of the church, not
far from the tombs of the Stuarts. Last of all must be
mentioned a curious relic of the Emperor Frederick the
Second, the prince whom of all others one would least
expect to see honoured in the city of his foes. It is an
inscription in the palace of the Conservators upon the
Capitoline hill, built into the wall of the great staircase,
and relates the victory of Frederick's army over the
" The only other of the Teutonic lie in the cathedral of Speyer ; fiw
Emperors buried in Italy were, so (Charles IV, Wenzel, Ferdinanl %
far as I know, Lewis the Second Maximilian II and Rudolf II) at
(whose tomb, with an inscription Prague; two (Charles I and Otto ID)
commemorating his exploits, is built at Aachen ; two (Henry II andCcm-
into the wall of the north aisle of rad III) at Bamberg ; two(LeiriiI^
the famous church of S. Ambrose at and Charles VII) at Munich ; .t*o
Milan), Henry the Sixth and Frede- (Amulf and Lewis the OuM) it
rick the Second, at Palermo, Con- Regensburg ; Lewis the PioBi it
rad IV, at Messina, and Henry VII, Metz, Lothar I at PrUm near TYef*
whose sarcophagus may be seen in Henry I at Qaedlinburg, Otto I il
the Campo Santo of Pisa, a city al- Magdeburg, Otto IV at Bnmsvkfci
ways conspicuous for her zeal on the Rupert at Heidelberg, Sigismnod tf
imperial side. Nagy Virad, Albert II at Stohhwii"
Eight emperors or kings (Conrad senburg, Charles V in the Escoiiili
II, Henry III, Henry IV, Henry V, and most of the later ones rt
Philip, Rudolf I, Adolf and Albert I) Vienna.
CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
289
and the capture of the carroccio p of the rebel
I he sends as a trophy to his faithful Romans,
all or nearly all the traces of her Teutonic lords
; has preserved till now. Pictures indeed there
ndance, from the mosaic of the Scala Santa at
Ln<i and the curious frescoes in the church of
ttro Incoronati r, down to the paintmgs of the
itechapel and the Stanze of Raphael in the
^here the triumphs of the Popedom over all its
it forth with matchless art and equally matchless
. But these are mostly long subsequent to the
y describe, and these all the world knows,
tions of the highest interest would have attached
rches in which the imperial coronation was per-
L ceremony which, whether we regard the dig-
5 performers or the splendoiu* of the adjuncts,
bly the most imposing that modern Europe has
But old St. Peter's disappeared in the end of
ith century, not long after the last Roman
1, that of Frederick the Third, while the basilica
m Lateran, in which Lothar the Saxon and
I Seventh were crowned, has been so wofully
:d that we can hardly figure it to ourselves as
building s.
17.
lighly curious frescoes
:hapel of St. Sylvester
:he very ancient church
Santi on the Coelian
supposed to have been
the time of Pope
, They represent scenes
f the Saint, more par-
making of the famous
him by Constantine,
who submissively holds the bridle
of his palfrey.
■ The last imperial coronation,
that of Charles the Fifth, took place
in the church of St. Petronius at
Bologna, Pope Clement VII being
unwilling to receive Charles in
Rome. It is a grand church, but
the choir, where the ceremony took
place, seems to have been ' restored/
that is to say modernized, since
Charles's time.
U
CHAP. XVI.
290
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAF. XVI.
Causes of
the want of
nudiceval
monuments
in Rome.
Barbarism
of the ari-
stocracy.
Bearing in mind what was the social condition of Rome
during the middle ages, it becomes easier to understand the
architectural barrenness which at first excites the ^sitor's
surprise. Rome had no temporal sovereign, and there
were therefore only two classes who could build at all,
the nobles and the clergy. Of these, the former had seldom
the wealth, and never the taste, which would have enabled
them to construct palaces graceful as the Venetian or
massively grand as the Florentine and Genoese. MoI^
over, the constant practice of domestic war made defence
the first object of a house, beauty and convenience the
second. The nobility, therefore, either adapted anciest
edifices to theu: purpose or built out of their materials
those huge square towers of brick, a few of which stiD
frown over the narrow streets in the older parts of
Rome. We may judge of their number from the state-
ment that the senator Brancaleone destroyed one hundred
and forty of them. With perhaps no more than one
exception, that of the so-called House of Rienzi, these
towers are the only domestic buildings in the city older
than the middle of the fifteenth century. The vast palaces
to which strangers now flock for the sake of the picture
galleries they contain, have been most of them erected in
the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, some even later.
Among the earliest is that Palazzo Cenci ^, whose gloooj
low-browed arch so powerfully affected the imaginaticm of
Shelley.
It was no want of wealth that hampered the archi-
tectural efforts of the clergy, for vast revenues flowed io
upon them from every corner of Christendom. A good
" The name of Cenci is a very We hear in the eleventh centuffrf
old one at Rome : it is supposed to a certain Cenciu^ who on one o^
be an abbreviation of Crescentius. casion made Gregory VU priioatt
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
291
deal was actually spent upon the erection or repairs of
churches and convents, although with a less liberal hand
than that of such great Transalpine prelates as Hugh of
Lincoln or Conrad of Cologne. But the Popes always
needed money for their projects of ambition, and in times
when disorder and corruption were at their height the
work of building stopped altogether. Thus it was that
after the time of the Carolingians scarcely a church was
erected imtil the beginning of the twelfth century, when
the reforms of Hildebrand had breathed new zeal into the
priesthood. The Babylonish captivity of Avignon, as it
was called, with the great schism of the West that followed
upon it, was the cause of a second similar intermission,
which lasted nearly a century and a half.
At every time, however, even when his work went on
most briskly, the labours of the Roman architect took the
direction of restoring and readorning old churches rather
than of erecting new ones. While the Transalpine coun-
tries, except in a few favoured spots, such as Provence
and part of the Rhineland, remained during several ages
with few and rudely built stone churches, Rome possessed,
as the inheritance of the earlier Christian centuries, a pro-
fusion of houses of worship, some of them still unsur-
passed in splendour, and far more than adequate to the
needs of her diminished population. In repairing these
from time to time, their original form and style of work
were usually as far as possible preserved, while in con-
structing new ones, the abundance of models, beautiful in
themselves and hallowed as well by antiquity as by re-
ligious feeling, enthralled the invention of the workman,
bound him down to be at best a faithful imitator, and
forbade him to deviate at pleasure from the old established
manner. Thus it befell that while his brethren throughout
u 2 I
CHAP. XVI.
Ambition^
weakness^
and cor-
ruption ^
the clergy.
Tendency of
the Roman
builders to
adhere to
the ancient
manner.
29a
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Absence of
Gothic in
Rome,
Destruction
and altera'
tion of the
old build-
ings :
the rest of Europe were passing by successive steps from
the old Roman and Byzantine styles to Romanesque, and
from Romanesque to Pointed, the Roman architect scarody
departed from the plan and arrangements of the primitive
basilica. This is one chief reason why there is so fitde
of Gothic work in Rome, so little even of Romanesque
like that of Pisa. What there is appears chiefly in the
pointed window, more rarely in the arch, seldom or never
in spire or tower or column. Only one of the existing
churches of Rome is Gothic throughout, and that, the
Dominican church of S. Maria sopra Minerva, was built
by foreign monks. In some of the other churches, and
especially in the cloisters of the convents, instances mj
be observed of the same style : in others slight traces, by
accident or design almost obliterated ^»
The mention of obliteration suggests a third cause of
the comparative want of mediaeval buildings in the d^—
the constant depredations and changes of which she has
been the subject. Ever since the time of Constantine
Rome has been a city of destruction, and Christians have
vied with pagans, citizens with enemies, in urging on the
teraal arcade exactly like tboie of
the Duomo at Pisa. Nor are tbeiB
the only instances.
The mined chapel attached to
the fortress of the Caetani fiumlf
the family to which Booiftoe ^
Eighth belonged, and whoie he*'
is now the first of the Roman ao*
biUty^is a pretty Httle bdUi^
more like northern Gothic thia
anjfthing within the walls of Ro*^
It stands upon the Appian Wtji
opposite the tomb of Codfia lb"
tella, which the Caetani oiedaii
stronghold.
« Thus in the church of San
Lorenzo without the walls there
are several pointed windows, now
bricked up ; and similar ones may
be seen in the church of Ara Coeli
on the summit of the Capitol. So
in the apse of St John Lateran
there are three or four windows of
Gothic form : and in its cloister, as
well as in that of St Paul without
the walls, a great deal of beautiful
Lombard work. The elegant porch
of the church of Sant Antonio
Abate is Lombard. In the apse of
the church of San Giovanni e Paolo
on the Ccelian hill there is an ex-
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
293
fatal work. Her siege and capture by Robert Guiscard y,
the ally of Hildebrand against Henry the Fourth, was far
more ruinous than the attacks of the Goths or Vandals :
and itself yields in atrocity to the sack of Rome in
A.D. 1526 by the soldiers of the Catholic king and most
pious Emperor Charles the Fifth z. Since the days of the
first barbarian invasions the Romans have gone on build-
ing with materials taken from the ancient temples, theatres,
law-courts, baths and villas, stripping them of their gor-
geous casings of marble, pulling down their walls for the
sake of the blocks of travertine, setting up their own hovels
on the top or in the midst of these majestic piles. Thus
it has been with the memorials of paganism : a somewhat
different cause has contributed to the disappearance of the
mediaeval churches. What pillage, or fanaticism, or the
wanton lust of destruction did in the one case, the osten-
tatious zeal of modern times has done in the other. The
era of the final establishment of the Popes as temporal
sovereigns of the city, is also that of the supremacy of
the Renaissance style in architecture. After the time of
Nicholas the Fifth, the pontiff against whom, it will be
remembered, the spirit of municipal freedom made its last
struggle in the conspiracy of Porcaro, nothing was built
' A good deal of the mischief
done by Robert Guiscard, from
whidi the parts of the city lying
beyoad the Coliseum towards the
rirer and St John Lateran never
recovered, is attributed to the Sara-
ocnic troops in his service. Saracen
pirates are said to have once before
lacked Rome. Genseric was not
a heathen, but he was a furious
Arian, which, as far as respect to
the churches of the orthodox went.
was nearly the same thing. The
seven - branched candlestick and
other vessels of the Temple, which
Titus had brought from Jerusalem
to Rome, are said to have been car-
ried off by him and lost on the
voyage to Africa.
■ We are told that one cause of
the ferocity of the German part of
the army of Charles was their anger
at the ruinous condition of the im-
perial palace.
CHAP. XVI.
By invaders.
By the
Romans of
the Middle
Ages.
By modern
restorers of
churches.
294
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
in Gothic, and the prevailing enthusiasm for the antique
produced a corresponding dislike to everything mediaeval,
a dislike conspicuous in men like Julius the Second and
Leo the Tenth, from whom the grandeur of modem Rome
may be said to begin. Not long after their time the great
religious movement of the sixteenth century, while tri-
umphing in the north of Europe, was in the south met
and overcome by a counter-reformation in the bosom of
the old church herself, and the construction or restoration
of ecclesiastical buildings became again the passion of
the devout *. No employment, whether it be called an
amusement or a duty, could have been better suited to
the court and aristocracy of Rome. They were indolent;
wealthy, and fond of displaying their wealth ; full of good
taste, and anxious, especially when advancing years had
chased away youth's pleasures, to be full of good works
also. Popes and cardinals and the heads of the great
families vied with one another in building new churches
and restoring or enlarging those they found till little of
the old was left; raising over them huge cupolas, sub-
stituting massive pilasters for the single-shafted columns,
adorning the interior with a profusion of rare marbles, of
carving and. gilding, of frescoes and altar-pieces by the
best masters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
None but a bigoted medisevalist can refuse to acknow-
ledge the warmth of tone, the repose, the stateliness, of
the churches of modem Rome; but even in the midst of
admiration the sated eye turns away from the wealth of
ponderous ornament, and we long for the dear pare
• Under the influence, partly of Sixtus the Fifth did a great deal of
this anti-pagan spirit, partly of his mischief in the way of destrojiBg
own restless vanity, partly of a or spoiling the monuments of «nt*"
passion to be doing something. Pope quity.
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
295
colour, the simple yet grand proportions that give a charm
to the buildings of an earlier age.
Few of the ancient churches have escaped untouched ;
many have been altogether rebuilt. There are also some,
however, in which the modemizers of the sixteenth and
subsequent centuries have spared two features of the old
structure, its round apse or tribune and its bell-tower.
The apse has its interior usually covered with mosaics,
exceedingly interesting, both from the ideas they express
and as the only monuments of pictorial art that remain
to us from the Dark Ages ^. To speak of them, however,
as they deserve to be spoken of, would involve a digres-
sion for which there is no space here. The campanile or
bell-tower is a quaint little square brick tower, of no great
height, usually standing detached from the church, and
having in its topmost, sometimes also in its other upper
stories, several arcade windows, divided by tiny marble
pillars <'. What with these campaniles, then far more
k The finest of the similar
Rarenna mosaics are rather older
than these Roman ones : but some
there, as well as a few others else-
where in Italy (e.g. the superb
ones at Torcello), date from the
lerenth, eighth, and ninth cen-
turies.
« These campaniles are generally
supposed to date from the ninth
and tenth centuries. I am in-
formed, however, by Mr. J. H.
Parker, of Oxford, whose anti-
quarian skill is well known, that
he is led to believe by an examina-
tion of their mouldings that few or
none, unless it be that of San
Prassede, are older than the twelfth
century.
This of course applies only to
the existing buildings. The type
of tower may be, and indeed no
doubt is, older.
Somewhat similar towers may
be observed in many parts of the
Italian Alps, especially in the won-
derful mountain land north of
Venice, where such towers are of
all dates from the eleventh or
twelfth down to the nineteenth
century, the ancient type having in
these remote valleys been adhered
to because the builder had no other
models before him. In the valley
of Cimolais (not very far from
Longarone in Val d'Ampezzo) I
have seen such a campanile in
course of erection, precisely similar
to others in the neighbouring vil-
lages some eight centuries old.
CHAP. XVI.
Existing
relics of the
Dark and
Middle
Ages,
The Mo-
saies.
The Bell-
towers,
296
THE HOL y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Changed
aspect of
the city of
Rome.
numerous than they are now, and with the huge brick
fortresses of the nobles, towers must have held in the
landscape of the mediaeval city very much the part which
domes do now. Although less imposing, they were pro-
bably more picturesque, the rather as in the earlier part
of the Middle Ages the houses and churches, which are
now mostly crowded together on the flat of the Campus
Maitius, were scattered over the heights and slopes of
the Ccelian, Aventine, and Esquiline hills d. Modem
Rome lies chiefly on the opposite or north-eastern side
of the Capitol, and the change from the old to the new
site of the city, which can hardly be said to have distinctly
begun before the destruction of the south-western part of
the town by Robert Guiscard, was not completed until
the sixteenth century. In a.d. 1536, in anticipation of
the entry of Charles the Fifth, the rebuilding of the Capitol
(afterwards carried on by Michael Angelo) was b^^
upon foundations that had been laid by the first Tarquin;
and the palace of the Senator, the greatest municipal
edifice of Rome, which had hitherto looked towards the
Forum and the Coliseum, was made to front in the direc*
tion of St. Peter's and the modem town.
The Rome of to-day is no more like the city of Rienii
than she is to the city of Trajan; just as the Roman
church of the nineteenth century diflfers profoundly, how-
The very carious round towers
of Ravenna, some four or five of
which are still standing, seem to
have originally had similar win-
dows, though these have been all,
or nearly all, stopped up. The
Roman towers are all square.
^ The Palatine hill seems to
have been then, as it is for the
most part now, a waste of stu-
pendous ruins. In the great im-
perial palace upon its nortbem and
eastern sides was the residence of
an official of the Eastern ooort in
the beginning of the eighth
tury. In the time of Charles,
seventy years later, this palace vai
no longer habitable.
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES,
297
ever she may strive to disguise it, from tjie church of Hilde-
brand. But among all their changes, both church and
city have kept themselves wonderfully free from the intru-
sion of foreign, at least of Teutonic, elements, and have
faithfully preserved at all times something of an old
Roman character. Latin Christianity inherited from the
imperial system of old that firmly knit yet flexible organi-
zation, which was one of the grand secrets of its power ;
the great men whom mediaeval Rome gave to or trained
up for the Papacy were, like their progenitors, adminis-
trators, legislators, statesmen; seldom enthusiasts them-
selves, but perfectly understanding how to use and guide
the enthusiasm of others — of the French and German
crusaders, of men like Francis of Assissi and Dominic
and Ignatius, Between Catholicism in Italy and Catho-
licism in Germany or England there was always, as
there is still, a very perceptible difference. So also, if
the analogy be not too fanciful, was it with Rome the
city. Socially she seemed always drifting towards feu-
dalism ; yet she never fell into its grasp. Materially, her
architecture was at one time considerably influenced by
Pointed forms, yet Gothic never became, as in the rest of
Europe, the dominant style. It approached Rome late,
and departed from her early, so that we scarcely notice
its presence, and seem to pass almost without a break
from the old Romanesque « to the Graeco-Roman of the
Renaissance. Thus regarded, the history of the city, both
in her political state and in her buildings, is seen to be
intimately connected with that of the Holy Empire itself.
The Empire in its title and its pretensions expressed the
idea of the permanence of the institutions of the ancient
* Such as we see it in the later and lefser churches of basilica form.
CHAP. XVI.
Analogy
between her
architecture
and her
civil and
ecclesiasti-
cal consti'
tution.
Preserva-
tion of an
antique
character
in both.
298
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Relation of
the City
and the
Empire,
world ; Rome the city had, in externals at least, careMy
preserved their traditions : the names of her magistracies,
the character of her buildings, all spoke of antiquity, and
gave it a strange and shadowy life in the midst of new
races and new forms of faith.
In its essence the Empire rested on the feeling of the
unity of mankind ; it was the perpetuation of the Roman
dominion by which the old nationalities had been de-
stroyed, with the addition of the Christian element which
had created a new nationality that was also universal. By
the extension of her citizenship to all her subjects heathen
Rome had become the common, home, and, figuratively,
even the local dwelling-place of the. civilized races of man.
By the theology of the time Christian Rome had bed
made the mystical type of humanity, the one flock of the
faithful scattered over the whole earth, the holy city whither,
as to the temple on Moriah, all the Israel of God shoold
come up to worship. She was not merely an image of
the mighty world, she was the mighty world itself in
miniature. The pastor of her local chiu-ch is also the
universal bishop; the seven suffragans who consecrate
him are the overseers of petty sees in Ostia, Antiom,
and the like, towns lying close round Rome: the
cardinal priests and deacons who join these seven in
electing him derive their title to be princes of the Church,
the supreme spuritual council of the Christian wcM,
from the incumbency of a parochial cure within tlie pre-
cincts of the city. Similarly, her ruler, the Emperor, is
ruler of mankind ; he is chosen by the acclamations of her
people^: he can be lawfully crowned nowhere but in
' It was thus that most of the notably Charles and Otto, pt^
earlier Teutonic Eoaperors, and fessed to hare obtained the cnm;
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
299
of her basilicas. She is, like Jerusalem of old, the mother
of us all.
There is yet another way in which the record of the
domestic contests of Rome throws light upon the history
of the Empire. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth
her citizens ceased not to demand in the name of the old
republic their freedom from the t)rranny of the nobles and
the Pope, and their right to rule over the world at large.
These efforts — selfish and fantastic we may call them, yet
men like Petrarch did not disdain to them their sympathy
— issued from the same theories and were directed to the
same ends as those which inspired Otto the Third and
Frederick Barbarossa and Dante himself. They witness
to the same incapacity to form any ideal for the future
except a revival of the past; the same belief that one
universal state is both desirable and possible, but possible
only through the means of Rome: the same refusal to
admit that a right which has once existed can ever be
extinguished. In the days of the Renaissance these
notions were passing silently away: the succeeding
century brought with it misfortimes that broke the spirit
of the nation. Italy was the battle-field of Europe : her
wealth became the prey of a rapacious soldiery: the last
CHAP. XVI.
although practically it was partly a
matter of conquest and partly of
private arrangement with the Pope.
Id Uter times, the seven Germanic
princes were recognized as the
legally qualified electoral body, but
their appearance on the stage was
a result of the confusion of the
German kingdom with the Roman
Empire, and in strictness they had
nothing to do with the Roman
aown at all. The right to bestow
it could only— on principle — belong
to some Roman authority, and
those who felt the difficulty were
driven to suppose a formal cession
of their privilege by the Roman
people to the seven electors. See
p. 227 supra; and cf. Matthew
Villani (iv. 77), *I1 popolo Romano,
non da se, ma la chiesa per lui,
concedette la elezione degli Im-
peradori a sette principi della
Magna.*
300
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
Extinction
of the
Florentine
republic,
A.D. 1530.
Feelings of
the modern
Italians
towards
Rome.
and noblest of her republics was enslaved by an unfeel-
ing Emperor, and handed over as the pledge of amity to a
selfish Medicean Pope. When the hope of independence
had been lost, the people turned away from politics to Kvc
for art and literature, and found, before many generations
had passed, how little such exclusive devotion could com-
pensate for the departure of freedom, and a national
spirit, and the activity of civic life. A century after Ae
golden days of Ariosto and Raphael, Italian literature had
become frigid and affected, while Italian art was dying
of mannerism.
At length, after long ages of sloth, the stagnant waters
were troubled. The Romans, who had lived in listless
contentment under the paternal sway of the Popes, re-
ceived new ideas from the advent of the revolutionary
armies of France, and have found the Papal sjrstem, since
its re-establishment fifty years ago as a modem bureau-
cratic despotism, far less tolerable than it was of yore.
Our own days have seen the name of Rome become
again a rallying-cry for the patriots of Italy, but in a sense
most unlike the old one. The contemporaries of Arnold
and Rienzi desired freedom only as a step to universal
domination : their descendants, more wisely, yet not more
from patriotism than from a pardonable civic pride, seek
only to be the capital of the Italian kingdom. Daotc
prayed for a monarchy of the world, a reign of peace
and Christian brotherhood : those who invoke his name
as the earliest prophet of their creed strive after an
idea that never crossed his mind — the national union of
Italy «.
e That which Dante, Arnold of tility to the temporal power of the
Brescia, and the rest really have in Popes.
common with the modern Italian (This chapter was written n
'party of movement' is their hos- 1865.)
THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
301
Plain common-sense politicians in other countries
io not understand this passion for Rome as a capital,
and think it their duty to lecture the Italians on their
[lightiness. The latter do not themselves pretend
that the shores of the Tiber are a suitable site for
a capital: Rome is lonely, imhealthy, and in a bad
strategical position; she has no particular facilities for
trade : her people, with some fine qualities, are less
orderly and industrious than the Tuscans or the Pied-
montese. Nevertheless all Italy cries with one voice
for Rome, firmly believing that national life can never
thrill with a strong and steady pulsation till the an-
cient capital has become the nation's heart. They
feel that it is owing to Rome — Rome pagan as
well as Christian — that they once played so grand a
part in the drama of European history, and that they
have now been able to attain that fervid sentiment
of imity which has brought them at last together under
one government. Whether they are right, whether if
right they are likely to be successful, need not be
inquired here. But it deserves to be noted that this
enthusiasm for a famous name — for it is nothing more
— is substantially the same feeling as that which
created and hallowed the Holy Empire of the Middle
Ages. The events of the last few years on both sides
of the Atlantic have proved that men are not now,
any more than they ever were, chiefly governed by
calculations of material profit and loss. Sentiments,
fancies, theories, have not lost their power; the spirit
of poetry has not wholly passed away from politics.
Strange, therefore, as seems to us the worship paid to
the name of mediaeval Rome by those who saw the sins
and the misery of her people, it can hardly have been an
CHAP. XVI.
I
302
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVI.
intenser feeling than is the imaginative reverence where-
with the Italians of to-day look pn the city whence, as
from a fountain, all the streams of their national life have
sprung, and in which, as in an ocean, they are all agam
to mingle.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE RENAISSANCE : CHANGE IN THE CHARACTER
OF THE EMPIRE.
In Frederick the Third's reign the Empire sank to its
lowest point. It had shot forth a fitful gleam under
Sigismund, who . in convoking and presiding over the
council of Constance had revived one of the highest
functions of his predecessors. The precedents of the
first great oecumenical councils, and especially of the
council of Nicaea, had established the principle that it
belonged to the Emperor, even more properly than to the
Pope, to convoke ecclesiastical assemblies from the whole
Christian world. The tenet commended itself to the
reforming party in the church, headed by Gerson, the
chancellor of Paris, whose aim it was, while making no
changes in matters of faith, to correct the abuses which
had grown up in discipline and government, and limit the
power of the Popes by exalting the authority of general
councils, to whom there was now attributed an immunity
from error superior to that, whatever it might be, which
residied in the successor of Peter. And although it was
Only the sacerdotal body, not the whole Christian people,
who were thus made the exponents of the universal
CHAP. XVU.
Wenzelt
I 378-1400.
Rupert,
1 400-1 410.
Sigismund,
1410-1438.
Council of
Constance.
304
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. xvn.
Wec^tnes&
of Germany
as compared
with the
other states
of Europe.
Albrecht II,
I 438-1440.
Frederick
III, 1440-
1493.
religious consciousness, the doctrine was nevertheless a
foreshadowing of that fuller freedom which was soon to
follow. The existence of the Holy Empire and the
existence of general councils were, as has been already
remarked, necessary parts of one and the same theoiy*,
and it was therefore more than a coincidence that the
last occasion on which the whole of Latin Christendom
met to deliberate and act as a single commonwealth ^
was also the last on which that commonwealth's lawful
temporal head appeared in the exercise of his inter-
national functions. Never afterwards was he, in the ^es
of Europe, anything more than a German monarch.
It might seem doubtful whether he would long remain
a monarch at all. When in a.d. 1493 the calamitous
reign of Frederick the Third ended, it was impossible f(x
the princes to see with unconcern the condition into ^diich
their selfishness and turbulence had brought the Em|Mre.
The time was indeed critical. Hitherto the Germans had
been protected rather by the weakness of their enemies
than by their own strength. From France there had been
little to fear while the English menaced her on one side
and the Burgundian dukes on the other : from England
still less while she was torn by the strife of York and
Lancaster. But now throughout Western Europe the
power of the feudal oligarchies was broken ; and its ducf
countries were being, by the establishment of fixed rules
of succession and the absorption of the smaller into the
* It is not without interest to Florence were not recogmsed fiwn
observe that the council of Basel first to last by all Europe, as wtf the
shewed signs of reciprocating im- council of Constance. Whco the
perial care by claiming those very assembly of Trent met, the greit
rights over the Empire to which religious schism had already nude
the Popes were accustomed to pre- a general council, in the tme
tend. of the word, impowbk.
^ The councils of Basel and
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS,
305
larger principalities, rapidly built up into compact and
aggressive military monarchies. Thus Spain became a
great state by the union of Castile and Aragon, and the
conquest of the Moors of Granada, Thus in England
there arose the popular despotism of the Tudors. Thus
France, enlarged and consolidated under Lewis the
Eleventh and his successors, began to acquire that pre-
dominant influence on the politics of Europe which her
commanding geographical position, the martial spuit of
her people, and, it must be added, the unscrupulous am-
bition of her rulers, have secured to her in every succeed-
ing century. Meantime there had appeared in the far
East a foe still more terrible. The capture of Constanti-
nople gave the Turks a firm hold on Europe, and inspired
them with the hope of eflfecting in the fifteenth century
what Abderrahman and his Saracens had so nearly
effected in the eighth — of establishing the faith of Islam
through all the provinces that obeyed the Western as well
as the Eastern Caesars. The navies of the Ottoman
Saltans swept the Mediterranean; their well-appointed
armies pierced Hungary and threatened Vienna.
Nor was it only that formidable enemies had arisen
without : the frontiers of Germany herself were exposed
by the loss of those adjoining territories which had for-
merly owned allegiance to the Emperors. Poland, once
tributary, had shaken off the yoke at the interregnum,
and had recendy wrested West Prussia from the Teutonic
knights, and compelled their Grand Master to swear alle-
giance for East Prussia, which they still retained. Bohe-
mia, where German culture had struck deeper roots, re-
mained a member of the Empire ; but the privileges she
had obtsdned from Charles the Fourth, and the subse-
quent acquisition of Silesia and Moravia, made her virtually
CHAP. XVII.
Lo&i of im-
perial ierri'
toriis.
3o6
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvn.
Italy.
independent. The restless Hungarians avenged their
former vassalage to Germany by frequent inroads on her
eastern border.
Imperial power in Italy ended with the life of Henry
the Seventh. Rupert did indeed cross the Alps, but it
was as the hireling of Florence ; Frederick the Third
received the Lombard crown, but it no longer conveyed
the slightest power. In the beginning of the fourteenth
century Dante still hopes the renovation of his countiy
from the action of the Teutonic Emperors. Some fifty
years later Matthew Villani sees clearly that they do not
and cannot reign to any purpose south of the Alps*.
Nevertheless the phantom of imperial authority lingers on
for a time. It is put forward by the Ghibeline tyrants of
the cities to justify their attacks on their Guelfic neigh-
bours : even resolute republicans like the Florentines do
not yet ventiu-e altogether to reject it, however unwilling
to permit its exercise. Before the middle of the fifteenth
century, the names of Guelf and Ghibeline had ceased to
have any sense or meaning ; the Pope was no longer the
protector nor the Emperor the assailant of municipal
freedom, for municipal freedom itself had well-nigh dis-
appeared. But the old war-cries of the Church and the
Empire were still repeated as they had been three centuries
c *E pero venendo gl' impera-
dori della Magna col supremo
titolo, e volendo col senno e colia
forza della Magna reggiere gli
Italiani, non lo fanno e non lo
possono fare/ — M. Villani, iv. 77.
Matthew Villani's ct)rmology of
the two great faction names of
Italy is worth quoting, as a fair
sample of the skill of mediaevals in
such matters r — * La Italia tutta e
divisa mistamente in doe ptrt^i
r una che seguita ne' &tti d^
mondo la santa chiesa—- e (ItKAi
son dinominati Guelfi ; do^ guardi-
tori di fd. £ 1' altra parte seguitano
lo 'mperio o fedcle o enfcddcdie
sia delle cose del mondo a vaSk
chiesa. E chiamansi GbibeUio't
quasi guida belli; cio^ gnidatod
di battaglie.'
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS,
307
before, and the rival principles that had once enlisted the
noblest spirits of Italy on one or other side had now sunk
into a pretext for wars of aggrandizement or of mere
unmeaning hate. That which had been remarked long
before in Greece was seen to be true here; the spirit of
faction outlived the cause of faction, and became itself the
new and prolific source of a useless, endless strife.
After Frederick the Third no Emperor was crowned in
Rome, and almost the only trace of that connection be-
tween Germany and Italy, to maintain which so much had
been risked and lost, was to be found in the obstinate
belief of the Hapsburg Emperors, that their own claims,
though often purely dynastic and personal, could be
enforced by an appeal to the imperial rights of their pre-
decessors. Because Barbarossa had overrun Lombardy
with a Transalpine host they fancied themselves entitled
to demand duchies for themselves and their relatives, and
to entangle the Empire in wars wherein no interest but
their own was involved.
The kingdom of Aries, if it had never added much
strength to the Empire, had been useful as an outwork
against France. And thus its loss — Dauphin^ passing
over, partly in a.d. 1350, finally in 1457, Provence in
i486 — proved a serious calamity, for it brought the
French nearer to Switzerland, and opened to them a
tempting passage into Italy. The Emperors did not for
a time expressly renounce their feudal suzerainty over
these lands, but if it was hard to enforce a feudal claim
over a rebellious landgrave in Germany, how much harder
to control a vassal who was also the mightiest king in
Europe.
On the north-west frontier, the fall in a.d. 1477 of the
great principality which the dukes of French Burgundy I
X 2
CH^. xvn.
Burgundy^
SoS
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. -XSVL
Svntzerland,
Internal
weakness.
were building up, was seen with pleasure by the Rhine-
landers whom Charles the last duke had incessant^
alarmed. But the only eflfect of its fall was to leave
France and Germany direcdy confronting each other,
and it was soon seen that the balance of strength lay on
the side of the less numerous but better organized and
more active nation.
Switzerland, too, could no longer be considered a part
of the Germanic realm. The revolt of the Forest Cantons,
in A.D. 13 13, was against the oppressions practised in the
name of Albert count of Hapsburg, rather than against
the legitimate authority of Albert the Emperor. Bat
although several subsequent sovereigns, and among them
conspicuously Henry the Seventh and Sigismund, favoured
the Swiss liberties, yet while the antipathy between the
Confederates and the territorial nobility gave a peculMur
direction to their policy, the accession of new cantons to
their body, and their brilliant success against Charles the
Bold in A.D. 1477, inade them proud of a separate
national existence, and not unwilling to cast themselves
loose from the stranded hulk of the Empire. Maximilian
tried to conquer them, but after a furious struggle, in
which the valleys of Western Tyrol were repeatedly laid
waste by the peasants of the Engadin, he was forced to
give way, and in a.d. 1500 recognized them by trea^as
practically independent. Not, however, till the peace of
Westphaha, in a.d. 1648, was the Swiss Confederation in
the eye of public law a sovereign state, and even ate
that date some of the towns continued to stamp thdr
coins with the double eagle of the Empire.
If those losses of territory were serious, for more
serious was the plight in which Germany herself ^7*
The country had now become not so much an empire as
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS,
309
an aggregate of very many small states, governed by sove-
reigns who would neither remain at peace with each
other nor combine against a foreign enemy, under the
nominal presidency of an Emperor who had little lawful
authority, and could not exert what he had d.
There was another cause, besides those palpable and
obvious ones already enumerated, to which this state of
things must be ascribed. That cause is to be foimd in
the theory which regarded the Empire as an international
power, supreme among Christian states. From the day
when Otto the Great was crowned at Rome, the characters
of German king and Roman Emperor were united in one
person, and it has been shewn how that union tended
more and more to become a fusion. If the two oflQces,
in their nature and origin so dissimilar, had been held by
diflferent persons, the Roman Empire would most probably
have soon disappeared, while the German kingdom grew
into a robust national monarchy. Their connection gave
a longer life to the one and a feebler life to the other,
while at the same time it transformed both. So long as
Germany was only one of the many countries that bowed
beneath their sceptre it was possible for the Emperors,
though we need not suppose they troubled themselves
with speculations on the matter, to distinguish their im-
perial authority, as international and more than half re-
ligious, from their royal, which was, or was meant to be
exclusively local and feudal. But when within the nar-
rowed bounds of Germany these international functions
d *Nam quamvis Imperatorem vultis, vultis autem minimum.' —
et regem et dominum vestrum esse ^neas Sylvius to the princes of
fateamini, precario tamen ille im- Germany, quoted by Hippolytus a
perare videtur: nulla ei potentia Lapide.
est; tantum ei paretis quantum
CHAP. xvn.
Influence of
the theory
of the Em-
pire as an
interna'
tional
power upon
the Ger-
manic con-
stitution.
310
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVII.
had ceased to have any meaning, when the rulers of
England, Spain, France, Denmark, Hmigary, Poland,
Italy, Bm-gundy, had in succession repudiated their con-
trol, and the Lord of the World foimd himself obeyed by
none but his own people, he would not sink from being
lord of the world into a simple Teutonic king, but con-
tinued to play in the more contracted theatre the part
which had belonged to him in the wider. Thus did
Germany instead of Europe become the sphere of his
international jurisdiction; and her electors and princes,
originally mere vassals, no greater than a Count of Cham-
pagne in France, or an Earl of Chester in England,
stepped into the place which it had been meant that the
several monarchs of Christendom should fill. If the power
of their head had been what it was in the eleventh cen-
tury, the additional dignity so assigned to them might
have signified very little. But coming in to confirm and
justify the liberties already won, this theory of their rela-
tion to the sovereign had a great though at the time
scarcely perceptible influence in changing the Grerman
Empire, as we may now begin to call it, from a state into
a sort of confederation or body of states, united indeed
for some of the purposes of government, but separate and
independent for others more important. Thus, and that
in its ecclesiastical as well as its civil organization, Ger-
many became a miniature of Christendom ©. The Pope,
though he retained the wider sway which his rival had
lost, was in an especial manner the head of the German
clergy, as the Emperor was of the laity : the three Rhenish
prelates sat in the supreme college beside the four temporal
e See ^gidi, Der Furstenrath any other with which I am le-
nach dem Luneviller Frieden ; a quainted on the inner nature of the
book which throws more light than Empire.
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS.
3"
electors : the nobility of prince-bishops and abbots was
as essential a part of the constitution and as influential
in the deliberations of the Diet as were the dukes, counts,
and margraves of the Empire. The world-embracing
Christian state was to have been governed by a hierarchy
of spiritual pastors, whose graduated ranks of authority
should exactly correspond with those of the temporal
magistracy, who were to be like them endowed with
worldly wealth and power, and to enjoy a jurisdiction co-
ordinate although distinct. This system, which it was in
vain attempted to establish in Europe during tlie eleventh
and twelfth centuries, was in its main features that which
prevailed in the Germanic Empire from the fourteenth
century onwards. And conformably to the analogy which
may be traced between the position of the archdukes of
Austria in Germany and the place which the four Saxon
and the two first Franconian Emperors had held in
Europe, both being recognized as leaders and presidents
in all that concerned the common interest, in the one case
of the Christian, in the other of the whole German people,
while neither of them had any power of direct government
in the territories of local kings and lords ; so the plan by
which those who chose Maximilian emperor sought to
strengthen their national monarchy was in substance that
which the Popes had followed when they conferred the
crown of the world on Charles and Otto. The pontiffs
then, like the electors now, finding that they could not
give with the title the power which its functions demanded,
were driven to the expedient of selecting for the oflSce
persons whose private resources enabled them to sustain
it with dignity. The first Frankish and the first Saxon
Emperors were chosen because they were already the
mightiest potentates in Europe; Maximilian because he
CHAP. XVII.
Position of
the Emperor
in Germany^
compared
with that
of his pre-
decessors in
Europe,
■vr.
3>2
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvn.
Beginning
of the Haps-
bttrg in-
fluence in
Germany.
was the strongest of the German princes. The parallel
may be carried one step further. Just as under Otto and
his successors the Roman Empire was Teutonized, so
now under the Hapsburg dynasty, from whose hands the
sceptre departed only once thenceforth, the Teutonic
Empire tends more and more to lose itself in an Austrian
monarchy.
Of that monarchy and of the power of the house of
Hapsburg, Maximilian was, even more than Rudolf his
ancestor, the founder ^. Uniting in his person those wide
domains through Germany which had been dispersed
among the collateral branches of his house, and claiming
by his marriage with Mary of Burgundy most of the terri-
tories of Charles the Bold, he was a prince greater than
any who had sat on the Teutonic throne since the death
of Frederick the Second. But it was as archduke of
Austria, count of Tyro\ duke of Styria and Carinthia,
feudal superior of lands in Swabia, Alsace, and Switzer-
land, that he was great, not as Roman Emperor. For
just as from him the Austrian monarchy begins, so with
him the Holy Empire in its old meaning ends. That
strange system of doctrines, half religious half politicali
which had supported it for so many ages, was groviiV
obsolete, and the theory which had wrought such cfaaoges
on Germany and Europe, passed ere long so complecdj
from remembrance that we can now do no more than call
up a faint and wavering image of what it must once have
been.
For it is not only in imperial history that the accession
' The two immediately preceding Hapsbargs. It is nereitheka ta>
Emperors, Albert II (i 438- 14 39) Maximilian that the aicendancyrf
and Frederick III, father of Max- that fiunily most be dated.
imilian (1439-1493)1 had been
I
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS,
Z^Z
of Maximilian is a landmark. That time — a time of
change and movement in every part of human life, a time
when printing had become common, and books were no
longer confined to the clergy, when drilled troops were
replacing the feudal militia, when the use of gunpowder
was changing the face of war — was especially marked by
one event, to which the history of the world offers no
parallel before or since, the discovery of America. The
cloud which from the beginning of things had hung thick
and dark round the borders of civilization was suddenly
lifted : the feeling of mysterious awe with which men had
regarded the firm plain of earth and her encircling ocean
ever since the days of Homer, vanished when astronomers
and geographers taught them that she was an insignificant
globe, which, so far from being the centre of the universe,
was itself swept round in the motion of one of the least
of its countless systems. The notions that had hitherto
prevailed regarding the life of man and his relations to
nature and the supernatural, were rudely shaken by the
knowledge that was soon gained of tribes in every stage
of culture and living under every variety of condition, who
had developed apart from all the influences of the Eastern
hemisphere. In a.d. 1453 the capture of Constantinople
and extinction of the Eastern Empire had dealt a fatal
blow to the prestige of tradition and an immemorial name ;
in A.D. 1492 there was disclosed a world whither the
eagles of the all-conquering Rome had never winged their
flight. No one could now have repeated the arguments
of the De Monarchia,
Another movement, too, widely different, but even more
momentous, was beginning to spread from Italy beyond
the Alps. Since the barbarian tribes setded in the Roman
provinces, no change had come to pass in Europe at all
CHAP. XVII.
Character
of the epoch
of Maxi-
milian.
The dis-
covery of
America.
The Re-
naissance.
3H
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVII. comparable to that which followed the diflfusion of the
new learning in the latter half of the fifteenth century.
Enchanted by the beauty of the ancient models of art
and poetry, more particularly those of the Greeks, men
came to regard with aversion and contempt all that had
been done or produced from the days of Trajan to those
of Pope Nicholas the Fifth. The Latin style of the
writers who lived after Tacitus was debased : the archi-
tecture of the Middle Ages was barbarous : the scholastic
philosophy was an odious and unmeaning jargon : Aris-
totle himself, Greek though he was, Aristotle who had
been for three centuries more than a prophet or an
apostle, was hurled from his throne, because his name
was associated with the dismal quarrels of Scotists and
Thomists. That spirit, whether we call it analytical or
sceptical, or earthly, or simply secular, for it is more or
less all of these — the spirit which was the exact antithesis
of mediaeval mysticism, had swept in and carried men
away, with all the force of a pent-up torrent. People were
content to gratify their tastes and their senses, caring litde
for worship, and still less for doctrine : their hopes and
ideas were no longer such as had made their forefathers
crusaders or ascetics: their imagination was possessed
by associations far different from those which had in-
spired Dante: they did not revolt against the church,
but they had no enthusiasm for her, and they had
enthusiasm for whatever was fresh and graceful and
intelligible. From all that was old and solemn, or that
seemed to savour of feudalism or monkery, they tamed
away, too indifferent to be hostile. And so, in the midst
of the Renaissance, so, under the consciousness tint
former things were passing from the earth, and a new
order opening, so, with the other beliefs and memories
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS,
315
of the Middle Age, the shadowy rights of the Roman
Empire melted away in the fuller modem light. Here
and there a jurist muttered that no neglect could destroy
its universal supremacy, or a priest declaimed to lis'tless
hearers on its duty to protect the Holy See; but to
Germany it had become an ancient device for holding
together the discordant members of her body, to its
possessors an engine for extending the power of the
house of Hapsburg.
Henceforth, therefore, we must look upon the Holy
Roman Empire as lost in the German ; and after a few
faint attempts to resuscitate old-fashioned claims, nothing
remains to indicate its origin save a sounding title and
a precedence among the states of Europe. It was not
that the Renaissance exerted any direct political influence
either against the Empire or for it ; men were too busy
upon statues and coins and manuscripts to care what
befel Popes or Emperors. It acted rather by silently
withdrawing the whole system of doctrines upon which
the Empire had rested, and thus leaving it, since it had
previously no support but that of opinion, without any
support at all.
During Maximilian's eventful reign several efforts were
made to construct a new constitution, but it is to German
rather than to imperial history that they properly belong.
Here, indeed, the history of the Holy Empire might
close, did not the title unchanged beckon us on, and
Were it not that the events of these later centuries may
in their causes be traced back to times when the name
of Roman was not wholly a mockery. It may be enough
to remark that while the preservation of peace and the
better administration of justice were in some measure
attained by the Public Peace and Imperial Chamber,
CHAP. XVIL
Empire
henceforth
German.
Attempts
to reform
the Germa-
nic Omsti-
tution.
3i6
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvn.
Causes of
the failure
of the pro-
jects of re-
form.
established in a.d. 1495, schemes still more important
failed through the bad constitution of the Diet, and the
unconquerable jealousy of the Emperor and the Estates.
Maximilian refused to have his prerogative, indefinite
though weak, restricted by the appointment of an pd*
ministrative councils, and when the Estates extorted it
from him, did his best to ensure its failure. In the Het,
which consisted of three colleges, electors, princes, and
cities, the lower nobility and knights of the Empire mst
unrepresented, and resented every decree that affected
their position, refusing to pay taxes in voting which they
had no voice. The interests of the princes and the
cities were often irreconcilable, while the strength of
the crown would not have been sufficient to make its
adhesion to the latter of any effect The policf of
conciliating the commons, which Sigismund had tried,
succeeding Emperors seldom cared to repeat, content
to gain their point by raising factions among the ter-
ritorial magnates, and so to stave off the unwekxune
demand for reform. After many earnest attempts to
establish a representative system, such as might reast
the tendency to local independence and cm^ the evOi
of separate administration, the hope so often ba£3ed died
away. Forces were too nearly balanced: the sovereign
could not extend his personal control, nor could the
reforming party limit him by a strong council of govcni-
ment, for such a measure would have equally trenched 00
the independence of the states. So ended the first great
effort for German unity, interesting from its bearing on
the events and aspirations of our own day; interesting,
too, as giving the most convincing proof of the decline of
< Reichsregiment.
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS.
317
the imperial oflfice. For the projects of reform did not
propose to effect their objects by restoring to Maximilian
the authority his predecessors had once enjoyed, but
by setting up a body which would resemble far more
nearly the senate of a federal state than the administrative
council which surrounds a monarch. The existing system
developed itself further : relieved from external pressure,
the princes became more despotic in their own terri-
tories : distinct codes were framed, and new systems of
administration introduced : the insurgent peasantry were
crushed down with more confident harshness. Already
had leagues of princes and cities been formed^ (that
of Swabia was one of the strongest forces in Germany,
and often the monarch's firmest support) ; now alliances
begin to be contracted with foreign powers, and receive a
direction of formidable import from the rivalry which the
pretensions on Naples and Milan of Charles the Eighth
and Lewis the Twelfth of France kindled between their
house and the Austrian. It was no slight gain to have
friends in the heart of the enemy's country, such as
French intrigue found in the Elector Palatine and the
count of Wiirtemberg.
Nevertheless this was also the era of the first conscious
feeling of German nationality, as distinct from imperial.
Driven in on all hands, with Italy and the Slavic lands
aad Burgundy hopelessly lost, Teutschland learnt to
separate itself from Welschland *. The Empire became
CHAP. XVII.
^ Wenzel had encouraged the
leagues of the cities, and incurred
dicreby the hatred of the nobles.
* The Germans, like our own
ancestors, called foreign, i.e, non-
TcQtonic nations, Welsh; yet ap-
parcntlj not all such nations, but
only those which they in some way
associated with the Roman Em-
pire, the Cymry of Roman Britain,
the Romanized Kelts of Gaul, the
Italians, the Roumans or Wallachs
of Transylvania and the Principa-
lities. It does not appear that
Germanic
nationality.
3i8
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVII.
Change of
Titles.
The title
* Imperator
Electus*
the representative of a narrower but more practicable
national union. It is not a mere coincidence that at tbis
date there appear several notable changes of style
* Nationis Teutonicae ' (Teutscher Nation) is added to tbe
simple * sacrum imperium Romanum/ The title of 'Im-
perator electus/ which Maximilian obtains leave from Pqw
Julius the Second to assume^ when the Venetians pre-
vent him from reaching his capital, marks the severance
of Germany from Rome. No subsequent Emperor re-
ceived his crown from the ancient capital (Charles the
Fifth was indeed crowned by the Pope's hands, but the
ceremony took place at Bologna, and was therefore of
at least questionable validity) ; each assumed after his
German coronation 1 the title of Emperor Elect"*, and
employed this in all documents issued in his name. Bat
the word * elect ' being omitted when he was addressed
by others, partly from motives of courtesy, partly because
at Frankfort. An acconot of the
ceremony may be found in Goedie'i
Wahrheit und Dichtung, Aaciia,
though it remained and indeed ii
still a German town, lay in too
remote a comer of the conntrf to
be a convenient capital, and wis
moreover in dangerous pioiiinitf
to the West Franks, as stobbom
old Germans continue to call then.
As early as aj>. 1553 «e find-
bishop Leopold of Bambef;g cooi-
plaining that the French had ino-
gated to themselves the hoooon of
the Frankish name, and called tbeo-
selves * reges Franciae,' instesd of
*reges Franciae occidentalis.'— I**
poldus Bebenburgensis, apod Sditf^
dium, Sylloge T^teUuttm,
m Erwahlter Kaisei. See Ap*
pendiz. Note C.
either the Magyars or any Sclavonic
people were called by any form of
the name.
In the Icelandic writings of the
thirteenth century France (Francia
occidentalis) is called * Valland.*
^ Julius was well pleased to give
it, as he had no desire to see Max-
imilian in Italy.
* The German crown was re-
ceived at Aachen, the ancient
Frankish capital, where may still
be seen, in the gallery of the basi-
lica, the marble throne on which
the Emperors from the days of
Charles to those of Ferdinand I
were crowned. It was upon this
chair that Otto III had found the
body of Charles seated, when he
opened his tomb in a.d. 100 i.
After Ferdinand I, the coronation
as well as the election took place
THE RENAISSANCE AND ITS EFFECTS.
319
the old rules regarding the Roman coronation were for-
gotten or remembered only by antiquaries, he was never
called, even when formality was required, anything but
Emperor. The substantial import of another title now
first introduced is the same. Before Otto the First, the
Teutonic king had called himself either ' rex ' alone, or
* Franconim orientalium rex,' or * Francorum atque Saxo-
num rex ' :. after a.d. 962, all lesser dignities had been
merged in the 'Romanorum Imperator°.' To this
Maximilian appended * Germaniae rex,' or, adding Frede-
rick the Second's bequest o, * l^onig in Germanien und
Jerusalem.' It has been thought that from a mixture of
the title King of Germany, and that of Emperor, has been
formed the phrase ' German Emperor,' or less correctly,
' Emperor of Germany p.' But more probably the terms
' German Emperor ' and * Emperor of Germany ' are no-
thing but convenient corruptions of the technical descrip-
tion of the Germanic sovereign Q.
That the Empire was thus sinking into a merely
German power cannot be doubted. But it was only
natural that those who lived at the time should not dis-
cern the tendency of events. Again and again did the
restless and sanguine Maximilian propose the recovery
of Burgundy and Italy, — his last scheme was to adjust
the relations of Papacy and Empire by becoming Pope
himself: nor were successive Diets less zealous to check
CHAP. XVII.
" Romanoram rex (after Henry
n) till the coronation at Rome.
• But the Emperor was only one
of many claimants to this kingdom ;
they multiplied as the prospect of
regaining it died away.
p The latter does not occur, even
in English books, till comparatively
recent times. English writers of
the seventeenth century always call
him * The Emperor/ pure and sim-
ple, just, as they invariably say
* the French king.* But the phrase
*Empereur d'Almayne* may be
found in very early French writers.
4 See Moser, Romische Kayser;
Goldast's and other collections of
imperial edicts and proclamations.
320
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVll.
private war, sLill the scandal of Germany, to set right
the gear of the imperial chamber, to make the imperial
officials permanent, and their administration unifoim
throughout the country. But while they talked the
heavens darkened, and the flood came and destroyed
them all.
CHAPTER XVm.
THE REFORMATION AND ITS EFFECTS UPON
THE EMPIRE.
The Reformation falls to be mentioned here, of course,
not as a religious movement, but as the cause of political
changes, which still further rent the Empire, and struck
at the root of the theory by which it had been created
and upheld. Luther completed the work of Hildebrand.
Hitherto it had seemed not impossible to strengthen the
German state into a monarchy, compact if not despotic ;
the very Diet of Worms, where the monk of Wittenberg
proclaimed to an astonished church and Emperor that
the day of spiritual tyranny was past, had framed and
presented a fresh scheme for the construction of a central
council of government. The great religious schism put
an end to all such hopes, for it became a source of poli-
tical disunion far more serious and permanent than any
that had existed before, and it taught the two factions
into which Germany was henceforth divided to regard
each other with feelings more bitter than those of hostile
nations.
The breach came at the most unfortunate time possible.
After an election, more memorable than any preceding,
an election in which Francis the First of France and
Henry the Eighth of England had been his competitors,
Y
CHAP. XVIII.
Accession
of Charles
^(1519-
1558).
322
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvm.
a prince had just ascended the imperial throne who united
dominions vaster than any Europe had seen since the
days of his great namesake. Spain and Naples, Flanders,
and other parts of the Burgundian lands, as well as large
regions in eastern Germany, obeyed Charles: he drew
inexhaustible revenues from a new empire beyond the
Atlantic. Such a power, directed by a- mind more reso-
lute and profound than that of Maximilian his grandfather,
might have well been able, despite the stringency of his
coronation engagements » and the watchfulness of the
electors ^, to override their usurped privileges, and make
himself practically as well as officially the head of the
nation. Charles the Fifth, though from the coldness of
his manner c and his Flemish speech never a favouiite
among the Germans, was in point of fact far stronger
than Maximilian or any other Emperor who had reigned
for three centuries. In Italy he succeeded, after long
struggles with the Pope and the French, in rendering
himself supreme: England he knew how to lead, by
flattering Henry and cajoling Wolsey : from no state bat
France had he serious opposition to fear. To tins
strength his imperial dignity was indeed a mere accident :
its sources were the infantry of Spain, the looms of
Flanders, the sierras of Peru. But the conquest once
achieved, might could lose itself in right; and as an
earlier Charles had veiled the terror of the Prankish
» The so-called * Wahlcapitula-
tion.*
*> The electors long refused to
elect Charles, dreading his great
hereditary power, and were at last
induced to do so only by their
overmastering fear of the Turks.
^ Nearly all the Hapsburgs seem
to have wanted that sort of genial
heartiness which, apt u it is to be
stifled by education in the pmiiki
has nevertheless been possesied by
several other ro3ral lines, gmtiy
contributing to their vitality; aifii
instance by more than one pcncB
of the houses of Bnmswick and
Hohenzollem.
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE. 323
sword under the mask of Roman election, so might his
successor sway a hundred provinces with the sole name
of Roman Emperor, and transmit to his race a dominion
as wide and more enduring.
One is tempted to speculate as to what might have
happened had Charles espoused the reforming cause.
His reverence for the Pope's person is sufficiently seen
in the sack of Rome and the captivity of Clement; the
traditions of his office might have led him to tread in the
steps of the Henrys and the Fredericks, into which even
the timid Lewis the Fourth and the unstable Sigismund
had sometimes ventured; the awakening zeal of the
German people, exasperated by the exactions of the
Romish court, would have strengthened his hands, and
enabled him, while moderating the excesses of change, to
fix his throne on the deep foundations of national love.
It may well be doubted — Englishmen at least have reason
for the doubt — whether the Reformation would not have
lost as much as it could have gained by being entangled
in the meshes of royal patronage. But, setting aside
Charles's personal leaning to the old faith, and forget-
ting that he was king of the most bigoted race of Europe,
his position as Emperor made him almost perforce the
Pope's ally. The Empire had been called into being
by Rome, had vaunted the protection of the Apostolic
See as its highest earthly privilege, had latterly been
wont, especially in Hapsburg hands, to lean on the
Papacy for support. Itself founded entirely on prescrip-
tion and the traditions of immemorial reverence, how
could it abandon the cause which the longest prescription
and the most solemn authority had combined to con-
secrate? With the German clergy, despite occasional
quarrels, it had been on better terms than with the lay
Y 2
CHAP. ZVIII.
Attitude of
Charles /o-
wards the
religious
movement.
324
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvin.
Ultimate
failure of
the repres-
sive policy
of Charles.
aristocracy ; their heads had been the chief ministers rf
the crown ; the advocacies of their abbeys were the last
source of imperial revenue to disappear. To turn against
them now, when furiously assailed by heretics ; to abro-
gate claims hallowed by antiquity and a hundred la^
would be to pronounce its own sentence, and the M of
the eternal city's spiritual dominion must involve the M
of what still professed to be her temporal Charles would
have been glad to see some abuses corrected; bat a
broad line of policy was called for, and he cast in his lot
with the Catholics d.
Of many momentous results only a few need be noticed
here. The reconstruction of the old imperial system,
upon the basis of Hapsburg power, proved in the end
impossible. Yet for some years it had seemed actuaOj
accomplished. When the Smalkaldic league had been
dissolved and its leaders captured, the whole country lay
prostrate before Charles. He overawed the Diet at Augs-
burg by his Spanish soldiery : he forced formularies of
doctrine upon the vanquished Protestants : he set up and
pulled down whom he would throughout Germany, amid
^ See this brought out with great
force in the very interesting work
of Padre Tosti, Prolegomeni alia
Storia Universale della Chiesa ffrom
which I quote one passage, which
bears directly on the matter in
hand : * II grido della riforma cleri«
cale aveva un eco terribile in tutta
la compagnia civile dei popoli:
essa percuoteva le cime del laicale
potere, e rimbalzava per tutta la
gerarchia sociale. Se 1* imperadore
Sigismondo nel consilio di Cos-
tanza non avesse iiutate queste con-
sequenze nella eresia di Hus e di
Girolamo di Praga, forse non av-
rebbe con tanto zdo mindadilk
fiamme que' novatori. Rotto da
Lutero il vincolo di snggeuooe il
Papa ed ai preti in fatti di idi-
gione, arvenne che andie qoeOo*
che sommetteva il vassallo il bi^
rone, il barone al impendoic i
allentasse. H popolo coo li Bibbii
in mano era prete, vescovo^ e pipit
e se prima contristato della pi^
potenza di chi gli soprastan, vat'
reva al successore di San FSeti^
ora ricorreva a se stesso, anoAofi
commesse Fra Martino le dutvi
del regno dei Cieli.'— ^?oL n. pp>
398, 9-
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE. 325
the muttered discontent of his own partisans. Then, as
in the beginnmg of the year 1553, he lay at Innsbruck,
fondly dreaming that his work was done, waiting the
spring weather to cross to Trent, where the Catholic
fathers had again met to settle the world's faith for it,
news was suddenly brought that North Germany was in
arms, and that the revolted Maurice of Saxony had seized
Donauwerth, and was hurrying through the Bavarian
Alps to surprise his sovereign e. Charles rose and fled
south over the snows of the Brenner, then eastwards,
under the blood-red cliflfs of dolomite that wall in the
Pusterthal, far away into the silent valleys of Carinthia :
the council of Trent broke up in consternation : Europe
saw and the Emperor acknowledged that in his fancied
triumph over the spirit of revolution he had done no
more than block up for the moment an irresistible torrent.
When this last effort to produce religious uniformity by
violence had failed as hopelessly as the previous devices
of holding discussions of doctrine and calling a general
council, a sort of armistice was agreed to in 1555, which
lasted in mutual fear and suspicion for more than sixty
years. Four years after this disappointment of the hopes
and projects which had occupied his busy life, Charles,
weighed down by cares and with the shadow of coming
death already upon him, resigned the sovereignty of Spain
and the Indies, of Flanders and Naples, into the hands
of his son Philip the Second ; while the imperial sceptre
passed to his brother Ferdinand, who had been some
time before (1531) chosen King of the Romans. Ferdi-
nand was content to leave things much as he found
• Maurice is reported to have escape. * I have no cage big enough,'
beeo just as well pleased at Charles* said he, * for such a bird.'
CHAP. XVIII.
Ferdi-
nand /,
1558-1564-
326
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVIII.
Maximilian
1564-1576.
Destruction
of the Ger-
manic state-
system.
them, and the amiable Maximilian II, who succeeded Imn,
though personally well inclined to the Protestants, found
himself fettered by his position and his allies, and could
do little or nothing to quench the flame of religious and
political hatred. Germany remained divided into two
omnipresent factions, and so further than ever from har-
monious action, or a tightening of the long-loosened bond
of feudal allegiance. The states of either creed being
gathered into a league, there could no longer be a recog-
nized centre of authority for judicial or administrative
purposes. Least of aU could a centre be sought in tbe
Emperor, the leader of the papal party, the suspected foe
of every Protestant. Too closely watched to do anjrthii^
of his own authority, too much committed to one par^r
to be accepted as a mediator by the other, he was driven
to attain his own objects by falling in with the schemes
and furthering the selfish ends of his adherents, by be-
coming the accomplice or the tool of the Jesuits. The
Lutheran princes addressed themselves to reduce a power
of which they had still an over-sensitive dread, and found
when they exacted from each successive sovereign engage-
ments more stringent than his predecessor's, that in this,
and this alone, their Catholic brethren were not unwilling
to join them. Thus obliged to strip himself one by one
of the ancient privileges of his crown, the Emperor came
to have litde influence on the government except that
which his intrigues might exercise. Nay, it became
almost impossible to maintain a government at all For
when the Reformers found themselves outvoted at the
Diet, they declared that in matters of religion a majority
ought not to bind a minority. As the measures were
few which did not admit of being reduced to this cate-
gory, for whatever benefited the Emperor or any other
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE. 327
Catholic prince injured the Protestants, nothing could be
done save by the assent of two bitterly hostile factions.
Thus scarce anything was done ; and even the courts of
justice were stopped by the disputes that attended the
appointment of every judge or assessor.
In the foreign politics of Germany another result
followed. Inferior in military force and organization,
the Protestant princes at first provided for their safety
by forming leagues among themselves. The device was
an old one, and had been employed by the monarch him-
self before now, in despair at the effete and cumbrous
forms of the imperial system. Soon they began to look
beyond the Vosges, and found that France, burning here-
tics at home, was only too happy to smile on free opinions
elsewhere. The alliance was easily struck ; Henry the
Second assumed in 1552 the title of * Protector of the
Germanic liberties,' and a pretext for interference was
never wanting in future.
These were some of the visible political consequences
of the great religious schism of the sixteenth century.
But beyond and above them there was a change far more
momentous than any of its immediate results. There is
perhaps no event in history which has been represented
in so great a variety of lights as the Reformation. It has
been called a revolt of the laity against the clergy, or of
the Teutonic races against the Italians, or of the king-
doms of Europe against the universal monarchy of the
Popes. Some have seen in it only a burst of long-
repressed anger at the luxury of the prelates and the
manifold abuses of the ecclesiastical system; others a
renewal of the youth of the church by a return to primi-
tive forms of doctrine. All these indeed to some extent
it was ; but it was also something more profound, and
CHAP. znn.
Alliance
of the Pro-
testants with
France.
The Re-
formation
spirit, and
its influence
upon the
Empire,
328
THE JIOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVIII.
fraught with mightier consequences than any of them. It
was in its essence the assertion of the principle of indivi-
duality— ^that is to say, of true spiritual freedom. Hitherto
the personal consciousness had been a faint and broken
reflection of the universal ; obedience had been held the
first of religious duties ; truth had been conceived as a
something external and positive, which the priesthood
who were its stewards were to communicate to the passive
layman, and whose saving virtue lay not in its being felt
and known by him to be truth, but in a purely formal
and unreasoning acceptance. The great principles which
mediaeval Christianity still cherished were obscured by the
limited, rigid, almost sensuous forms which had been
forced on them in times of ignorance and barbarism.
That which was in its nature abstract, had been able to
survive only by taking a concrete expression. The uni-
versal consciousness became the Visible Church: tbe
Visible Church hardened into a government and degene-
rated into a hierarchy. Holiness of heart and life was
sought by outward works, by penances and pilgrimages,
by gifts to the poor and to the clergy^ wherein there
dwelt often little enough of a charitable mind. The p«"
sence of divine truth among men was sj^mbolized under
one aspect by the existence on earth of an infallible Vicir
of God, the Pope ; under another, by the reception of
the present Deity in the sacrifice of the mass ; in a third,
by the doctrine that the priest's power to remit dns and
administer the sacraments depended upon a transmission
of miraculous gifts which can hardly be called other than
physical. All this system of doctrine, which might, hot
for the position of the church as a worldly and therrfcfc
obstructive power, have expanded, renewed, and purified
itself during the four centuries that had elapsed since its
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE, 329
completion^, and thus remained in harmony with the
growing intelligence of mankind, was suddenly rent in
pieces by the convulsion of the Reformation, and flung
away by the more religious and more progressive peoples
of Europe. That which was external and concrete, was
in all things to be superseded by that which was inward
and spiritual. It was proclaimed that the individual
spirit, while it continued to mirror itself in the world-
spirit, had nevertheless an independent existence as a
centre of self-issuing force, and was to be in all things
active rather than passive. Truth was no longer to be
truth to the soul until it should have been by the soul
recognized, and in some measure even created ; but when
so recognized and felt, it is able under the form of faith
to transcend outward works and to transform the dogmas
of the understanding; it becomes the living principle
within each man's breast, infinite itself, and expressing
itself infinitely through his thoughts and acts. He who
as a spiritual being was delivered from the priest, and
brought into direct relation with the Divinity, needed not,
as heretofore, to be enrolled a member of a visible con-
gregation of his fellows, that he might live a pure and
useful life among them. Thus by the Reformation the
Visible Church as well as the priesthood lost that para-
mount importance which had hitherto belonged to it, and
sank from being the depositary of all religious tradition,
the source and centre of religious life, the arbiter of
eternal happiness or misery, into a mere association of
Christian men, for the expression of mutual sympathy
and the better attainment of certain common ends. Like
' It was not till the end of the tiation was definitely established as
eleventh century that transubstan- a dogma.
CHAP. XVIII.
Effect of
the Refor-
mation on
the doctrines
regarding
the Visible
Church.
330
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XVIII.
Consequent
effect upon
the Empire,
those other doctrines which were now assailed by the
Reformation, this mediaeval view of the nature of the
Visible Church had been naturally, and so, it may be
said, necessarily developed between the third and the
twelfth century, and must therefore have represented the
thoughts and satisfied the wants of those times. By the
Visible Church the flickering lamp of knowledge and
literary culture, as well as of religion, had been fed and
tended through the long night of the Dark Ages. But,
like the whole theological fabric of which it formed a
part, it was now hard and unfruitful, identified with its
own worst abuses, capable apparently of no further deve-
lopment, and unable to satisfy minds which in growing
stronger had grown more conscious of their strength.
Before the awakened zeal of the northern nations it stood
a cold and lifeless system, whose organization as a hier-
archy checked the free activity of thought, whose bestowal
of worldly power and wealth on spiritual pastors drew
them away from their proper duties, and which by main-
taining alongside of the civil magistracy a co-ordinate
and rival government, maintained also that separation of
the spiritual element in man from the secular, which had
been so complete and so pernicious during the Middle
Ages, which debases life, and severs religion from mo-
rality.
The Reformation, it may be said, was a religious move-
ment : and it is the Empire, not the Church, that we have
here to consider. The distinction is only apparent. The
Holy Empire is but another name for the Visible Church.
It has been shewn already how mediaeval theory con-
structed the State on the model of the Church ; how the
Roman Empire was the shadow of the Popedom— deagned
to rule men's bodies as the pontiflf ruled their souk
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE, 331
Both alike claimed obedience on the ground that Truth
is One, and that where there is One faith there must be
One government &. And, therefore, since it was this very
principle of Formal Unity that the Reformation overthrew,
it became a revolt against despotism of every kind ; it
erected the standard of civil as well as of religious liberty,
since both of them are needed, though needed in a dif-
ferent measure, for the worthy development of the indi-
vidual spirit. The Empire had never been conspicuously
the antagonist of popular freedom, and was, even under
Charles the Fifth, far less formidable to the commonalty
than were the petty princes of Germany. But submis-
sion, and submission on the ground of indefeasible trans-
mitted right, upon the ground of Catholic traditions and
the duty of the Christian magistrate to suflfer heresy and
schism as little as the parallel sins of treason and rebel-
lion, had been its constant claim and watchword. Since
the days of Julius Caesar it had passed through many
phases, but in none of them had it ever been a consti-
tutional monarchy, pledged to the recognition of popular
rights. And hence the indirect tendency of the Reforma-
tion to narrow the. province of government and exalt the
privileges of the subject was as plainly adverse to the
Empire as the Protestant claim of the right of private
judgment was to the pretensions of the Papacy and the
priesthood.
The remark must not be omitted in passing, how much
less than might have been expected the religious move-
ment did at first actually eflfect in the way of promoting
either political progress or freedom of conscience. The
habits of centuries were not to be unlearnt in a few years,
B See the passages quoted in note ™, p. 98 ; and note s, p. no.
CHAP. XVIII.
Immediate
influence of
the Refor-
mation on
political
and religi-
ous liberty.
332
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. ZVIIl.
Conduct of
'the Protest
ant States.
and it was natural that ideas struggKng into e^dstence
and activity should work erringly and imperfectly for a
time. By a few inflammable minds liberty was carried
into antinomianism, and produced the wildest excesses of
life and doctrine. Several fantastic sects arose, refusing
to conform to the ordinary rules without which human
society could not subsist. But these commotions neither
spread widely nor lasted long. Far more pervading and
more remarkable was the other error, if that can be called
an error which was the almost unavoidable result of the
circumstances of the time. The principles which had led
the Protestants to sever themselves from the Roman
Church, should have taught them to bear with the
opinions of others, and warned them from the attempt to
connect agreement in doctrine or manner of worship widi
the necessary forms of civil government Still less ought
they to have enforced that agreement by civil penalties;
for faith, upon their own shewing, had no value save when
it was freely given. A church which does not claim to be
infallible is bound to allow that some part of the truth
may possibly be with its adversaries : a church which
permits or encourages human reason to apply itsdf to
revelation has no right first to argue with people and then
to punish them if they are not convinced. But whether
it was that men only half saw what they had done, or that
finding it hard enough to imrivet priestly fetters, th^
welcomed all the aid a temporal prince could give, the
result was that religion, or rather religious creeds, began
to be involved with politics more closely than had cwr
been the case before. Through the greater part of Chris-
tendom wars of religion raged for a century or more, and
down to our own days feelings of theological antipathy
continue to aflfect the relations of the powers of EuropCi
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE. 333
In almost every country the form of doctrine which
triumphed associated itself with the state, and maintained
the despotic system of the Middle Ages, while it forsook
the grounds on which that system had been based. It
was thus that there arose National Churches, which were
to be to the several Protestant countries of Europe that
which the Church Catholic had been to the worid at
large ; churches, that is to say, each of which was to be
co-extensive with its respective state, was to enjoy landed
wealth and exclusive political privilege, and was to be
armed with coercive powers against recusants. It was
not altogether easy to find a set of theoretical principles
on which such churches might be made to rest, for they
could not, like the old church, point to the historical
transmission of their doctrines ; they could not claim to
have in any one man or body of men an infallible organ of
divine truth ; they could not even fall back upon general
councils, or the argument, whatever it may be worth,
^ Securtis iudicai orbis ierrarum* But in practice these
diflficulties were soon got over, for the dominant party in
each state, if it was not infallible, was at any rate quite
sure that it was right, and could attribute the resistance
of other sects to nothing but moral obliquity. The will
of the sovereign, as in England, or the will of the ma-
jority, as in Holland, Scandinavia, and Scotland, imposed
upon each country a peculiar form of worship, and kept
up the practices of mediaeval intolerance without their
justification. Persecution, which might be at least ex-
cused in an infallible Catholic and Apostolic Church, was
peculiarly odious when practised by those who were not
catholic, who were no more apostolic than their neigh-
bours, and who had just revolted from the most ancient
and venerable authority in the name of rights which they
CHAP. xvin.
334
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XVIII.
Influence
of the Re-
formation
on the name
and asso-
ciations of
the Empire.
now denied to others. If union with the visible church
by participation in a material sacrament be necessary to
eternal life, persecution may be held a duty, a kindness
to perishing souls. But if the kingdom of heaven be in
every sense a kingdom of the spirit, if saving faith be
possible out of one visible body and under a diversity of
external forms, persecution becomes at once a crime and
a folly. Therefore the intolerance of Protestants, if the
forms it took were less cruel than those practised by the
Roman Catholics, was also far less defensible ; for it had
seldom anything better to allege on its behalf than mo-
tives of political expediency, or, more often, the mere
headstrong passion of a ruler or a faction to silence the
expressions of any opinions but their own. To enlarge
upon this theme, did space permit it, would not be to
digress from the proper subject of this narrative. For
the Empire, as has been said more than once already, was
far less an institution than a theory or doctrine. And
hence it is not too much to say, that the ideas which
have but recently ceased to prevail regarding the duty of
the magistrate to compel uniformity in doctrine and wor-
ship by the civil arm, may all be traced to the relation
which that theory established between the Roman Church
and the Roman Empire ; to the conception, in fact, of sn
Empire Church itself.
Two of the ways in which the Reformation affected the
Empire have been now described : its immediate political
results, and its far more profound doctrinal importance,
as implanting new ideas regarding the nature of freedom
and the province of government. A fliird, though ^
parently almost superficial, cannot be omitted. Its name
and its traditions, little as they retained of their fonner
magic power, were still such as to excite the antipathy of
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE. 335
the German reformers. The form which the doctrine of
the supreme importance of one faith and one body of the
faithful had taken was the dominion of the ancient
cjipital of the world through her spiritual head, the
Roman bishop, and her temporal head, the Emperor.
As the names of Roman and Christian had been once
convertible, so long afterwards were those of Roman and
Catholic. The Reformation, separating into its parts
what had hitherto been one conception, attacked Roman-
ism but not Catholicity, and formed religious communities
which, while continuing to call themselves Christian, re-
pudiated the form with which Christianity had been so
long identified in the West. As the Empire was founded
upon the assumption that the limits of Church and State
are exactly co-extensive, a change which withdrew half
of its subjects from the one body while they remained
members of the other, transformed it utterly, destroyed
the meaning and value of its old arrangements, and forced
the Emperor into a strange and incongruous position.
To his Protestant subjects he was merely the head of the
administration, to the Catholics he was also the Defender
and Advocate of their church. Thus from being chief of
the whole state he became the chief of a party within it,
the Corpus Catholicorum, as opposed to the Corpus
Evangelicorum ; he lost what had been hitherto his most
holy claim to the obedience of the subject ; the awakened
feeling of German nationality was driven into hostility to
an institution whose title and history bound it to the
centre of foreign tyranny. After exulting for seven cen-
turies in the heritage of Roman rule, the Teutonic nations
cherished again the feeling with which their ancestors
had resisted Julius Caesar and Germanicus. Two mutually
repugnant systems could not exist side by side without
OHAP. rviii.
336
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvm.
Troubles of
Germany.
Striving to destroy one another. The instincts of theo-
logical sympathy overcame the duties of political alle-
giance, and men who were subjects both of the Emperor
and of their local prince, gave all their loyalty to him who
espoused their doctrines and protected their worship.
For in North Germany princes as well as people were
mostly Lutheran: in the southern and especially the
south-eastern lands, where the magnates held to the dd
faith, Protestants were scarcely to be found except in the
free cities. The same causes which injured the Emperor's
position in Germany swept away the last semblance of
his authority through other countries. In the great
struggle which followed, the Protestants of England and
France, of Holland and Sweden, thought of him only as
the ally of Spain, of the Vatican, of the Jesuits ; and he
of whom it had been believed a century before that bf
nothing but his existence was the coming of Antichrist on
earth delayed, was in the eyes of the northern divines
either Antichrist himself or Antichrist's foremost cham-
pion. The earthquake that opened a chasm in Germany
was felt through Europe ; its states and peoples marshalled
themselves under two hostile banners, and with the Em-
pire's expiring power vanished that united Christendom
it had been created to lead \
Some of the effects thus sketched began to shew
themselves as early as that famous Diet of Worms, from
Luther's appearance at which, in a.d. 1521, we may
h Henry VIII of England when
he rebelled against the Pope called
himself King of Ireland (^his pre-
decessors had used only the title
* Dominus Hibemiae *) without ask-
ing the Emperor's permission, in
order to shew that he repudiated
the temporal as well as the q»iiitiul
dominion of Rome.
So the Statute of Appeals is cardbl
to deny and reject the authority of
'other foreign potentates/ meaning*
no doubt, the Emperor as well is
the Pope.
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE, 337
date the beginning of the Reformation. But just as the
end of the religious conflict in England can hardly be
placed earlier than the Revolution in 1 688, nor in France
than the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685,
so it was not till after more than a century of doubtful
strife that the new order of things was fully and finally
established in Germany. The arrangements of Augsburg,
like most treaties on the basis of uti possidetis y were no
better than a hollow truce, satisfying no one, and con-
sciously made to be broken. The church lands which
Protestants had seized, and Jesuit confessors urged the
CathoHc princes to reclaim, furnished an unceasing
ground of quarrel : neither party yet knew the strength of
its antagonists sufiQciently to abstain from insulting or
persecuting their modes of worship, and the smoulder-
ing hate of half a century was kindled by the troubles
of Bohemia into the Thirty Years' War.
The imperial sceptre had now passed from the in-
dolent and vacillating Rudolf II (1576-1612), the corrupt
and reckless policy of whose ministers had done much to
exasperate the already suspicious minds of the Protestants,
into the firmer grasp of Ferdinand the Second i. Jealous,
bigoted, implacable, skilful in forming and concealing
his plans, resolute to obstinacy in carrying them out in
action, the house of Hapsburg could have had no abler
and no more unpopular leader in their second attempt to
turn the German Empire into an Austrian military
monarchy. They seemed for a time as near to the
accomplishment of the project as Charles the Fifth had
been. Leagued with Spain, backed by the Catholics
of Germany, served by such a leader as Wall.enstein,
i Matthias, brother of Rudolf II, reigned from 1612 till 1610.
Z
CHAP. xvni.
Rudolf IT,
1576-1612.
Matthias^
1612-1619.
Thirty
Fears*
War,
1618-1648.
Ferdinand
lit A.D.
1619-1637.
Plans of
Ferdinand
II.
338
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. xvm.
Gustavus
Adolphus.
Ferdinand
1637-1658.
Ferdinand proposed nothing less than the extension of
the Empire to its old limits, and the recovery of his
crown's full prerogative over all its vassals. Denmark and
Holland were to be attacked by sea and land : Italy to
be reconquered with the help of Spain : Maximilian of
Bavaria and Wallenstein to be rewarded with principalities
in Pomerania and Mecklenburg. The latter general was
all but master of Northern Germany when the successful
resistance of Stralsund turned the wavering balance of
the war. Soon after (a.d. 1630), Gustavus Adolphus
crossed the Baltic, and saved Europe from an impending
reign of the Jesuits. Ferdinand's high-handed pro-
ceedings had already alarmed even the Catholic princes.
Of his own authority he had put the Elector Palatine
and other magnates to the ban of the Empire : he had
transferred an electoral vote to Bavaria; had treated
the districts overrun by his generals as spoil of war,
to be portioned out at his pleasure ; had unsettled afl
possession by requiring the restitution of church pro-
perty occupied since a.d. 1555. The Protestants were
helpless ; the Catholics, thotigh they complained of the
flagrant illegality of such conduct, did not dare to oppose
it : the rescue of Germany was the work of the Swedish
king. In four campaigns he destroyed the armies and
the prestige of the Emperor; devastated his lands, emptied
his treasury, and left him at last so enfeebled that no
subsequent successes could make him again formidaUe.
Such, nevertheless, was the selfishness and apathy of the
Protestant princes, divided by the mutual jealousy of the
Lutheran and the Calvinist party — some, like the Saxon
elector, most inglorious of his inglorious house, bribed by
the cimning Austrian ; others afraid to stir lest a reverse
should expose them improtected to his vengeance-
EFFECT OF THE REFORMATION ON THE EMPIRE, 339
that the issue of the long protracted contest would have
gone against them but for the interference of France.
It was the leading principle of Richelieu's policy to
depress the house of Hapsburg and keep Germany
disunited : hence he fostered Protestantism abroad while
trampling it down at home. The triumph he did not
live to see was sealed in a.d. 1648, on the utter exhaustion
of all me combatants, and the treaties of Miinster and
Osnabriick were thenceforward the basis of the Germanic
constitution.
CHAP. XVUl.
The peace of
Westphalia.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA : LAST STAGE IN
THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
The Peace of Westphalia is the first, and, with the
exception perhaps of the Treaties of Vienna in 1815,
the most important of those attempts to reconstruct bj
diplomacy the European states- system which have played
so large a part in modem history. It is important,
however, not as marking the introduction of new prin-
ciples, but as winding up the struggle which had convulsed
Germany since the revolt of Luther, sealing its results,
and closing definitely the period of the Reformation.
Although the causes of disunion which the religioos
movement called into being had now been at work for
more than a hundred years, their eflfects were not Mj
seen till it became necessary to establish a system which
should represent the altered relations of the Gennan
states. It may thus be said of this famous peace, as d
the other so-called * fundamental law of the Empire,' the
Golden Bull, that it did no more than legalize a condition
of things already in existence, but which by being legaliied
acquired new importance. To all parties alike the result
of the Thirty Years' War was thoroughly unsatisfactory:
to the Protestants, who had lost Bohemia, and still were
obliged to hold an inferior place in the electoral college
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
341
and in the Diet: to the Catholics, who were forced to
permit the exercise of heretical worship, and leave the
church lands in the grasp of sacrilegious spoilers : to the
princes, who could not throw off the burden of imperial
supremacy: to the Emperor, who could turn that su-
premacy to no practical account. No other conclusion
was possible to a contest in which every one had been
vanquished and no one victorious; which had ceased
because while the reasons for war continued the means of
war had failed. Nevertheless, the substantial advantage
remained with the German princes, for they gained the
formal recognition of that territorial independence whose
origin may be placed as far back as the days of Frederick
the Second, and the maturity of which had been hastened
by the events of the last preceding century. It was,
indeed, not only recognized but justified as rightful and
necessary. For while the political situation, to use a
current phrase, had changed within the last two hundred
years, the eyes with which men regarded it had changed
still more. Never by their fiercest enemies in earlier
times, not once by the Popes or Lombard republicans in
the heat of their strife with the Franconian and Swabian
Caesars, had the Emperors been reproached as mere
German kings, or their claim to be the lawful heirs of
Rome denied. The Protestant jurists of the sixteenth or
rather of the seventeenth century were the first persons who
ventured to scoff at the pretended lordship of the world,
and declare their Empire to be nothing more than a
German monarchy, in dealing with which no superstitious
reverence need prevent its subjects from making the best
terms they could for themselves, and controlling a sove-
reign whose religious predilections made him the friend of
their enemies.
CHAP. XIX.
342
THE JIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIZ.
The trea-
tise of Hip-
polytus a
Lapide.
It is very instructive to turn suddenly from Dante or
Peter de Andlo to a book published shortly bcsfore a.d.
1648, under the name of Hippolytus a Lapide S and
notice the matter-of-fact way, the almost contemptuous
spirit in which, disregarding the traditional glories of the
Empire, he comments on its actual condition and pros-
pects. Hippolytus, the pseudonym which the jurist
Chemnitz assumed, urges with violence almost super-
perfluous that the Germanic constitution must be treated
entirely as a native growth : that the so-called *lex regia*
and the whole system of Justinianean absolutism which
the Emperors had used so dexterously, were in their
applications to Germany not merely incongruous but
positively absurd. With eminent learning, Chemnitz ex-
amines the early history of the Empire, draws from the
unceasing contests of the monarch with the nobility the
unexpected moral that the power of the former has been
always dangerous, and is now more dangerous than ever,
and then launches out into a long invective against the
policy of the Hapsburgs, an invective which the ambition
and harshness of the late Emperor made only too plausible.
The one real remedy for the evils that menace Germany
he states concisely — *domus Austriacae extirpatio:' but,
failing this, he would have the Emperor's prerogative
restricted in every way, and provide means for resisting
or dethroning him. It was by these views, which seem
to have made a profound impression in Germany, that
the states, or rather France and Sweden acting on their
behalf, were guided in the negotiations of Osnabrtick and
Munstcr. By extorting a full recognition of the sovereignty
of all the princes. Catholics and Protestants ahke, in thdr
respective territories, they bound the Emperor from any
* De Ratione Status in Imperio nostro RomatuhGMnnanMk
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
343
direct interference with the administration, either in par-
ticular districts or throughout the Empire. All affairs of
public importance, including the rights of making war or
peace, of levying contributions, raising troops, building
fortresses, passing or interpreting laws, were henceforth
to be left entirely in the hands of the Diet. The Aulic
Council, which had been sometimes the engine of im-
perial oppression, and always of imperial intrigue, was so
restricted as to be harmless for the future. The *reservata'
of the Emperor were confined to the rights of granting
titles and confirming tolls. In matters of religion, an
exact though not perfectly reciprocal equality was estab-
lished between the two chief ecclesiastical bodies, and
the right of *Itio in partes,' that is to say, of deciding
questions in which religion was involved by amicable
negotiations between the Protestant and Catholic states,
instead ot by a majority of votes in the Diet, was defi-
nitely conceded. Both Lutherans and Calvinists were
declared free from all jurisdiction of the Pope or any
Catholic prelate. Thus the last link which bound Ger-
many to Rome was snapped, the last of the principles by
virtue of which the Empire had existed was abandoned.
For the Empire now contained and recognized as its
members persons who formed a visible body at open war
with the Holy Roman Church ; and its constitution ad-
mitted schismatics to a full share in all those civil rights
which, according to the doctrines of the early Middle
Age, could be enjoyed by no one who was out of the
communion of the Catholic Church. The Peace of
Westphalia was therefore an abrogation of the sove-
reignty of Rome, and of the theory of Church and State
with which the name of Rome was associated. And in
this light was it regarded by Pope Innocent the Tenth,
CHAP. ZIX.
Rights of
the Em-
peror and
the D'lety as
settled in
A J). 1648.
344
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
Lo^s of
imperial
territories.
who commanded his legate to protest against it, and sub-
sequently declared it void by the bull * Zelo domus Dei \'
The transference of power within the Empire, from its
head to its members, was a small matter compared with
the losses which the Empire suffered as a whole. The
real gainers by the treaties of Westphalia were those who
had borne the brunt of the battle against Ferdinand the
Second and his son. To France were ceded Brisac,
the Austrian part of Alsace, and the lands of the three
bishoprics in Lorraine — Metz, Toul, and Verdun, which
her armies had seized in a.d. 1552 : to Sweden, northern
Pomerania, Bremen, and Verden. There was, however,
this difference between the position of the two, that
whereas Sweden became a member of the German Diet
for what she received (as the king of Holland was, until
1866 a member for Dutch Luxemburg, and as the
kings of Denmark, up till the accession of the present
sovereign in 1863, were for Holstein), the acquisitions
of France were delivered over to her in full sovereignty,
and for ever (as it seemed) severed from the Gennanic
body. And as it was by their aid that the liberties of the
Protestants had been won, these two states obtained at
the same time what was more valuable than territorial
accessions — the right of interfering at imperial elections,
and generally whenever the provisions of the treaties of
^ Even then the Roman pontiffs
had lapsed into that scolding, anile
tone (so unlike the fiery brevity of
Hildebrand, or the stern precision
of Innocent III) which is now
seldom absent from their public
utterances. Pope Innocent the
Te*nth pronounces the provisions
of the treaty, 'ipso iure nulla.
irrita, inralida, iniqna, imosta,
damnata, reprobata, inania, riri-
busque et effectu vacua, oounoo
fuisse, esse, et perpetuo fore.' lo
spite of which they wen ob-
served.
This baU may be found in toL
xvii. of the BuUarium. It beus
date Nov. 20tb, aj>. 16^.
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE,
345
Osnabriick and Miinster, which they had guaranteed,
might be supposed to be endangered. The bounds of
the Empire were further narrowed by the final separation
of two countries, once integral parts of Germany, and up
to this time legally members of her body. Holland and
Switzerland were, in a.d. 1648, declared independent.
The Peace of Westphalia is an era in imperial history
not less clearly marked than the coronation of Otto the
Great, or the death of Frederick the Second. As from
the days of Maximilian it had borne a mixed or transi-
tional character, well expressed by the name Romano-
Germanic, so henceforth it is in everything but title purely
and solely a German Empire. Properly, indeed, it was no
longer an Empire at all, but a Confederation, and that of
the loosest sort. For it had no common treasury, no
eflBcient common tribunals c, no means of coercing a re-
fractory member d ; its states were of different religions,
were governed according to different forms, were ad-
ministered judicially and financially without any regard to
sach other. The traveller in Central Germany used, up
:ill 1866, to be amused to find, every hour or two, by the
::hange in the soldiers' uniforms, and in the colour of the
stripes on the railway fences, that he had passed out of
Dne and into another of its miniature kingdoms. Much
CHAP. XIX.
c The Imperial Chamber (Kam-
Tiergericht) continued, with fre-
:^ueiit and long interruptions, to
iit while the Empire lasted. But
ts slowness and formality passed
:hat of any other legal body the
ivorld has yet seen, and it had
no power to enforce its sentences.
Till i68q it sat at Speyer, whence
the saying 'Spirae lites spirant et
Don exspirant;* in that year the
French laid Speyer in ashes, and
the Chamber was in 1693 esta-
blished at Wetzlar. The Aulic
council was little more efficient,
and was generally disliked as the
tool of imperial intrigue.
d The * matricula ' specifying the
quota of each state to the imperial
army could not be any longer em-
ployed.
Germany
after the
Peace,
346
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
Number of
petty inde-
pendent
states : ef-
fects of such
a system on
Germany,
Feudalism
in France^
England^
Germany,
more surprised and embarrassed would he have been
a century ago, when, instead of the present twenty-nine
there were three hundred petty principalities between the
Alps and the Baltic, each with its own laws, its own court
(in which the ceremonious pomp of Versailles was faintly
reproduced), its little army, its separate coinage, its
tolls and custom-houses on the frontier, its crowd of
meddlesome and pedantic ofl&cials, presided over by a
prime minister who was generally the unworthy favourite
of his prince and the pensioner of some foreign court.
This vicious system, which paralyzed the trade, the litera-
ture, and the political thought of Germany, had been
forming itself for some time, but did not become fully
established until the Peace of Westphalia, by emanci-
pating the princes from imperial control, had made them
despots in their own territories. The impoverishment of
the inferior nobility and the decline of the commercial
cities caused by a war that had lasted a whole generation,
removed every counterpoise to the power of the electors
and princes, and made absolutism supreme just where
absolutism wants all its justification, its states too small to
have any public opinion, states in which everything de-
pends on the monarch, and the monarch depends on
his favourites. After a.d. 1648 the provincial estates or
parliaments became obsolete in most of these principalities,
and powerless in the rest. Germany was forced to drink
to its very dregs the cup of feudalism, feudalism from
which all the feelings that once ennobled it had departed.
It is instructive to compare the results of the system of
feudality in the three chief countries of modern Europe.
In France, the feudal head absorbed all the powers of
the state, and left to the aristocracy only a few privileges,
odious indeed, but politically worthless. In England,
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
347
the mediaeval system expanded into a constitutional
monarchy, where the oligarchy was still strong, but the
commons had won the full recognition of equal civil
rights. In Germany, everything was taken from the
sovereign, and nothing given to the people; the repre-
sentatives of those who had been fief-holders of the first
and second rank before the Great Interregnum were now
mdependent potentates ; and what had been once a
monarchy was now an aristocratic federation. The Diet,
originally an assembly of magnates meeting from time
to time like our early English Parliaments, became in
A.D. 1654 a permanent body, at which the electors,
princes, and cities were represented by their envoys. In
other words, it was now not a national council, but an
international congress of diplomatists.
Where the sacrifice of imperial, or rather federal, rights
to state rights was so complete, we may wonder that the
farce of an Empire should have been retained at all. A
mere German Empire would probably have perished; but
the Teutonic people could not bring itself to abandon the
Venerable heritage of Rome. Moreover, the Germans were
:if all European peoples the most slow-moving and long-
suffering; and as, if the Empire had fallen, something
ttiust have been erected in its place, they preferred to
svork on with the clumsy machine so long as it would
work at all. Properly speaking, it has no history after
this ; and the history of the particular states of Germany
which takes its place is one of the dreariest chapters in the
annals of mankind. It would be hard to find, from the
Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution, a single
grand character or a single noble enterprise ; a single
sacrifice made to great public interests, a single instance
in which the welfare of nations was preferred to the selfish
CHAP. XIX.
Causes of
the eon."
tinuance of
the Empire.
348
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
passions of their princes®. The military history of those
times will always be read with interest; but free and pro-
gressive countries have a history of peace not less rich
and varied than that of war ; and when we ask for an
account of the political life of Germany in the eighteenth
century, we hear nothing but the scandals of buzzing
courts, and the wrangling of diplomatists at never-ending
congresses.
and the
Balance of
power.
Useless and helpless as the Empire had become, it was
not without its importance to the neighbouring countries^
with whose fortunes it had been linked by the Peace of
Westphalia. It was the pivot on which the political
The Empire system of Europe was to revolve : the scales, so t6 speak,
which marked the equipoise of power that had become
the grand object of the policy of all states. This modem
caricature of the plan by which the theorists of the four-
teenth century had proposed to keep the world at peace,
used means less noble and attained its end no better than
theirs had done. No one will deny that it was and is
desirable to prevent a universal monarchy in Europe.
But it may be asked whether a system can be considered
successful which allowed Frederick of Prussia to seiic
Silesia, which did not check the aggressions of Russia
and France upon their neighbours, which was for ever
bartering and exchanging lands in every part of Europe
without thought of the inhabitants, which permitted and
has never been able to redress that greatest of public mis-
fortunes, the partitionment of Poland. And if it be said
that bad as things have been under this system, they
« There was indeed one ruler of and people, he did nothing bj dWBi
consummate powers ; but his policy and gave no opportunity for the d^
was seif-regarding throughout, aiid velopement of political life among
though he did much for his state them.
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE,
349
CHAP. XTX.
in Europe.
would have been worse without it, it is hard to refrain I
from asking whether any evils could have been greater |
than those which the people of Europe have suffered!
through constant wars with each other, and through the \
withdrawal, even in time of peace, of so large a part of.
their population from useful labour to be wasted in main-
taining a standing army.
The result .of the extended relations in which Germany i position of
now found herself to Europe, with two foreign kings the Empire
never wanting an occasion, one of them never the wish,
to interfere, was that a spark from her set the Continent
ablaze, while flames kindled elsewhere were sure to spread
hither. Matters grew worse as her princes inherited or
created so many thrones abroad. The Duke of Holstein
acquired Denmark, the Count Palatine Sweden, the Elector
of Saxony Poland, the Elector of Hanover England, the
Archduke of Austria Hungary and Bohemia, while the
Elector (originally Margrave) of Brandenburg assumed,
on the strength of non-imperial territories to the north-
eastward which had come into his hands, the style and
title of King of Prussia. Thus the Empire seemed again
about to embrace Europe; but in a sense far different
from that which those words would have expressed under
Charles and Otto. Its history for a century and a half
is a dismal list of losses and disgraces. The chief ex-
ternal danger was from French influence, for a time
supreme, always menacing. For though Lewis the Four-
teenth, on whom, in a.d. 1658, half the electoral college
wished to confer the imperial crown, was before the end
of his life an object of intense hatred, ofiicially entitled
* Hereditary enemy of the Holy Empire ^* France had
' Erhfeind des heiligen Reichs,
350
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
Weakness
and stag-
nation of
Germany.
nevertheless a strong party among the princes always at
her beck. The Rhenish and Bavarian electors were her
favourite tools. The ^r/unions* begun in a. d. 1680, a
pleasant euphemism for robbery in time of peace, added
Strasburg and other places in Alsace, Lorraine, and
Franche Comte to the monarchy of Lewis, and brought
him nearer the heart of the Empire; his ambition and
cruelty were witnessed to by repeated wars, and by the
devastation of the Rhine countries; the ultimate though
short-lived triumph of his policy was attained when
Marshal Belleisle dictated the election of Charles VII in
A.D. 1742. In the Turkish wars, when the princes left
Vienna to be saved by the Polish Sobieski, the Empire's
weakness appeared in a still more pitiable light There
was, indeed, a complete loss of hope and interest in the
old system. The princes had been so long accustomed
to consider themselves the natural foes of a central govern-
ment, that a request made by it was sure to be dis-
regarded ; they aped in their petty courts the pomp and
etiquette of Vienna or Paris, grumbling that they should
be required to garrison the great frontier fortresses which
alone protected them from an encroaching neighbour.
The Free Cities had never recovered the famines and
sieges of the Thirty Years* War: Hanseatic greatness
had waned, and the southern towns had sunk into languid
oligarchies. All the vigour of the people in a somewhat
stagnant age either found its sphere in rising states like
the Prussia of Frederick the Great, or turned away fipom
politics altogether into other channels. The Diet had
become contemptible from the slowness with which it
moved, and its tedious squabbles on matters the most
frivolous. Many sittings were consumed in the discussion
of a question regardmg the time of keeping Easter, more
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
351
ridiculous than that which had distracted the Western
churches in the seventh century, the Protestants refusing
to reckon by the reformed calendar because it was the
work of a Pope. Collective action through the old organs
was confessed impossible, when the common object of
defence against France was sought by forming a league
under the Emperor's presidency, and when at European
congresses the Empire was not represented at all «. No
change could come from the Emperor, whom the capitu-
lation of A.D. 1658 deposed ipso facto if he violated its
provisions. As Dohm^i said, to keep him from doing
harm, he was kept from doing anything.
Yet little was lost by his inactivity, for what could
have been hoped from his action? From the election of
Albert the Second, a.d. 1437, to the death of Charles the
Sixth, A.D. 1742, the sceptre had remained in the hands
of one family. So far from being fit subjects for undis-
tinguishing invective, the Hapsburg Emperors may be
contrasted favourably with the contemporary dynasties of
France, Spain, or England. Their policy, viewed as
a whole from the days of Rudolf downwards, had been
neither conspicuously tyrannical, nor faltering, nor dis-
honest. But it had been always selfish. Entrusted with
an office which might, if there be any power in those
memories of the past to which the champions of hereditary
monarchy so constantly appeal, have stirred their sluggish
souls with some enthusiasm for the heroes on whose
throne they sat, some wish to advance the glory and the
happiness of Germany, they had cared for nothing, sought
nothing, used the Empire as an instrument for nothing
but the attainment of their own personal or dynastic ends.
K Only the envoys of the several ^ Quoted by Ludwig Haiisser,
states were present at Utrecht in 1 7 1 3. Deutsche Geschichte,
CHAP. XIX.
Leopold 7,
1658-1705.
Joseph 7,
1705-1711.
Charles VI,
1711-1742.
The Haps-
burg Em-
perors and
their policy.
352
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
Causes of
tlu long
retention of
the throne
by Aui>tria.
Placed on the eastern verge of Germany, the Hapsburgs
had added to their ancient lands in Austria proper, Styria
and Tyrol, non-German territories far more extensive, and
had thus become the chiefs of a separate and independent
state. They endeavoured to reconcile its interests with
the interests of the Empire, so long as it seemed possible
to recover part of the old imperial prerogative. But when
such hopes were dashed by the defeats of the Thirty
Years* War, they hesitated no longer between an elective
crown and the rule of their hereditary states, and com-
ported themselves thenceforth in European politics not as
the representatives of Germany, but as heads of the great
Austrian monarchy. There would have been nothing
culpable in this had they not at the same time continued
to entangle Germany in wars with which she bad no
concern : to waste her strength in tedious combats with
the Turks, or plunge her into a new struggle with France,
not to defend her frontiers or recover the lands she had
lost, but that some scion of the house of Hapsburg might
reign in Spain or Italy. Watching the whole course of
their foreign policy, marking how in a.d. 1736 they had
bartered away Lorraine for Tuscany, a German for a non-
German territory, and seeing how at home they opposed
every scheme of reform which could in the least degree
trench upon their own prerogative, how they strove to
obstruct the imperial chamber lest it should interfere widi
their own Aulic council, men were driven to separate die
body of the Empire from the imperial office and its pos-
sessors i, and when plans for reinvigorating the one
failed, to leave the others to their fate. Still the old line
clung to the crown with that Hapsburg gripe which has
i The distinction is well expressed thum/ to which we have noibr'
by the German 'Reich' and 'Kaiser- tunately no texms to correapond.
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
353
almost passed into a proverb. Odious as Austria was,
no one could despise her, or fancy it easy to shake her
commanding position in Europe. Her alliances were
fortimate : her designs were steadily pursued : her dis-
membered territories always returned to her. Though
the throne continued strictly elective, it was impossible
not to be influenced by long prescription. Projects were
repeatedly formed to set the Hapsburgs aside by electing
a prince of some other linei, or by passing a law that
there should never be more than two, or four, successive
Emperors of the same house. France ^ ever and anon
renewed her warnings to the electors, that their freedom
was passing from them, and the sceptre becoming here-
ditary in one haughty family. But it was felt that a
change would be difficult and disagreeable, and that the
heavy expense and scanty revenues of the Empire required
to be supported by larger patrimonial domains than most
German princes possessed. The heads of states like
Prussia and Hanover, states whose size and wealth would
have made them suitable candidates, were Protestants,
and so excluded both by the connexion of the imperial
ofl&ce with the Church, and by the majority of Roman
Catholics in the electoral college \ who, however jealous
CHAP. XIX.
» So the Elector of Saxony pro-
posed in 1332 that, Albert II,
Frederick III, and Maximilian
Having been all of one house,
Charles V's successor should be
chosen from some other. — Moser,
Udmische Kayser. See the various
attempts of France in Moser. The
coronation engagements (Wahl-
capitulation) of every Emperor
l>ound him not to attempt to make
the throne hereditary in his family.
* In 1658 France offered to sub-
sidize the Elector of Bavaria if he
would become Emperor.
1 Whether an Evangelical was
eligible for the office of Emperor
was a question often debated, but
never actually raised by the candi-
dature of any but a Roman Catho-
lic prince. The * exacta aequaiitas '
conceded by the Peace of West-
phalia might appear to include so
important a privilege. But when
Aa
354
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHA^. XIX.
Charles
VII, 1742-
1745.
Francis 7,
1745-1765-
they might be of Austria, were led both by habit and
sympathy to rally round her in moments of peril The
one occasion on which these considerations were dis-
regarded shewed their force. On the extmction of the
male line of Hapsburg in the person of Charles the
Sixth, the intrigues of the French envoy, Marshal BeDe-
isle, procured the election of Charles Albert of Bavaria,
who stood first among the Catholic princes. His reign
was a succession of misfortunes and ignominies. Driven
from Munich by the Austrians, the head of the H0I7
Empire lived in Frankfort on the bounty of France^
cursed by the country on which his ambition had brought
the miseries of a protracted war ™. The choice in 1745
of Duke Francis of Lorraine, husband of the archduchess
of Austria and queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa, was
meant to restore the crown to the oiiTy power capable
of wearing it with dignity: in Joseph the Second, her
son, it again rested on the brow of a Hapsburg °. In
we consider that the peculiar rela- nation ceremonies (among irfucb
tion in which the Emperor stood to was a sort of ordination) perfonned
the Holy Roman Church was one upon a Protestant, the coodoiioD
which no heretic could hold, and must be unfavourable to the diiw
that the coronation oaths could not of any but a Catholic,
have been taken by, nor the coro-
^ 'The bold Bavarian, in a luckless hour.
Tries the dread summits of Cesarean power;
With unexpected legions bursts away,
And sees defenceless realms receive his sway. • . •
The baffled prince in honour's flattering bloom
Of hasty greatness finds the fatal doom;
His foes' derision and his subjects* blame,
And steals to death from anguish and from shame'
Johnson, Vanity of Human "WvAn*
" The following nine reasons for byPfeffinger(FirfriflnitfiHf»Wfttf)»
the long continuance of the Empire writing early in the dj^teeoti) "'
in the House of Hapsburg are given tury :—
1. The great power of Austria.
2. Her wealth, now that the Empire was so poor.
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE.
355
le war of the Austrian succession, which followed
n the death of Charles the Sixth, the Empire as a
ody took no part ; in the Seven Years' War its whole
light broke in vain against one resolute member.
Jnder Frederick the Great Prussia approved herself at
*ast a match for France and Austria leagued against her,
nd the semblance of unity which the predominance of a
ingle power had hitherto given to the Empire was replaced
y the avowed rivalry of two military monarchies* The
-mperor Joseph the Second, a sort of philosopher-king,
lan whom few have more narrowly missed greatness,
lade a desperate effort to set things right, striving to
sstore the disordered finances, to purge and vivify the
mperiaJ Chamber. Nay, he renounced the intolerant
olicy of his ancestors, quarrelled with the Pope©, and
resumed to visit Rome, whose streets heard once more
le shout that had been silent for three centuries,
Ewiva il nostro imperatore ! Siete a casa vostra : siete
padrone P.* But his indiscreet haste was met by a
iillen resistance, and he died disappointed in plans for
'hich the time was not yet ripe, leaving no result save the
jague of princes which Frederick the Great had formed
3. The majority of Catholics among the electors.
4. Her fortunate matrimonial alliances.
5. Her moderation.
6. The memory of benefits conferred by her.
7. The example of evils that had followed a departure from
the blood of former Caesars.
8. The fear of the confusion that would ensue if she were
deprived of the crown.
9. Her own eagerness to have it.
o The Pope undertook a journey shook it.
> Vienna to mollify Joseph, and
let with a sufficiently cold recep-
on. When he saw the famous
kinister Kaunitz and gave him his
%nd to kiss, Kaunitz took it and kept his Christmas at Rome.
A a 2
p * You are in your own house :
be the master.'
Joseph was the first Emperor
since Charles the Bald who had
CHAP. XIX.
Seven
Years* War,
Joseph II,
1765-1790.
35^
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
Leopold II,
1 790-1 792.
Last phase
of the Em-
pire.
The Diet,
to oppose his designs on Bavaria. His successor, Leopold
the Second, abandoned the projected reforms, and a cahn,
the calm before the hurricane, settled down agsun upon
Germany. The existence of the Empire was almost for-
gotten by its subjects : there was nothing to remind them
of it but a feudal investiture now and then at Vienna (real
feudal rights were obsolete q); a concourse of solemn old
lawyers at Wetzlar puzzling over interminable suits'; and
some thirty diplomatists at Regensburgs, the relics of that
Imperial Diet where once a hero-king, a Frederick or a
Henry, enthroned amid mitred prelates and steel-dad
barons, had issued laws for every tribe from the Mediter-
ranean to the Baltic *. The solemn triflings of this so-
called * Diet of Deputation' have probably never been
equalled elsewhere ^, Questions of precedence and tide,
questions whether the envoys of princes should have
chairs of red cloth like those of the electors, or only of
the less honourable green, whether they should be served
on gold or on silver, how many hawthorn boughs should
be hung up before the door of each on May-day ; these,
and such as these, it was their chief employment not to
settle but to discuss. The pedantic formalism of oU
Germany passed that of Spaniards or Turks ; it had now
crushed under a mountain of rubbish whatever meaning
or force its old institutions had contained. It is tbe
penalty of greatness that its form should outHve its sub*
4 Joseph II was foiled in his * Frederick the Great said of
attempt to assert them. the Diet, * £s ist eio Scbattenbiki,
' Goethe spent some time in eine Versammlung aus PoblinM
studying law at Wetzlar among die mehr mit Formalien ik vs^
those who practised in the Kam- Sachen sich beschaftigen, and, *ic
merger icht. Hofhunde, den Mcmd anbelleii.'
f' Cf.FvLttev, Historical Develope- » Cf. Hausser, Deuiseht G^
ment of the Political Constitution of schichte ; Introduction.
the German Empire, vol. iii.
LAST PHASE OF THE EMPIRE,
357
stance: that gilding and trappings should remain when
that which they were meant to deck and clothe has de-
parted. So our sloth or our timidity, not seeing that
whatever is false must be also bad, maintains in being
what once was good long after it has become helpless and
hopeless : so now at the close of the eighteenth century,
strings of sounding titles were all that was left of the
Empire which Charles had founded, and Frederick
adorned, and Dante sung.
The German mind, just beginning to put forth the
blossoms of its wondrous literature, turned away in disgust
from the spectacle of ceremonious imbecility more than
Byzantine. National feeling seemed gone from princes
and people alike. Of Frederick the Great, of Joseph II,
there is no need to speak, but even Lessing, who did
more than any one else to create the German literary
spirit, says, * Of the love of country I have no concep-
tion : it appears to me at best a heroic weakness which
I am right glad to be without*.' There were never-
theless persons who saw how fatal such a system was,
lying like a nightmare on the people's soul. Speaking
of the union of princes formed by Frederick of Prussia
to preserve the existing condition of things, Johannes
von Miiller writes y: 'If the German Union serves for
nothing better than to maintain the status quo^ it is against
the eternal order of God, by which neither the physical
nor the moral world remains for a moment in the stattis
quo^ but all is life and motion and progress. To exist
without law or justice, without security from arbitrary
imposts, doubtful whether we can preserve from day to
day our children, our honour, our liberties, our rights.
CHAP. ZIX.
Feelings
of the
German
people.
« Qiioted by Hausser.
y DeutschlandsErwartungenvom
Filrsienbunde, quoted in the Staats
Lexikon.
358
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XIX.
OUT lives, helpless before superior force, without a bene-
ficial connexion between our states, without a national
spirit at all, this is the status quo of our nation. And it
was this that the Union was meant to confirm. If it be
this and nothing more, then bethink; you how when Israel
saw that Rehoboam would not hearken, the people gave
answer to the king and spake, " What portion have we
in David, or what inheritance in the son of Jesse? to
your tents, O Israel: David, see to thine own house."
See then to your own houses, ye princes.'
Nevertheless, though the Empire stood like a corpse
brought forth from some Egyptian sepulchre, ready to
crumble at a touch, there seemed no reason why it should
not stand so for centuries more. Fate was kind, and slev
it in the light.
CHAPTER XX.
FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
Goethe has described the uneasiness with which, in
the days of his childhood, the burghers of his native
Frankfort saw the walls of the Roman Hall covered with
the portraits of Emperor after Emperor, till space was left
for few, at last for one ». In a.d. 1792 Francis the Second
mounted the throne of Augustus, and the last place was
filled. Three years before there had arisen on the western
horizon a little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, and
now the heaven was black with storms of ruin. There
was a prophecy *», dating from the first days of the Em-
pire's decline, that when all things were falling to pieces, and
wickedness rife in the world, a second Frankish Charles
should rise as Emperor to purge and heal, to bring back
peace and purify religion. If this was not exacdy the
mission of the new ruler of the West Franks, he was at
least anxious to tread in the steps and revive the glories
of the hero whose throne he professed to have again
erected. It were a task superfluously easy to shew how
delusive is that minute historical parallel of which every
Parisian was full in a.d. 1804, the parallel between the heir
of a long line of fierce Teutonic chieftains, whose vigorous
genius had seized what it could of the monkish learning
• Wahrheit und Dichtung^ bk. i. modern ; and few have any merit
The Romer Saal is still one of the as works of art.
sights of Frankfort. The portraits, * Jordanis Chronica^ ap. Schar-
howeyer, which one now sees in it, dium, Sylloge Tractatuum,
seem to be all or nearly all of them
CHAP. XX.
Francis II,
1792-1806.
36o
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE,
CHAP. XX.
Napoleon^
Emperor of
the West.
Belief of
Napoleon
that he was
thesuccessor
of the eighth century, and the son of the Corsican lawyer,
with all the brilliance of a Frenchman and all the resolute
profundity of an Italian, reared in, yet only half believing,
the ideas of the Encyclopaedists, swept up into the seat of
absolute power by the whirlwind of a revolution. Alcuin
and Talleyrand are not more unlike than are their masters.
But though in the characters and temper of the men there
is litde resemblance, though their Empires agree in this
only, and hardly even in this, that both were founded on
conquest, there is nevertheless a sort of grand historical
similarity between their positions. Both were the leaders
of fiery and warlike nations, the one still untamed as the
creatures of their native woods, the other drunk with revo-
lutionary fury. Both aspired to found, and seemed for a
time to have succeeded in founding, universal monarchies.
Both were gifted with a strong and susceptible imagina-
tion, which if it sometimes overbore their judgment, was
yet one of the truest and highest elements of their great-
ness. As the one looked back to the kings under the
Jewish theocracy and the Emperors of Christian Rome,
so the other thought to model himself after Caesar and
Charlemagne. For, useful as was the fancied precedent
of the title and career of the great Carolingian to a chief
determined to be king, yet unable to be king after the
fashion of the Bourbons, and seductive as was such a con-
nexion to the imaginative vanity of the French people, it
was no studied purpose or stimulating art that led Napo-
leon to remind his subjects so frequentiy of the hero he
claimed to represent. No one who reads the records of
his life can doubt that he believed, as fully as he believed
anything, that the same destiny which had made France
the centre of the modem world had also appointed him
to sit on the throne and carry out the projects of Charles
FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
361
the Frank, to rule all Europe from Paris, as the Caesars
had ruled it from Rome c. It was in this belief that he
went to the ancient capital of the Franklsh Emperors to
receive there the Austrian recognition of his imperial title :
that he talked of 'revendicating' Catalonia and Aragon,
because they had formed a part of the Carolingian realm,
though they had never obeyed any descendant of Hugh
Capet : that he undertook a journey to Nimeguen, where
he had ordered the ancient palace to be restored, and in-
scribed on its walls his name below that of Charles : that
he summoned the Pope to attend his coronation as
Stephen had come ten centuries before to instal Pipin in
the throne of the last Merovingian \ The same desire
« In an address by Napoleon to
the Senate in 1804, bearing date
loth Frimaire (ist Dec), are the
words, • Mes descendans conserve-
ront longtemps ce trone, le premier
de runivers.* Answering a deputa-
tion from the department of the
Lippe, Aug. 8th, 181 1, *La Provi-
dence, qui a voulu que je r^tablisse
le tr6ne de Charlemagne, vous a
fait naturellement rentrer, avec la
HoUande et les villes ans^atiques,
dans le sein de I'Empire.* — CEuvres
de Napoleon^ tom. v. p. 521.
* Pour le Pape, je suis Charle-
magne, parce que, comme Charle-
magne, je r^unis la couronne de
France 4 celle des Lombards, et
que mon Empire confine avec
rOrient.* (Quoted by Lanfrey, Vie
de Napoleon^ iii. 417.)
* Votre Saintet6 est souveraine
de Rome, mais j*en suis I'Empe-
reur/ (Letter of Napoleon to Pope
Pius, Feb. 13th, 1806. Lanfrey.)
* Dites bien,* says Napoleon to
Cardinal Fesch, * que je suis Charle-
magne, leur Empereur [of the Papal
Court] que je dois €tre traits de
meme. Je fais connaitre au Pape
mes intentions en peu de mots, s'il
n*y acquiesce pas, je le r^uirai it
la meme condition qu'il ^tatt avant
Charlemagne.* (Lanfrey, Vie de
Napoleon^ iii. 420.)
<* Napoleon said on one occa-
sion, 'Je n'ai pas succ6d6 a Louis
Quatorze, mais a Charlemagne.* —
Bourrienne, Vie de Napoleon^ vi. 256,
who adds that in 1804, shortly be-
fore he was crowned, he had the
imperial insignia of Charles brought
from the old Frankish capital, and
exhibited them in a jeweller's shop
in Paris, along with those which
had just been made for his own co-
ronation. But if there was not in
this a trick of Napoleon's, there
must be a mistake of Bourrienne's,
for these insignia had been removed
from Aachen by Austria in 1798.
(Cf. Bock, Die Kleinodien des h.
romischen Reiches^ p. 4.) Somewhat
in the same spirit in which he
CHAP. XX.
of Charle-
magne.
362
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XX.
Attitude of
the Papacy
towards
Napoleon,
to be regarded as lawful Emperor of the West shewed
itself in his assumption of the Lombard crown at Milan;
in the words of the decree by which he annexed Rome
to the Empire, revoking * the donations which my prede-
cessors, the French Emperors, have made®;' in the title
' King of Rome,* which he bestowed on his ill-fated son,
in imitation of the German * King of the Romans C We
are even told that it was at one time his intention to eject
the Hapsburgs, and be chosen Roman Emperor in their
stead. Had this been done, the analogy would have been
complete between the position which the French ruler
held to Austria now, and that in which Charles and Otto
had stood to the feeble Caesars of Byzantium. It was
curious to see the head of the Roman church turning
away from his ancient ally to the reviving power of France
— France, where the Goddess of Reason had been wor-
shipped eight years before — just as he had sought the he^)
of the first Carolingians against his Lombard enemies s.
The difference was indeed great between the feelings
wherewith Pius the Seventh addressed his *very dear
son in Christ,' and those that had pervaded the inter-
course of Pope Hadrian the First with the son of Pifrin;
just as the contrast is strange between the principles that
shaped Napoleon's policy and the vision of a theocracy
that had floated before the mind of Charles. Neither
displayed the Bayeux embroidery, in
order to incite his subjects to the
conquest of England.
• * Je n'ai pu concilier ces grands
inter^ts (of political order and the
spiritual authority of the Pope)
qu'en annulant les donations des
Empereurs Fran9ais, mes pr6d6ces-
seurs, et en r^unissant les ^tats ro-
mains k la France.' — Proclamation
issued in 1809 ; (Euvrts, 17.
' See Appendix, Note C.
K Pope Pius VII wrote to tbe
First Consul, * Carissime in Chritfo
Fili noster .... tarn perspecta loiit
nobis tusB voluntatis studia eigt ooii
ut quotiescunque ope aliqoa in itboi
nostris indigemus, cam a te fideoter
petere non dubitare debeamos.'—
Quoted by ^gidi.
FALL OF THE EMPIRE,
363
comparison is much to the advantage of the modern ; but
Pius might be pardoned for catching at any help in his
distress, and Napoleon found that the protectorship of the
church strengthened his position in France, and gave him
dignity in the eyes of Christendom \
A swift succession of triumphs had left only one thing
still preventing the full recognition of the Corsican warrior
as sovereign of Western Europe, and that one was the
existence of the old Romano-Germanic Empire. Napo-
leon had not long assumed his new title when he began
to mark a distinction between *la France' and M'Empire
Fran9ais/ France had, since a.d. 1792, advanced to the
Rhine, and, by the annexation of Piedmont, had over-
stepped the Alps; the French Empire included, besides
the kingdom of Italy, a mass of dependent states, Naples,
Holland, Switzerland, and many German principalities,
the allies of France in the same sense in which the * socii
populi Romani' were allies of Rome^ When the last
of Pitt's coalitions had been destroyed at Austerlitz, and
Austria had made her submission by the peace of Pres-
burg, the conqueror felt that his hour was come. He had
now overcome two Emperors, those of Austria and
Russia, claiming to represent the old and the new Rome
respectively, and had in eighteen months created more
^ Let us place side by side the
letters of Hadrian to Charles in the
Codex Carolinus, and the following
preamble to the Concordat of a.d.
1801, between the First Consul
and the Pope (which I quote from
the Bullarium Romanum), and
mark the changes of a thousand
years.
• Gubemium reipublicae [Gallicae]
recognoscit religionem Catholicam
Apostolicam Romanam earn esse
religionem quam longe maxima pars
civium Gallicae reipublicae profitetur.
*Summus pontifex pari mode
recognoscit eandem religionem
maximam utilitatem maximumque
decus percepisse et hoc quoque
tempore prsestolari ex catholico
cultu in Gallia constituto, necnon
ex peculiari eius professione quam
faciunt reipublicae consules.'
» Cf. Heeren, Political System,
vol iii. p. 273.
CHAP. XX.
The French
Empire.
364
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XX.
Napoleon in
Germany.
kings than the occupants of the Germanic throne in as
many centuries. It was time, he thought, to sweep away
obsolete pretensions, and claim the sole inheritance of that
Western Empire, of which the titles and ceremonies of
his court presented a grotesque imitation K The task was
an easy one after what had been already accomplished.
Previous wars and treaties had so redistributed the terri-
tories and changed the constitution of the Germanic Em-
pire that it could hardly be said to exist in anything but
name. In French history Napoleon appears as the re-
storer of peace, the rebuilder of the shattered edifice of
social order, the author of a code and an administrative
system which the Bourbons who dethroned him were glad
to preserve. Abroad he was the true child of the Revo-
lution, and conquered only to destroy. It was his mission
— a mission more beneficent in its result than in its
means ' — to break up in Germany and Italy the abominable
system of petty states, to reawaken the spirit of the people,
to sweep away the relics of an effete feudalism, and leave
the ground clear for the growth of newer and better forms
of political life. Since a.d. 1797, when Austria at Campo
Formio perfidiously exchanged the Netherlands for Vene-
tia, the work of destruction had gone on apace. All tbc
German sovereigns west of the Rhine had been dispos-
sessed, and their territories incorporated with France,
while the rest of the country had been revolutionized by
^ He had arch-chancellors, arch-
treasurers, and so forth. The
Legion of Honour, which was
thought important enough to be
mentioned in the coronation oath,
was meant to be something like
the mediaeval orders of knighthood :
whose connexion with the Empire
has already been mentioned.
1 Napoleon's fedines towudi
Germany may be garnered finni
the phrase he once used, *B ftot
depayser I'Allemagne.'
Again, in a letter to his brother
Louis, he says, *You most knov
that the annihflatioa of Qemui
nationality is a necessary Iet£i^
principle of my policy.'
FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
36s
the arrangements of the peace of Luneville and the * In-
demnities/ dictated by the French to the Diet in February
1803. New kingdoms were erected, electorates created
and extinguished, the lesser princes mediatized, the free
cities occupied by troops and bestowed on some neigh-
bouring potentate. More than any other change, the
secularization of the dominions of the prince-bishops and
abbots proclaimed the fall of the old constitution, whose
principles had required the existence of a spiritual along-
side of the temporal aristocracy. The Emperor Francis,
partly foreboding the events that were at hand, partiy
in order to meet Napoleon's assumption of the imperial
name by depriving that name of its peculiar meaning,
began in a.d. i 805 to style himself * Hereditary Emperor
of Austria,' while retaining at the same time his former
title ™. The next act of the drama was one in which we
may more readily pardon the ambition of a foreign con-
queror than the traitorous selfishness of the German
princes, who broke ever}' tie of ancient friendship and
duty to grovel at his throne. By the Act of the Con-
federation ° of the Rhine, signed at Paris, July 17th, 1806,
Bavaria, Wurtemberg, Baden, and several other states,
CHAP.
™ Thus in documents issued by
the Emperor during these two years
he is styled ' Roman Emperor Elect,
Hereditary Emperor of Austria/
(erwahlter Romischer Kaiser, Erb-
kaiser von Oesterreich).
" This Act of Confederation of
the Rhine (Rheinbund) is printed
in Koch's Traites (continued by
Scholl), vol. viii., and Meyer's Corpus
Juris Confaederationis GermaniccB^
vol. i. It has every appearance of
being a translation from the French,
and was no doubt originally drawn
up in that language. Napoleon is
called in one place *Der namliche
Monarch, dessen Absichten sich
stets mit den wahren Interessen
Deutschlands iibereinstimmend ge-
zeigt haben.* The phrase * Roman
Empire ' does not occur ; we hear
only of the * German Empire,'
' body of German states * (Staats-
korper), and so forth. This Con-
federation of the Rhine was even-
tually joined by every German
State except Austria, Prussia, Elec-
toral Hessen, and Brunswick.
The Confe-
deration of
the Rhine,
366
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XX.
Abdication
of the
Emperor
Francis IT,
End of the
Emptre,
sixteen in all, withdrew from the body and repudiated the
laws of the Empire, while on August ist the French
envoy at Regensburg announced to the Diet that his
master, who had consented to become Protector of the
Confederate princes, no longer recognized the existence
of the Empire. Francis the Second resolved at once
to anticipate this new Odoacer, and by a declaration,
dated August 6th, 1806, resigned the imperial dignity.
His deed states that finding it impossible, in the altered
state of things, to fulfil the obligations imposed by his
capitulation, he considers as dissolved the bonds which
attached him to the Germanic body, releases from their
allegiance the states who formed it, and retires to the
government of his hereditary dominions under the title of
'Emperor of Austria 0/ Throughout, the term 'German
Empire' (Deutsches Reich) is employed. But it was the
crown of Augustus, of Constantine, of Charles, of Maxi-
milian, that Francis of Hapsburg laid down, and a new
era in the world's history was marked by the fall of its
most venerable institution. One thousand and six yean
after Leo the Pope had crowned the Frankish king,
eighteen hundred and fifty-eight years after Caesar had
conquered at PharsaUa, the Holy Roman Empire came
to its end.
There was a time when this event would have been
thought a sign that the last days of the world were at
® Histoire des Traitds, vol. viii.
The original may be found in
Meyer's Corpus Juris Confcedera-
tiofiis Germanic<Bi vol. i. p. 70* It
is a document in no way remark-
able, except from the ludicrous re-
semblance which its language sug-
gests to the circular in which a
tradesman, announcing tiie diao*
lution of an old partnership, idiciti,
and hopes by close attention to
merit, a continuance of his casr
tomers' patronage to his basiiie>i»
which will henceforth be carried 00
under the name of, &c., Sec
FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
367
hand. But in the whirl of change that had bewildered
men since a.d. 1789, it passed almost unnoticed. No
one could yet fancy how things would end, or what sort
of a new order would at last shape itself out of chaos.
When Napoleon's universal monarchy had dissolved, and
old landmarks shewed themselves again above the re-
ceding waters, it was commonly supposed that the Empire
would be re-established on its former footing p. Such
was indeed the wish of many states, and among them of
Hanover, representing Great Britain a. Though a simple
revival of the old Romano-Germanic Empire was plainly
out of the question, it still appeared to them that Germany
would be best off under the presidency of a single head,
entrusted with the ancient oflfice of maintaining peace
among the members of the confederation. But the new
kingdoms, Bavaria especially, were unwilling to admit a
superior; Prussia, elated at the glory she had won in
the war of independence, would have disputed the crown
with Austria; Austria herself cared littie to resume an
office shorn of much of its dignity, with duties to perform
and no resources to enable her to discharge them. Use
was therefore made of an expression in the Peace of
Paris which spoke of uniting Germany by a federative
bond ', and the Congress of Vienna was decided by the
wishes of Austria and the difficulty of bringing the various
p Koch (Scholl), Histoire des
Traites, vol. xi. p. 257, sqq. ;
H^usser, Deutsche Geschichte, vol.
IT.
4 Great Britain had refused in
1806 to recognize the dissolution
of the Empire. And it may in<
deed be maintained that in point
of law the Empire was never ex-
tinguished at all, but lives on as
a disembodied spirit to this day.
For it is clear that, technically
speaking, the abdication of a sove-
reign can destroy only his own
rights, and does not dissolve the
state over which he presides.
' * Les ^tats d*Allemagne seront
independans et unis par un lien
federatif.*— jyM/oir# des TraiUs,
vol. xi. p. 357.
CHAP. XX.
Congress of
Vienna.
368
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XX
The Ger-
manic Con-
federation.
Its end in
A.D. 1866.
States to agree to anything else, to establish a federal
league. Thus was brought into existence the Germanic
Confederation, an institution confessed almost fix)m its
birth to be a temporary expedient — an unsatisfactory com-
promise between the reality of local sovereignty and the
semblance of national union, which, after an ignoble and
often-threatened life of half a century, fell unregretted
upon the fields of Koniggratz and Langensalza.
CHAPTER XXL
CONCLUSION.
After the attempts already made to examine separately
each of the phases of the Empire, little need be said,
m conclusion, upon its nature and results in general.
A general character can hardly help being either vague
or false. For the aspects which the Empire took are
as many and as various as the ages and conditions of
society during which it continued to exist. Among the
exhausted peoples aroimd the Mediterranean, whose na-
tional feeling had died out, whose faith was extinct or
turned to superstition, whose thought and art was a faint
imitation of the Greek, there arises a huge despotism,
first of a city, then of an administrative system, which
presses with equal weight on all its subjects, and becomes
to them a religion as well as a government. Just when
the mass is at length dissolving, the tribes of the North
come down, too rude to maintain the institutions they
found subsisting, too few to introduce their own, and a
weltering confusion follows, till the strong hand of the
first Prankish Emperor raises the fallen image and bids
the nations bow down to it once more. Under him it
is for some brief space a theocracy ; under his German
successors the first of feudal kingdoms, the centre of
European chivalry. As feudalism wanes, it is again
transformed, and after promising for a time to become
Bb
CHAP. XXI.
General
summary.
370
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Perpetua-
tion of the
name of
Rome.
Parallel
ifiitiances.
an hereditary Hapsburg monarchy, sinks at last into the
presidency, not more dignified than powerless, of an in-
ternational league. To us moderns, a perpetuation under
conditions so diverse of the same name and the same
pretensions, appears at first sight absurd, a phantom too
vain to impress the most superstitious mind Closer
examination will correct such a notion. No power was
ever based on foundations so sure and deep as those
which Rome laid during three centuries of conquest and
four of undisturbed dominion. If her empire had been
an hereditary or local kingdom, it might have fallen with
the extinction of the royal line, the conquest of the tribe,
the destruction of the city to which it was attached. Bat
it was not so limited. It was imperishable because it
was universal; and when its power had ceased, it was
remembered with awe and love by the races whose sepa-
rate existence it had destroyed, because it had spared the
weak while it smote down the strong; because it had
granted equal rights to all, and closed against none of
its subjects the path of honourable ambition. When the
military power of the conquering city had departed, her
sway over the world of thought began : by her the theories
of the Greeks had been reduced to practice ; by her die
new religion had been embraced and organized; her
language, her theology, her laws, her architecture made
their way where the eagles of war had never flown, and
with the spread of civilization have found new homes
on the Ganges and the Mississippi.
Nor is such a claim of government prolonged under
changed conditions by any means a singular phenomenon.
Titles sum up the political history of nations, and an as
often causes as effects : if not insignificant now, how
much less so in ages of ignorance and unreason. It
CONCLUSION.
371
would be an instructive, if it were not a tedious t'ask, to
examine the many pretensions that are still put forward
to represent the Empire of Rome, all of them baseless,
none of them effectless. Austria clings to a name which
seems to give her a sort of precedence in Europe, and
was wont, while she held Lombardy, to justify her position
there by invoking the feudal rights of the Hohenstaufen.
With no more legal right than a prince of Reuss or a
landgrave of Homburg might pretend to, she has assumed
the arms and devices of the old Empire, and being almost
the youngest of European monarchies, is respected as the
oldest and most conservative. Bonapartean France, as
the self-appointed heir of the Carolingians, grasped for a
time the sceptre of the West, and under her lately fallen
ruler aspired to hold the balance of European politics, and
be recognized as the leader and patron of the so-called
Latin races on both sides of the Atlantic *. Professing
the creed of Byzantium, Russia claims the crown of the
Byzantine Caesars, and trusts that the capital which pro-
phecy has promised for a thousand years will not be long
withheld. The doctrine of Panslavism, under an imperial
head of the whole Eastern church, has become a formid-
able engine of aggression in the hands of a crafty and
warlike despotism. Another testimony to the enduring
influence of old political combinations is supplied by the
eagerness with which modern Hellas has embraced the
notion of gathering all the Greek races into a revived Em-
pire of the East, with its capital on the Bosphorus. Nay,
the intruding Ottoman himself, different in faith as well as
in blood, has more than once declared himself the repre-
sentative of the Eastern Caesars, whose dominion he
• See Louis Napoleon's letter to General Forey, explaining the object
of the expedition to Mexico.
Bb 2
CHAP. XXI.
Claims to
represent
the Roman
Empire.
Austria,
France,
Russia.
Greece.
The Turks.
372
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Parallel of
the Papacy.
extinguished. Solyman the Magnificent assumed the
name of Emperor, and refused it to Charles the Fifth :
his successors were long preceded through the streets of
Constantinople by twelve oflficers, bearing straws aloft, a
faint semblance of the consular fasces that had escorted
a Quinctius or a Fabius through the Roman forum. Yet
in no one of these cases has there been that apparent
legality of title which the shouts of the people and the
benediction of the pontiff conveyed to Charles and Otto^
These examples, however, are minor parallels: the
complement and illustration of the history of the Empire
is to be found in that of the Holy See. The Papacy,
whose spiritual power was itself the offspring of Rome's
temporal dominion, evoked the phantom of her parent,
used it, obeyed it, rebelled and overthrew it, in its old age
once more embraced it, till in its downfall she has heard
the knell of her own approaching doom «.
Both Papacy and Empire rose in an age when the
human spirit was utterly prostrated before authority and
tradition, when the exercise of private judgment was
impossible to most and sinful to all. Those who believed
the miracles recorded in the Ac/a Sane forum, and did not
question the Isidorian decretals, might well recognize as
ordained of God the twofold authority of Rome, founded,
as it seemed to be, on so many texts of Scripture, and
confirmed by five centuries of undisputed possession.
Both sanctioned and satisfied the passion of the Middle
Ages for unity. Ferocity, violence, disorder, were the con-
*> One may also compare the re-
tention of the office of consul at
Rome till the time of Justinian :
indeed it even survived his formal
abolition. The relinquishment of
the title 'King of Great Britain,
France, and Ireland/ seriooslj dii-
tressed many excellent peracms.
(! I speaJc, of course, of the
Papacy as an autocratic power
claiming a more than tpiriLiul
authority.
CONCLUSION,
373
spicuous evils of that time : hence all the aspirations of
the good were for something which, breaking the force
of passion and increasing the force of sympathy, should
teach the stubborn wills to sacrifice themselves in the
view of a common purpose. To those men, moreover,
unable to rise above the sensuous, not seeing the true
connexion or the true difference of the spiritual and the
secular, the idea of the Visible Church was full of awful
meaning. Solitary thought was helpless, and strove to
lose itself in the aggregate, since it could not create for
itself that which was universal. The schism that severed
a man from the congregation of the faithful on earth was
hardly less dreadful than the heresy which excluded him
from the company of the blessed in heaven. He who
kept not his appointed place in the ranks of the church
militant had no right to swell the rejoicing anthems of the
church triumphant. Here, as in so many other cases,
the continued use of traditional language seems to have
prevented us from seeing how great is the diiFerence
between our own times and those in which the phrases
we repeat were first used, and used in full sincerity.
Whether the world is better or worse for the change
which has passed upon its feelings in these matters is
another question: all that is necessary to note here
is that the change is a profound and pervading one.
Obedience, almost the first of mediaeval virtues, is now
often spoken of as if it were fit only for slaves or fools.
Instead of praising, men are wont to condemn the sub-
mission of the individual will, the surrender of the
individual belief, to the will or the belief of the com-
munity. Some persons declare variety of opinion to be
a positive good. The great mass have certainly no
longing for an abstract unity of faith. They have no
CHAP. XXI.
374
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
horror of schism. They do not, cannot, understand the
intense fascination which the idea of one all-pervading
church exercised upon their mediaeval forefathers. A life
in the church, for the church, through the church ; a life
which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peace-
ful rest by the vesper hymn ; a life which she supported
by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments,
relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admo-
nishing it by the presentation of visible objects for con-
templation and worship, — this was the Ufe which they of
the Middle Ages conceived of as the rightful life for man ;
it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all. The un-
seen world was so unceasingly pointed to, and its de-
pendence on the seen so intensely felt, that the barrier
between the two seemed to disappear. The church was
not merely the portal to heaven; it was heaven antici-
pated ; it was already self-gathered and complete. In one
sentence from a famous mediaeval document may be found
a key to much which seems strangest to us in the feelings
of the Middle Ages : * The church is dearer to God than
heaven. For the church does not exist for the sake of
heaven, but conversely, heaven for the sake of the church*.'
Again, both Empire and Papacy rested on opinion
rather than on physical force, and when the struggle of
the eleventh century came, the Empire fell, because its
rival's hold over the souls of men was firmer, more direct,
enforced by penalties more terrible than the death of the
body. The ecclesiastical body under Alexander and In-
nocent was animated by a loftier spirit and more wholly
* * Ipsa cnim ccclesia charier From the tract entitled* A Letter of
Deo est quam coelLm. Non enim the four Universities to Wenid md
propter coelum ecclesia, scd e con- Uiban VI/ quoted in an ear&tf
verso propter ecclesiam coelum.* chapter.
CONCLUSION.
375
devoted to a single aim than the knights and nobles who
followed the banner of the Swabian Caesars. Its allegiance
was undivided ; it comprehended the principles for which
it fought : they trembled at even while they resisted the
spiritual power.
Both sprang from what might be called the accident of
name. The power of the great Latin patriarchate was a
Form : the ghost, it has been said, of the older Empire,
favoured in its growth by circumstances, but really vital
because capable of wonderful adaptation to the character
and wants of the time. So too, though far less perfectly,
was the Empire. Its Form was the tradition of the uni-
versal rule of Rome; it met the needs of successive
centuries by civilizing barbarous peoples, by maintaining
unity in confusion and disorganization, by controUing
brute violence through the sanctions of a higher power,
by being made the keystone of a gigantic feudal arch, by
assuming in its old age the presidency of a European
confederation. And the history of both, as it shews the
power of ancient names and forms, shewg also within
what limits such a perpetuation is possible, and how it
sometimes deceives men, by preserving the shadow while
it loses the substance. This perpetuation itself, what is
it but the expression of the belief of mankind, a belief
incessantly corrected yet never weakened, that their old
institutions do and may continue to subsist unchanged,
that what has served their fathers will do well enough for
them, that it is possible to make a system perfect and
abide in it for ever? Of all political instincts this is
perhaps the strongest ; often useful, often grossly abused,
but never so natural and so fitting as when it leads men
who feel themselves inferior to their predecessors, to save
what they can from the wreck of a civilization higher than
CHAP. XXL
Papacy
and Em-
pire com-
pared as
perpetua-
tions of a
name.
376
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI^
In what
sense was
the Empire
Roman f
their own. It was thus that both Papacy and Empire
were maintained by the generations who had no tjrpe of
greatness and wisdom save that which they associated
with the name of Rome. And therefore it is that no
examples shew so convincingly how hopeless are all such
attempts to preserve in life a system which arose out
of ideas and under conditions that have passed away.
Though it never could have existed save as a prolonga^
tion, though it was and remained through the Middle
Ages an anachronism, the Empire of the tenth centmy
had little in common with the Empire of the second
Much more was the Papacy, though it too hankered after
the forms and titles of antiquity, in reality a new creation.
And in the same proportion as it was new, and repre-
sented the spirit not of a past age but of its own, was it
a power stronger and more enduring than the Empire.
More enduring, because younger, and so in fuller har-
mony with the feelings of its contemporaries: stronger,
because at the head of the great ecclesiastical body, in
and through which, rather than through secular life, all
the intelligence and political activity of the Middle Ages
sought its expression. The famous simile of Gregory the
Seventh is that which best describes the Empire and the
Popedom. They were indeed the *two lights in the
firmament of the militant church,' the lights which iDn-
mined and ruled the world all through the Middle Ages.
And as moonlight is to sunlight, so was the Empire to
the Papacy. The rays of the one were borrowed, feeble,
often interrupted : the other shone with an unquenchable
brilliance that was all her own.
The Empire, it has just been said, was never truly
mediaeval. Was it then Roman in anything but name?
and was that name anything better than a piece of fan-
CONCLUSION,
377
tastic antiquarianism ? It is easy to draw a comparison
between the Antonines and the Ottos which should shew
nothing but unlikeness. What the Empire was in the
second century every one knows. In the tenth it was
a feudal monarchy, resting on a strong territorial oli-
garchy. Its chiefs were barbarians, the sons of those
who had destroyed Varus and baffled Germanicus, some-
times unable even to use the tongue of Rome. Its powers
were limited. It could scarcely be said to have a regular
organization at all, whether judicial or administrative. It
was consecrated to the defence, nay, it existed by virtue
of the religion which Trajan and Marcus had persecuted.
Nevertheless, when the contrast has been stated in the
strongest terms, there will remain points of resemblance.
The thoroughly Roman idea of universal denationalization
survived, and drew with it that of a certain equality among
all free subjects. It has been remarked already, that the
world's highest dignity was for many centuries the only
civil office to which any free-bom Christian was legally
eligible. And there was also, during the earlier ages,
that indomitable vigour which might have made Trajan
or Severus seek their true successors among the woods
of Germany rather than in the palaces of Byzantium,
where every office and name and custom had floated
down from the court of Constantine in a stream of un-
broken legitimacy. The ceremonies of Henry the Seventh's
coronation would have been strange indeed to Caius
Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus ; but how much nobler,
how much more Roman in force and truth than the
childish and unmeaning forms with which a Palaeologus
was installed ! It was not in purple buskins that the
dignity of the Luxemburger lay ®. To such a boast the
• Von Raumer, Geschichte der Hohensfau/en, v.
CHAP. XXI.
378
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
* Imperial'
ism :'
Romany
French, and
mediaval.
Germanic Empire had long ere its death lost right : it had
lived on, when honour and nature bade it die : it had
become what the empire of the Moguls was, and that
of the Ottomans is now, a curious relic of antiquity,
over which the imaginative might muse, but which the
mass of men would push aside with impatient contempt
But institutions, like men, should be judged by their
prime.
The comparison of the old Roman Empire with its
Germanic representative raises a question which has been
a good deal canvassed of late years. That wonderfiil
system which Julius Caesar and his subtle nephew erected
upon the ruins of the republican constitution of Rome
has been made the type of a certain form of government
and of a certain set of social as well as political arrange-
ments, to which, or rather to the theory whereof they are
a part, there has been given the name of Imperialism.
The sacrifice of the individual to the mass, the concentra*
tion of all legislative and judicial powers in the person of
the sovereign, the centralization of the administrative
system, the maintenance of order by a large military force,
the substitution of the influence of public opinion for the
control of representative assemblies, are commonly taken,
whether rightly or wrongly, to characterize that theory.
Its enemies cannot deny that it has before now given
and may again give to nations a sudden and violent
access of aggressive energy ; that it has often achieved the
glory (whatever that may be) of war and conquest ; thtf
it has a better title to respect in the ease with which it
may be made, as it was by the Flavian and AntoniDe
Caesars of old, and at the beginning of this century by
Napoleon in France, the instrument of comprehensive
reforms in law and government. The parallel between
CONCLUSION,
379
Oman world under the Caesars and the French
in the days of the last-named monarch is indeed
Effect that those who dilate upon it fancy. That
dng despotism which was a good to a medley of
the force of whose national life had spent itself
jft them languid, yet restless, with all the evils of
)n and none of its advantages, was not necessarily
1 to a country then the strongest and most united
*ope, a country where the administration is only
rfect, and the pressure of social uniformity only loo
. But whether it be a good or an evil, no one can
that there is a sense in which France represents,
is always represented, the imperialist spirit of Rome
truly than those whom the Middle Ages recog-
as the legitimate heirs of her name and. dominion,
ler, the French people have a deep-rooted belief
0 them it naturally belongs to lead the world
ontrol the policy of neighbouring states : like
hey regard war not as a sometimes necessary
)ut as a thing to be enjoyed for its own sake,
le, perhaps the noblest employment of human force
enius. And in their political character, whether it
1 result of the five centuries of Roman rule in Gaul,
her due to the original instincts of the Gallic race,
may be found a claim, better founded than any
; Napoleon put forward, to be the Romans ^ of the
m world. The tendency of the Teuton was and is
; independence of the individual life, to the mutual
iion, if the phrase may be permitted, of the social
J, as contrasted with Keltic and so-called Romanic
es, among which the unit is more completely ab-
caning thereby not the citi- but the Italo- Hellenic subjects of the
Rome in her republican days, Roman Empire.
CHAP. XXI.
Political
character
of the Teu-
tonic and
Gallic
races.
38o
THE IIOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Essential
principles
of the
medicBval
Empire,
sorbed in the mass, who live possessed by a common idea
which they are driven to realize in the concrete. Teutonic
states have been little more successful than their neigh-
bours in the establishment of free constitutions. Their
assemblies meet, and vote, and are dissolved, and nothing
comes of it : their citizens endure without greatly resenting
outrages that would raise the more excitable French or
Italians in revolt. But, whatever may have been the
form of government, the body of the people have in
Germany always enjoyed a freedom of thought which has
made them comparatively careless of politics; and the
absolutism of the Elbe is at this days no more like that of
the Seine than a revolution at Dresden is to a revolution
at Paris. The rule of the Hohenstaufen had nothing
either of the good or the evil of the imperialism which
Tacitus painted, or of that which the panegyrists of the
lately- fallen system in France were wont to paint in colours
somewhat different from his.
There was, nevertheless, such a thing as mediaeval
imperialism, a theory of the nature of the state and the
best form of government, which has been described once
already, and need not be described again. It is enough
to say, that from three leading principles all its* properties
mav be derived. The first and the least essential was the
existence of the state as a monarchy. The second was
the exact coincidence of the state's limits, and the perfect
harmony of its workings with the limits and the workings
of the church. The third was its universality. These
three were vital. Forms of political organization, the
presence or absence of constitutional checks, the degree
of liberty enjoyed by the subject, the rights conceded to
local authorities, all these were matters of secondaiy
importance. But although there brooded over all the
» Written in 1865.
J
CONCLUSION,
381
shadow of a despotism, it was a despotism not of the
sword but of law ; a despotism not chilling and blighting,
but one which, in Germany at least, looked with favour
on municipal freedom, and everywhere did its best for
learning, for religion, for intelligence; a despotism not
hereditary, but one which constantly maintained in theory
the principle that he should rule who was found the
fittest. To praise or to decry the Empire as a despotic
power is to misunderstand it altogether. We need not,
because an unbounded prerogative was useful in ages of
turbulence, advocate it now ; nor need we, with Sismondi,
blame the Frankish conqueror because he granted no
'constitutional charter' to all the nations that obeyed
hinL Like the Papacy, the Empire expressed the poli-
tical ideas of a time, and not of all time : like the Papacy,
it decayed when those ideas changed; when men became
more capable of rational liberty ; when thought grew
stronger, and the spiritual nature shook itself more free
from the bonds of sense.
The influence of the Empire upon Germany is a sub-
ject too wide to be more than glanced at. There is
much to make it appear altogether imfortunate. For
many generations the flower of Teutonic chivalry crossed
the Alps to perish by the sword of the Lombards, or the
deadlier fevers of Rome. Italy terribly avenged the
wrongs she suff"ered Those who destroyed the national
existence of another people forfeited their own : the Ger-
man kingdom, crushed, beneath the weight of the Roman
Empire, could never recover strength enough to form a
compact and united monarchy, such as arose elsewhere in
Europe : the race whom their neighbours had feared and
obeyed till the fourteenth century saw themselves, down
even to our own day, the prey of intestine feuds and their
CHAP. XXI.
Influence
of the Holy
Empire on
Germany,
382
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
country the battlefield of Europe. Spoiled and insulted
by a neighbour restlessly aggressive and superior in all
the arts of success, they came to regard France as the
persecuted Slave regards them. The want of national
union and political liberty from which Germany has suf-
fered, and to some extent suflfers still, need not be attributed
to the differences of her races ; for, conspicuous as tbat
difference was in the days of Otto the Great, it was no
greater than in France, where intruding Franks, Goths,
Burgundians, and Northmen were mingled with primitive
Kelts and Basques ; not so great as in Spain, or Italy, or
Britain. Rather is it due to the decline of the central
government, which was induced by its strife with the
Popedom, its endless Italian wars, and the passion for
universal dominion which made it the assailant of all the
neighbouring countries. The absence or the weakness
of the monarch enabled his feudal vassals to establish
petty despotisms, debarring the nation from united poli-
tical action, and greatly retarding the emancipation of
the commons. Thus, while the princes became shame-
lessly selfish, justifying their resistance to the throne
as the defence of their own liberty — ^liberty to oppress the
subject — and ready on the least occasion to throw them-
selves into the arms of France, the body of the people were
deprived of all political training, and have found the \uk
of such experience impede their efforts to this day.
For these misfortunes, however, there has not been
wanting some compensation. The inheritance of the
Roman Empire made the Germans the ruling race of
Europe, and the brilliance of that glorious dawn has never
faded and can never fade entirely from their name. A
peaceful people now, peaceful in sentiment even now
when they have become a great military power^ aoqoir
CONCLUSIOI^,
383
escent in pateraal government, and given to the quiet
enjoyments of art, music, and meditation, they delight
themselves with memories of the time when their con-
quering chivalry was the terror of the Gaul and the Slave,
the Lombard and the Saracen. The national life received
a keen stimulus from the sense of exaltation which victorv
brought, and from the intercourse with countries where
the old civilization had not wholly perished. It was this
connexion with Italy that raised the German lands out of
barbarism, and did for them the work which Roman con-
quest had performed in Gaul, Spain, and Britain. From
the Empire flowed all the richness of their mediaeval life
and literature : it first awoke in them a consciousness of
national existence ; its history has inspired and served as
material to their poetry ; to many ardent politicians the
splendours of the past have become the beacon of the
future^. There was a bright side even to that long
political disunion, which can hardly be said to have yet
disappeared. When they complained that they were not
a nation, and sighed for the harmony of feeling and single-
ness of aim which their great rival seemed to display, the
example of the Greeks might have brought them some com-
fort. To the variety which so many small governments
have produced may be partly attributed the breadth of
development in German thought and hterature, by virtue of
which it transcends the French hardly less than the Greek
surpassed the Roman. Paris no doubt is great, but a
country may lose as well as gain by the predominance of
a single city ; and Germany need not mourn that she alone
among modern states has not and never has had a capital.
Z See especially Von Sybel, Die Kaiserthum und Papstthum, and
Deutsche Nation und das Kaiser- Waitz, Deutsche Kaiser von Karl
retch : and the answers of Ficker dem Grossen bis Maximilian, \
and Von Wydenbrugk ; also Hofler,
CHAP. XXI.
384
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Austria
as heir of
the Holy
Empire,
1 ■• T
The merits of the old Empire were not long since tbe
subject of a brisk controversy among several German
professors of history. The spokesmen of the Austrian
or Roman Catholic party, a party which ten years ago
was not less powerful in some of the minor South German
States than in Vienna, claimed for the Hapsburg mon-
archy the honour of being the legitimate representative
of the mediaeval Empire, and declared that only by again
accepting Hapsburg leadership could Germany win back
the glory and the strength that once were hers. The
North German liberals ironically applauded the com-
parison. * Yes,' they replied, ' your Austrian Empire, as
it calls itself, is the true daughter of the old despotism:
not less tyrannical, not less aggressive, not less retrograde;
like its progenitor, the friend of priests, the enemy of free
thought, the trampler upon the national feeling of the
peoples that obey it. It is you whose selfish and anti-
national policy blasts the hope of German unity now, as
Otto and Frederick blasted it long ago by their schemes
of foreign conquest. The dream of Empire has been our
bane from first to last.' It is possible, one may hope, to
escape the alternative of admiring the Austrian Empire
or denouncing the Holy Roman. Austria has indeed, in
some things, but too faithfully reproduced the policjof
the Saxon and Swabian Caesars**. Like her, they oppressed
and insulted the Italian people : but it was in the defence
of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. like
her, they lusted after a dominion over the races on their
borders, but that dominion was to them a means of
spreading civilization and religion in savage countries,
not of pampering upon their revenues a hated court and
^ Written in 1865 : Austria, taught by adyersity, has turned OTcr •
new leaf since then.
CONCLUSION.
385
aristocracy. Like her, they strove to maintain a strong
government at home, but they did it when a strong
government was the first of pohtical blessings. Like her,
they gathered and maintained vast armies; but those
armies were composed of knights and barons who lived
for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful
labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuating
their own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another
nationality. They sinned grievously, no doubt, but they
sinned in the dim twilight of a half-barbarous age, not
in the noonday blaze of modern civilization. The en-
thusiasm for mediaeval faith and simplicity which was so
fervid some years ago has run its course, and is not likely
soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle
Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the grandest of
them,' were in some respects little better than savages. But
when he approaches more recent times, and sees how,
during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with
their subjects and with each other, he will forget the
ferocity of the Middle Ages, in horror at the heartlessness,
he treachery, the injustice all the more odious because it
ometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the
nnals of the military monarchies of Europe. With re-
ard, however, to the pretensions of modern Austria, the
uth is that this dispute about the worth of the old system
s no bearing upon them at all. The day of imperial
tatness was already past when Rudolf the first Haps-
•g reached the throne ; while during what may be
W the Austrian period, from Maximilian to Francis II,
Holy Empire was to Germany a mere clog and in-
brance, which the unhappy nation bore because she
T not how to rid herself of it. The Germans are
)ine to appeal to the old Empire to prove that they
cc
CRAP. XXI.
386
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
€HAP. XZI.
Bearing of
the Empire
upon the
progress of
European
civilization.
Influence
upon
modem
jurispru'
dence.
were once a united people. Nor is there 'any harm m
their comparing the politics of the twelfth centuiy with
those of the nineteenth, although to argue from the one
to the other seems to betray a want of historical judgment.
But the one thing which is wholly absurd is to make
Francis Joseph of Austria the successor of Frederick of
Hohenstaufen, and justify the most sordid and ungenial of
modern despotisms by the example of the mirror of medi-
aeval chivalry, the noblest creation of mediaeval thought
We are not yet far enough from the Empire to com-
prehend or state rightly its bearing on European progress.
The mountain lies behind us, but miles must be travereed
before we can take in at a glance its peaks and slopes
and buttresses, picture its form, and conjecture its height
Of the perpetuation among the peoples of the West of
the arts and Hterature of Rome it was both an effed and
a cause, — a cause only less powerful than the church. It
would be endless to shew in how many wa}rs it a£fected
the political institutions of the Middle Ages, and through
them of the whole civilized world. Most of the attributes
of modern royalty, to take the most obvious instance,
belonged originally and properly to the Emperor, and
were borrowed from him by other monarchs. The once
famous doctrine of divine right had the same origin. To
the existence of the Empire is chiefly to be ascribed the
prevalence of Roman law through Europe, and its prac-
tical importance in our own days. For while in Southern
France and Central Italy, where the subject popolatioD
greatly outnumbered their conquerors, the old system
would have in any case survived, it cannot be doubted
that in Germany, as in England, a body of customarj
Teutonic law would have grown up, had it not been far
the notion that since the German monarch was the legn
CONCLUSION.
387
timate successor of Justinian, the Corpus Juris must be
binding on all his subjects. This strange idea was re-
ceived with a faith so unhesitating that even the aristo-
cracy, who naturally disliked a system which the Emperors
and the cities favoured, could not but admit its validity,
and before the end of the Middle Ages Roman law pre-
vailed through all Germany \ When it is considered how
great are the services which German writers have rendered
and continue to render to the study of scientific juris-
prudence throughout Europe generally, this result will
appear far from insignificant. But another of still wider
import followed. When by the Peace of Westphalia a
crowd of petty principalities were recognized as prac-
tically independent states, the need of a code to regulate
their intercourse became pressing. Such a code Grotius
and his successors formed out of what was then the
private law of Germany, which thus became the foundation
whereon the system of international jurisprudence has
been built up during the last two centuries. That system
is, indeed, entirely a German creation J, and could have
arisen in no country where the law of Rome had not
been the fountain of legal ideas and the groundwork of
positive codes. In Germany, too, was it first carried out
in practice, and that with a success which is the best,
some might say the only, title of the later Empire to the
grateful remembrance of mankind. Under its protecting
shade small princedoms and free cities lived unmolested
beside states like Saxony and Bavaria; each member of
the Germanic body feeling that the rights of the weakest
of his brethren were also his own.
The most important chapter in the history of the
> Modified of course by the canon law, and not superseding the feudal
law of land. i Holland was then practically German.
C C 2
CHAP. XXI.
388
THE HOL V ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Influence of
the Empire
upon the
history of
the Cburcb.
Nature of
the question
at issue
between the
Emperors
and the
Popes,
Empire is that which describes its relation to the Church
and the Papacy. Of the ecclesiastical j)ower it was
alternately the champion and the enemy. In the ninth
and tenth centuries the Emperors extended the dominio&
of Peter's chair : in the tenth and eleventh they rescued it
from an abyss of guilt and shame to be the instrument of
their own downfall. The struggle which Gregory the
Seventh began, although it was political rather than
religious, awoke in the Teutonic nations a hostility to
the pretensions of the Romish court. That struggle
ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the
victory of the priesthood, — a victory whose abuse by the
insolent and greedy pontiffs of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries made it more ruinous than a defeat. The anger
which had long smouldered in the breasts of the northern
nations of Europe burst out in the sixteenth with a
violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto de-
fended, and made the Emperors once more the allies of
the Popedom, and the partners of its declining fortunes.
But the nature of that alliance and of the hostility which
had preceded it must not be misimderstood. It is a
natural, but not the less a serious error to suppose, as
modern writers often seem to do, that the pretensions of
the Empire and the Popedom were mutually exclusive;
that each claimed 'all the rights, spiritual and secular,
of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the
case, that we find mediaeval writers and statesmen, even
Emperors and Popes themselves, expressly recognizing a
divinely appointed duality of government — ^two potentates,
each supreme in the sphere of his own activity, Peter in
things eternal, Csesar in things temporal. The relative
position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo
a signal alteration. In the days of Charles^ the barbarous
CONCLUSION,
389
age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but
be governed chiefly by physical force, the Emperor was
practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four
centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent the Third,
when the power of ideas had grown stronger in the world,
and was able to resist or to bend to its service the arms
and the wealth of men, we see the balance inclined the
other way. Spiritual authority is conceived of as being
of a nature so high and holy that it must inspire and
guide the civil administration. But it is not proposed to
supplant that administration nor to degrade its head : the
great struggle of the eleventh and two following centuries
does not aim at the annihilation of one or other power
but turns solely upon the character of their connexion.
Hildebrand, the typical representative of the Popedom,
requires the obedience of the Emperor on the ground of
his own personal responsibility for the souls of their
common subjects : he demands, not that the functions of
temporal government shall be directly committed to him-
self, but that they shall be exercised in conformity with
the will of God, whereof he is the exponent The im-
perialist party had no means of meeting this argument,
for they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the
Pope, nor the transcendant importance of eternal salvation.
They could therefore only protest that the Emperor, being
also divinely appointed, was directly answerable to God, and
remind the Pope that his kingdom was not of this world.
There was in truth no way out of the difficulty, for it was
caused by the attempt to sever things that admit of no
severance, life in the soul and life in the world, life for
the future and life in the present. What it is most
pertinent to remark is that neither combatant pushed his
theorj to extremities, since he felt that his adversary's
6hap. XXI.
390
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Ennobling
influence
of the con-
ception of
the World
Empire.
title rested on the same foundations as his own. The
strife was keenest at the time when the whole world be-
lieved fervently in both powers ; the alliance came when
faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the
other; from the Reformation onwards Empire and Popedom
fought no longer for supremacy, but for existence. One
is fallen already, the other shakes with every blast
Nor was that which may be called the inner life of the
Empire less momentous in its influence upon the minds
of men than were its outward dealings with the Roman
Church upon her greatness and decline. In the Middle
Ages, men conceived of the communion of the saints as
the formal unity of an organized body of worshippers,
and found the concrete realization of that conception in
their universal religious state, which was in one aspect
the Church, in another, the Empire. Into the meaning
and worth of the conception, into the nature of the con-
nexion which subsists or ought to subsist between the
Church and the State, this is not the place to inquire.
That the form which it took in the Middle Ages was
always imperfect and became eventually rigid and un-
progressive was sufl&ciendy proved by the event But by
it the European peoples were saved from the isolationi
and narrowness, and jealous exclusiveness which had
checked the growth of the earlier civilizaticms of the
world, and which we see now lying like a weight Bpon
the kingdoms of the East : by it they were brought into
that mutual knowledge and co-operation which is the
condition if it be not the source of all true culture and
progress. For as by the Roman Empire of old 4e
nations were first forced to own a common s^'ay, so by
the Empire of the Middle Ages was preserved the feding
of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the
CONCLUSION,
39t
whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor
distinction.
As despotic monarchs claiming the world for their
realm, the Teutonic Emperors strove from the first against
three principles, over all of which their forerunners of
the elder Rome had triumphed, — those of Nationality,
Aristocracy, and Popular Freedom. Their early struggles
were against the first of these, and ended with its victory
in the emancipation, one after another, of England, France,
Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Burgundy, and Italy. The
second, in the form of feudalism, menaced even when
seeming to embrace and obey them, and succeeded, after
the Great Interregnum, in destroying their effective
strength in Germany. Aggression and inheritance
turned the numerous independent principalities thus
formed out of the greater fiefs, into a few military
monarchies, resting neither on a rude loyalty, like feudal
kingdoms, nor on religious duty and tradition, like the
Empire, but on physical force, more or less disguised
by legal forms. That the hostility to the Empire of the
third was accidental rather than necessary is seen by
this, that the very same monarchs who strove to crush
the Lombard and Tuscan cities favoured the growth of
the free towns of Germany. Asserting the rights of
the individual in the sphere of religion, the Reformation
weakened the Empire by denying the necessity of
external unity in matters spiritual: the extension of
the same principle to the secular world, whose fulness
is still withheld from the Germans, would have struck
at the doctrine of imperial absolutism had it not found
a nearer and deadlier foe in the actual tyranny of the
princes. It is more than a coincidence, that as the
proclamation of the liberty of thought had shaken it, so
CHAP. XXI.
Principles
adverse to
the Empire,.
39^
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
Change
marked by
its/all.
that of the liberty of action made by the revolutionaiy
movement, whose beginning the world saw and under-
stood not in 1789, whose end we see not yet, should
have indirectly become the cause which overthrew the
Holy Empire.
Its fall in the midst of the great convulsion that changed
the face of Europe marks an era in history, an era whose
character the events of every year are further unfolding:
I an era of the destruction of old forms and systems and
I the building up of new. The last instance is the most
memorable. Under our eyes, the work which Theodoric
and Lewis the Second, Guido and Ardoin and the second
1 '
Frederick essayed in vain, has been achieved by the
steadfast will of the Italian people. The fairest province
of the Empire, for which Franconian and Swabian battled
so long, is now a single monarchy under the Burgundian
count, whom Sigismund created imperial vicar in Italy,
and who, now that he holds the ancient capital, might
call himself * king of the Romans' more truly than Greek
or Frank or Austrian has done since Constantine forsook
the Tiber for the Bosphorus. No longer the prey of the
stranger, Italy may forget the past, and sympathise, as
she has now indeed, since the fortunate alliance of 1866,
begun to sympathize, with the efforts after national unity
of her ancient enemy — efforts confronted by so many
obstacles that a few years ago they seemed all but hope-
less, but now crowned with a success which, if it be not
yet complete, has in it all the promise of completeness
in the future. For if the name of German Empire does
not denote a united monarchy, it does nevertheless denote
not only a nation but also a state, — a state whose strength
lies in the community of interests and feelings among
its members, and in which this unity of sentiment, based
CONCLUSION.
393
upon the glorious memories of the Middle Ages, built
up by the literature of more recent times, cemented by
the last great struggle against France, promises to grow
in each succeeding generation nlore hearty and more
trustful. On the new shapes that may emerge in this
general reconstruction it would be idle to speculate. Yet
one prediction may be ventured. No imiversal monarchy
is likely to arise. More frequent intercourse, and the
progress of thought, have done much to change the
character of national distinctions, substituting for igno-
rant prejudice and hatred a genial sympathy and the
sense of a common interest. They have not lessened
their force. No one who reads the history of the last
three hundred years, no one, above all, who studies atten-
tively the career of Napoleon, can believe it possible for
any state, however great her energy and material re-
sources, to repeat in modern Europe the part of ancient
Rome : to gather into one vast political body races whose
national individuality has grown more and more marked
in each successive age. Nevertheless, it is in great
measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the
Middle Ages that the bonds of national union are on the
whole both stronger and nobler than they were ever
before. The latest historian of Rome, after summing up
the results to the world of his hero's career, closes his
treatise with these words: 'There was in the world as
Caesar found it the rich and noble heritage of past cen-
turies, and an endless abundance of splendour and glory,
but little soul, still less taste, and, least of all, joy in
and through life. Truly it was an old world, and even
Caesar's genial patriotism could not make it young again.
The blush of dawn returns not until the night has fully
descended. Yet with him there came to the much-
CHAP. XXI.
Relations of
the Empire
to the nO'
tionalities
of Europe.
I
394
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening
after a sultry day ; and when, after long historical night,
the new day broke once more upon the peoples, and
fresh nations in free self-guided movement began thdr
course towards new and higher aims, many were found
among them in whom the seed of Caesar had sprung up,
many who owed him, and who owe him still, their national
individuality^.' If this be the glory of Julius, the first
great founder of the Empire, so is it also the glory of
Charles, the. second founder, and of more than one
amongst his Teutonic successors. The work of the
mediaeval Empire was self-destructive; and it fostered,
while seeming to oppose, the nationalities that were deS"
tined to replace it. It tamed the barbarous races of the
North, and forced them within the pale of civilization.
It preserved the arts and literature of antiquity. In times
of violence and oppression, it set before its subjects the
duty of rational obedience to an authority whose watch-
words were peace and religion. It kept alive, when
national hatreds were most bitter, the notion of a great
European Commonwealth. And by doing all this, it was
in effect abolishing the need for a centralizing and de-
spotic power like itself : it was making men capable of
using national independence aright : it was teaching them
to rise to that conception of spontaneous activity, and a
freedom which is above law but not against it, to which
national independence itself, if it is to be a blessing at
all, must be only a means. Those who mark what has
been the tendency of events since a.d. 1789, and who
remember how many of the crimes and calamities of the
past are still but half redressed, need not be surprised to
see the so-called principle of nationalities advocated with
k Mommsen, Romische Geschiehie, iii. suhjin*
CONCLUSION.
395
honest devotion as the final and perfect form of political
development. But such undistinguishing advocacy is after
all only the old error in a new shape. If all other his-
tory did not bid us beware the habit of taking the pro-
blems and the conditions of our own age for those of all
time, the warning which the Empire gives might alone
be warning enough. From the days of Augustus down
to those of Charles the Fifth the whole civilized world
believed in its existence as a part of the eternal fitness
of things, and Christian theologians were not behind
heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the
world would perish with it. Yet the Empire is gone, and
the world remains, and hardly notes the change.
This is but a small part of what might be said upon an
almost inexhaustible theme: inexhaustible not from its
extent but from its profundity : not because there is so
much to say, but because, pursue we it never so far, more
will remain unexpressed, since incapable of expression.
For that which it is at once most necessary and least
easy to do, is to look at the Empire as a whole : a single
institution, in which centres the history of eighteen cen-
turies— whose outer form is the same, while its essence
and spirit are constantly changing. It is when we come
to consider it in this light that the difficulties of so vast a
subject are felt in all their force. Try to explain in words
the theory and inner meaning of the Holy Empire, as it
appeared to the saints and poets of the Middle Ages, and
that which we cannot but conceive as noble and fertile in
its life, sinks into a heap of barren and scarcely intelligible
formulas. Who has been able to describe the Papacy in
the power it once wielded over the hearts and imagina-
tions of men ? Those persons, if such there still be, who
see in it nothing but a gigantic upas-tree of fraud and
CHAP. XXI.
Difficulties
arising
from the
nature of
the subject.
396
THE HOL Y ROMAN EMPIRE.
CHAP. XXI.
superstition, planted and reared by the enemy of mankind,
are hardly further from entering into the mystery of its
being than the complacent political philosopher, who ex-
plains in neat phrases the process of its growth, analyses
it as a clever piece of mechanism, enumerates and mea-
sures the interests it appealed to, and gives, in conclusion,
a sort of tabular view of its results for good and for evU
So, too, is the Holy Empire above all description or ex-
planation ; not that it is impossible to discover the beliefs
which created and sustained it, but that the power of
those beliefs cannot be adequately apprehended by men
whose minds have been differently trained, and whose
imaginations are fired by different ideals. Something,
yet still how little, we should know of it if we knew what
were the thoughts of Julius Caesar when he laid the
foundations on which Augustus built : of Charles, when
he reared anew the stately pile : of Barbarossa and his
grandson, when they strove to avert the surely coming
ruin. Something more succeeding generations will know,
who will judge the Middle Ages more fairly than we, still
living in the midst of a reaction against all that is me-
diaeval, can hope to do, and to whom it will be given to
see and understand new forms of political life, whose
nature we cannot so much as conjecture. Seeing more
than we do, they will also see some things less distinctly.
The Empire which to us still looms largely on the
horizon of the past, will to them sink lower and lower as
they journey onwards into the future. But its importance
in universal history it can never lose. For into it all the
life of the ancient world was gathered : out of it all the
life of the modem world arose.
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
In 1806 the Holy Empire died and was buried and to
all appearance soon forgotten. No outworn shape of the
past could have seemed less likely to be ever recalled to
life, for the forces which had so long assailed and at last
destroyed it were stronger than ever, and threatened with
extinction even that feeble shadow which, under the name
of the Germanic Confederation, affected in some sort to
represent the unity of the German nation. Fifty years
passed away ; new questions arose ; Europe ranged itself
into new parties; men's minds began to be swayed by
new feelings; time drove fast onwards, and the Holy
Roman Empire seemed left so far behind among the mists
of the past, that it was hard to believe that living men had
seen it and borne part in its government. Then suddenly
there arises from these cold ashes a new, vigorous, self-
confident German Empire, a State which, although most
different, as well in its inner character as in its form and
legal aspect, from its venerable predecessor, is nevertheless
in a very real sense that predecessor's representative. An
accoimt of this new creation of our own days, perhaps the
most striking and fertile epoch in European annals, is
therefore a fitting, if not a necessary, pendant to the
history of the elder Empire ; it is, in fact, the. latest act of
40O SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
a long drama, which gives a new and happier meaning to
all that has gone before. For not onlj does the new
Empire hold that central and commanding place among
Continental States which the old Empire once filled: it is,
in a moral and intellectual sense, the offspring of the old
Empire, and, but for the preexistence of the other, could
never have itself come into being.
It has been shewn in the earlier chapters of this treatise,
how from the days of the Emperor Henry III, when the
Holy Empire reached the maximum of its power, every
succeedmg change tended to weaken it morally and
politically, to loosen its cohesion, diminish its material
resources, destroy its hold on the love and faith of its
subjects. The first crisis was marked by the death of
Frederick II, when Italy was lost beyond hope of re-
covery ; the second by the Reformation, and particularly
by the Treaty of 1555 \ the third by the Peace of West-
phalia, when Germany was legally reconstituted as a sort
of federation of mutually suspicious and unfriendly states;
the fourth, one may perhaps say, by the Seven Years' War,
when one vigorous member successfully resisted the whole
force of Austria and the other German powers, backed by
the armies of France and Russia. It is easy for us now
to see, that as after the first of these crises the Empire
had no longer any chance of making good its claim to be
a world-monarchy, co-extensive with Christianity, so after
the second its prospects as a national State, claiming to
unite all Germany under a single effective administration,
were practically hopeless. The Germans, however, as
was natural, did not see this until in 1648 the admission
of the substantial independence of the princes had turned
the imperial dignity into a mask under which the hanh
features of the Hapsburg sovereigns tried in vain to con-
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
401
ceal themselves. Over the sentiment of the people its
name still retained some power, for it was associated with
all the glories of their earlier history, with heroic memo-
ries enshrined in song, with claims of world-supremacy
which they could not bring themselves to forget. But
it was no longer a rallying-point for national feeling, a
centre to which the country looked for inspiration and
guidance. There was indeed but little national feeling in
the Germany of that age, little political hope or ardour,
little interest in the welfare of the State as a whole, for
there was nothing to stir men's feelings as Germans or
citizens, no struggles for great common objects against
' foreign powers, no free political life at home, no assem-
blies, no press, no local self-government. But, even if
a national feeling had been awake, it would hardly have
attached itself to the old Empire, which was not only cum-
brous and antiquated, but seemed strange and un-German,
just because it was more than German ; and which found
the support of Rome now almost as injurious as her
enmity had been in times gone by, since the friendship of
Rome meant the hatred and jealousy of the Protestants.
It can hardly be said that the Empire was so utterly dead
but that it might have been vivified by a really great man,
just as such an one might perhaps make the English
monarchy a power even now. But had this come to
pass, it would have been because the genius gave life
to the office, not, as of old, because the office inspired its
holder. And it was not so to be. The imperial throne
found no man of the first order to fill it; and continued
to stand rather because nobody appeared to overthrow it,
than because any good reason remained for it in the new
order of things.
The denationalisation of Germany had indeed gone
D d
402
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
beyond politics. As after the establishment of foreign
role in Italy, Italian art and letters had become frigid and
affected, so with that extinction of any free or united state
life in Germany which followed the Thirty Years' War,
the blossoms of literature which had put themselves forth
in the age of the Reformation were nipped and withered
away. In Lewis the Fourteenth's time, French influence
became dominant in Germany, no less in poetry and criti-
cism, than in matters of dress, furniture, and etiquette;
and the ambition of German men of letters was to pnt
off what they were hardly ashamed to call their native
barbarism, and imitate the sparkling elegance of tfadr
Western neighbours and enemies. French was the fashion-
able language ; French ideas and modes of thought were
no less supreme than Greek ideas had been at Rome in
the last century of the Republic ; French men of letten
and science were imported, as apostles of enlightenment,
by the best of the German princes, just as Germans have
in later times been drawn into Russia by the Czars.
Just when this reign of foreign taste was most undis-
puted, just when the political life and national sentiment
of Germany seemed bound in a frozen sleep, a chapge
began ; and it began, like so many other great changOy
in an unpromising quarter and an unconscious way.
From the time of the Swabian emperors, the Maignve
of Brandenburg was one of the most considerable princci
of the Empire, and by the reign of Rudolf the First he
had become definitely recognised as an Elector with the
office of Arch chamberlain «. His dominions consisted of
the Mark proper, or Old Mark, to which were added the
The Mar-
f:r aviate of
Branden-
burfr and
the hrnise
of IhduH-
zollern.
» A sketch of the earlier history volume of Mr. Cariyle*t •
of Prussia and the house of Hohen- of Friedrich the Second.'
zoUcra may be found in the first
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
403
New and the Middle Mark, a flat, sandy territory of
heaths and woods lying along the Elbe and the Havel,
which had been conquered from the Wends in the days
of Henry the Fowler, and gradually filled by a Teutonic
population, together with a more or less vague authority,
or claims of authority, over the Slavic tribes to the north
and east. In a.d. 141 i this territory was delivered over to
Frederick, sixth Burggrave of Nurnberg, by the Emperor
Sigismund, whom he had served faithfully, and to whom he
had advanced moneys, which the latter in this way repaid,
giving Brandenburg as a sort of pledge which was not
likely to be redeemed: and in 141 5 Sigismund formally
conferred the Mark and the Electoral dignity upon Frede-
rick and his heirs, still, however, reserving (but on the
occasion of the formal investiture of 141 7 omitting this
reservation) the right of redeeming his grant by the pay-
ment of 400,000 Hungarian gold gulden, and retaining to
himself and his male heirs the reversion in the Electorate,
expectant on the extinction of Frederick's line, an event
which has not yet happened. This Burggrave Frederick
was the lineal descendant of a certain Conrad of Hohen-
zoUem (first Burggrave in the days of Frederick Barba-
rossa), scion of an old Swabian family whose ancestral
castle stands in the high limestone plateau of the Rauhe
Alp, not very far from Hohenstaufen and from Altorf, the
original seat of the Welfs ; and this Conrad is the twenty-
third lineal ancestor of the present Emperor William. From
the time of Elector Frederick the house of Hohenzollem
held Brandenburg, adding to it by slow degrees various
other scattered territories and claims to territories which for a
time could not be made good, and in particular acquiring,
in 1605 and 1618, the district known as East Prussia, lying
along the Baltic beyond the Vistula, as the heirs of Albert
D d 2
404
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
Erection of
the last Grandmaster of the Teutonic knights^. The
HohenzoUems embraced Protestantism, and after having
played (in the person of the Elector George William)
a rather contemptible part in the Thirty Years' War,
produced a really distinguished prince in Frederick the
(so-called) Great Elector, who reigned in the latter half of
the seventeenth century. He freed East Prussia from the
supremacy of Poland, consolidated his straggling domin-
ions into a well-ordered State, and gave to his subjects,
by the lustre of his military successes, a sort of incipient
consciousness of national existence.
In 1700 his son Frederick, having secured or purchased
^ofPru^ki^ i the approval of the Emperor Leopold, but not without a
furious protest from Pope Clement XI, whose prophetic
spirit dreaded and denounced in Hildebrandine &shion the
admission of a heretic to the most sacred of secular o£Sces,
called himself King of Prussia, taking his title from the
above-named Duchy of East Prussia, and crowning him-
self at Konigsberg, its ancient capital, on January 18, 1701.
This region formed no part of the Holy Empire, and its
original inhabitants, the Old Prussians^, were of cooise
not Germans at all, but a Lithuanian people, who had
remained pagans and barbarians till they were half con-
quered, half exterminated by the Teutonic knights in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and their countiy
Germanised by a constant immigration from the West
It is a curious freak of history, not xmlike that which has
given the British name to the Teutonic and Gaelic inhabi-
b The Duchy of East Prussia was actual goyemment into thdr handi
established by the treaty of Cracow till 1605, nor the fiill kgal doBU-
in 1525, under Polish suzerainty, nion till l6l8; and the snpreniMy
The Electors of Brandenburg, from of Poland remained until rdeaxd
the time of Joachim 11 onwards, at the peace of Wehlaa in l657>
obtained from Poland the co-in- ^ So called from their dirdliog
vestiture of it, but did not get the next to Russia — po Russia,
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
40:
tants ot these islands, that has transferred the name of this
vanishing race to the greatest of modem German states.
This assumption of royalty, the work of a prince who
contributed nothing else to the greatness of his house,
was a matter of far greater consequence than might have
at first appeared. At that time no other member of the
Empire (except the Elector of Saxony, who had in 1697
been chosen king of Poland) wore a crown, and the new
dignity was soon felt to have raised its owner into a
different European position; it made him the fellow of
the sovereigns of France, England, Denmark, Sweden,
and brought him into what soon became a rivalry with his
titular superior the Emperor. Had Austria been wise,
she would have rejected a bribe far larger than that by
which her compliance was purchased, would even have
dispensed with the goodwill of Brandenburg in the
struggle of the Spanish Succession, rather than have
yielded to this young antagonist a moral advantage of
such moment. For the time, however, little change
seemed to have been made. Frederick the First was
feeble and peaceful : the eccentric Frederick William I,
who followed him, had a dutiful reverence for his Emperor,
and prized his regiment of giants too highly to care to
risk them in war. He was, moreover, thrifty to the verge
of parsimony ; and his energy, which was considerable,
found scope for its exercise in a careful oversight of the
revenue and civil service of the country which largely
contributed to the successes of his son.
The greatness of the Prussian monarchy begins with
Frederick II, certainly the most considerable man who
has succeeded to a throne since Charles V. The extra-
ordinary military talents by which Europe knows him
best, are a less worthy title to the admiration of posterity,
than the ardour he shewed for good administration, for
Frederick
the Great,
1742-1786.
4o6 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
the prosperity and happiness of his people. Along with
the instinctive desire of a powerful and active mind to
have everything done in the best way, he had a complete
superiority to prejudice and tradition, and a gentune sym-
pathy, not indeed for political liberty, but for cultivation
and enlightenment. It was at bottom this, fully as mudi
as the glories of his campaigns, that made him, in spite of
his cold heart and scornful manners, a favourite with his
own people and an object of interest, even of pride,
throughout Germany. Upon that country the moral
effect of his reign was great It stirred the national spirit
to see a German prince defend his naturally weak king-
dom against the allied might of Austria, France, and
Russia, and come out of the terrible struggle with un-
daunted confidence and undiminished territories. While
the other states of the Empire were languishing under a
wasteful and old-fashioned misgovernment, Prussia gave
the example of an administration which, while rigidly
economical, strove to develope the resources of the
country, of a highly-disciplined army, a codified law, a
reformed system of procedure, a capital to which literaiy
and scientific celebrities were gathered from all quartern
While Roman Catholicism and feudalism reigned on the
Danube, Frederick made Berlin the centre of light fix
North Germany ; and in this way effected as much for his
kingdom as he had done by the seizure of wealthy Silesia,
giving it a representative position, a daim on Gennan
interest and sympathy which there had been nothing in its
earlier history, or in that of his own house, to awaken.
But in all this it would be a mistake to attribute to the
great king a conception of what it is now the &shion
to call * Prussia's German Mission,' the conscious foresight
of a German patriot anxious to pave the way for the unity
7 HE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
407
of the nation. There is little in his words or acts to shew
such a feeling ; what he planned and cared for was the
strength and wellbeing of his own Prussian State ^. And
when at the end of his life he took a lead in the politics of
the Empire, by forming the League of Princes to oppose
the ambitious designs of Joseph II, his purpose was
simply to maintain the status quo^ — that siaitis quo whose
impotence was so terribly displayed by the events of the
next twenty years «. That League is memorable, not as
being in any sense a project of reform, but as the first
instance in which Prussia appears heading a party among
the German States in hostility to Austria : it is the begin-
ning of that Dualism, as the Germans call it, which at
last reached a point where nothing but a struggle for life
and death could decide between the rival powers.
What glory Prussia had gained under Frederick II she
seemed determined to lose under his two unworthy suc-
cessors. Nothing, except indeed the behaviour of the
minor German princes, could have been weaker, meaner,
more unpatriotic than her conduct in the struggle with
France which began in 1792^. In 179 1 she had leagued
herself with Austria, but their relations, as might have been
expected, soon ceased to be cordial. Frederick William
II began to negotiate with the French Republic, in the
^ The idea was started during justly incurred,
the Seven Years* War of uniting This League, which Frederick
Germany under Prussian supremacy, modelled to some extent upon the
deposing Francis I, and getting Smalkaldic of the sixteenth century,
Frederick himself chosen Emperor; answered its purpose by • check-
and his favourite minister Winter- ing Joseph, and preventing any
feldt was, in 1757, sanguine enough change in the constitution of the
to believe this could be effected. Empire. See upon it Von Rankers
(See Schmidt, Preussens Deutsche Die Deutschen M'dchte und der
Politik, p. 22.) Frederick is said to Fdrstenhund.
have, while Crown Prince, formed ' See for the whole history of
the plan of marrying Maria Theresa, this period Von Sybel's Geschichte
whose hatred he afterwards so der RevolutionssLeii,
Prussian
policy in the
wars of the
French
Revolution.
4o8
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
The War of
Liberation.
hope of getting something for himself out of the con-
fusion, and in 1795 concluded with France the separate
peace of Basel, by which a line of demarcation was drawn
between North and South Germany, the former being de-
clared neutral. When in 1806 the Confederation of the
Rhine had been formed under Napolepn's protectorate and
the Holy Empire extinguished, Prussia, which by a con-
vention (February 15, 1806) had obtained p>ossession of
Hanover, part, it need hardly be said, of the dominions of
her late ally, the English King George III, endeavoured
to unite the Northern States in a league, at whose head
should stand her king, with the title and prerogative of
Emperor, the Direktorium being composed of him and
the sovereigns of Saxony and Hessen-Cassel. Talleyrand,
however, found it easy to baffle this scheme, on which he
had at first pretended to smile (it is memorable as the
first appearance of the conception of a North-German
Confederation) ; and soon afterwards the defeats of Jena
and Auerstadt, followed by that of Friedland, left Prussia
at Napoleon's mercy, if mercy he had any. By the Peace
of Tilsit she submitted, losing her .lands west of the Elbe,
and in all more than half of her territories, recognising
the Confederation of the Rhine, and abandoning all claim
to interfere in German politics. Meanwhile Saxony, the
newly-created kingdom of Westphalia, and all the other
purely German members of the old Empire, joined the
Rhenish Confederation, that is to say, enrolled themselves
the vassals of the Parisian crown. French domination
was offensive ever}'where, but nowhere so ofifensive as in
Prussia, the feebleness of whose Court seems to have em-
boldened Napoleon to treat her with an insolent scorn be
never thought of shewing to the more consistent, though
not more patriotic Hapsburgs. Hence, too, when the
uprising came, and the swelling wave of popular enthn-
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
409
siasm tossed back the French beyond the Elbe, the Weser,
the Rhine itself, it was the much-suffering Prussian people
that was foremost in the fight ; it was northern heroes of
the sword and pen that drew the admiration and gratitude
of a liberated Fatherland; while the French, who had
been wont to treat the North Germans with a strangely
misplaced contempt, felt for them, after the campaigns of
Leipzig and Waterloo, a hatred scarcely less bitter than
that they bore to England herself.
This great deliverance was far more the work of the
people than of King or Court; but as was natural, it
induced a burst of loyalty which strengthened and glori-
fied the Prussian monarchy in the eyes of Germany, and
gave it a great opportunity of placing itself at the
head of the nation. For the national feeling which had
smouldered for two centuries or more, had now risen
into a strong and brilliant flame ; and it was on Prussia,
far more than on any other state, that its light was shed.
Austria's merits as well as her vices do not permit her to
be popular; Bavaria and Wiirtemberg had been aggran-
dized by Napoleon ; Saxony had adhered to him through-
out; Prussia had endured most and triumphed most
signally. Now would have been the time for her to
answer to the great cry that went up for freedom and
unity, to secure by firm action the rights of the people
in a consolidated German state.
But, as often happens, the hour came without the man.
Frederick William III was well intentioned indeed, but
feeble and narrow-minded; and his Court had not yet
recovered from its horror at the principles of 1789 and
the acts of 1793. As the want of representative insti-
tutions and the habit of combination for political pur-
poses gave the desire for unity no means of expressing
itself practically, it remained an aspiration, a sentiment]
4IO
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
The Con-
gress of
Vienna.
nothing more. Thus, when the Congress of Vienna met
to reconstitute Europe and Germany, the princes were
masters of the situation ; and they used their advantage
with characteristic selfishness. The proclamation of
Kalisch issued by the sovereigns of Prussia and Russia,
when they leagued themselves against Napoleon (March
25th, 18 1 3), announced the object of the two powers to
be * to aid the German peoples in recovering freedom and
independence, and to afford to them effective protection
and defence in re-establishing a venerable Empire.' The
reconstitution of the country, it was added, was to be
effected solely by the united action of the princes and
peoples, and was to proceed * from the ancient and native
spirit of the German nation; that Grermany, the more
perfectly this work was executed in its principles and
compass, might so much the more appear again among
the peoples of Europe in renovated youth, strength, and
unity.' But at the Congress nothing was heard, and
indeed nothing would have been listened to, of the
kinds. When it opened, Hardenberg the Prussian
minister presented a scheme which, although it recog-
nized in the princes an independence in some respects
considerable, and already conceded to them by the
treaties securing their adhesion against France, pro-
posed to treat Germany as being for many purposes
a united state, under institutions whose tendency would
have been to make her less and less of a mere kagae.
Austria however, under the chilling influence of Metter^
nich, himself perhaps prompted by the darker vpA
of Frederick von Gentz, received these proposals wilfc
B For the Congress of Vienna tion to H. Scbuize, Einlmlmg ■
students may refer to L. Hausser's das detUsch§ Staatsrtehtp and K.
Deutsche Ge^chichte; for the sub- Kliipfel, Dit deutsehtn
sequent history of the Confedera- bestrebungen seii 1815.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
411
dull disfavour ; the minor potentates, headed by Bavaria
and Wtirtemburg, entered energetic protests against any-
thing which could infringe on their sovereignty; pro-
tests so sweeping that even Austria was obliged to
remind them that under the old Empire certain rights
were assured to German subjects, while the envoy of
Hanover exclaimed against the ' Sultanism ' of these
members of the late Confederation of the Rhine. At
last, after a long period of confusion and uncertainty, in
which projects for the restoration of the * ancient vener-
able Empire ' were frequently put forward, and supported
among others by Stein, a counter-scheme, propounded
by Mettemich, was moulded into the Act of Foundation
of the Germanic Confederation. The work was hastily
done, under the pressure of alarm at Napoleon's return
from Elba, and professed to be only an outline, to be
subsequendy improved and filled in. The diplomatists
were exhausted by a long course of bickerings and in-
trigues upon this and other questions ; many were dis-
satisfied, but every one saw that his opponent's power of
hindering was greater than his own power of forcing a
proposition through ; and as it was clear something must
be done, people brought themselves to a sort of acqui-
escence, which though it professed to be only temporary,
could not easily be recalled, and of course made it harder
to reopen the discussion. So this proposed completion,
as was natural in a matter of so much delicacy and
difficulty, never took place; and the revised draft of
the Act of Confederation, adopted on June loth, 18 15,
a week before Waterloo, was in all its main features the
constitution which lasted down till 1866. Prussia yielded
with unaccountable readiness — unaccountable except on
the hypothesis that her ministers, Hardenberg and William
Establish'
ment of the
Germanic
Confedara'
tion.
412 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
von Humboldt, despaired at such a time and among
such people of effecting anything satisfactory — the points
on which she had at first insisted ; and made little fiirtber
objection to the carrying out of Mettemich's views. Her
king was a faithful member of the Holy Alliance: her
government adhered to the principles associated ^th
that compact, and was content in internal questions to
follow humbly in the wake of Austria. While the re-
action was triumphing in the rest of Europe, Particularism^
triumphed at Vienna, and the interests of the German
people were forgotten or ignored.
The Federal Constitution, while recognizing fiilly the
sovereignty of the princes in their own territories, had
made only the feeblest provisions for the concession of
popular rights and the establishment of representative
institutions in the several states. Almost the only ex-
pression which it allowed to be given to the idea of
national unity was in the creation of a central fed^al
body, the Diet, wherein only the princes and not their
subjects were represented, which was empowered to act
in foreign affairs, and might be made by the great
princes the means of repressing any liberal movements
on the part of an individual member. But this did not
satisfy Metternich. The excitement produced by the
War of Liberation did not at once subside : the ideas of
freedom, national unity, national greatness, which it had
called forth, had obtained a dominion over the minds of
the German youth; and were eloquently preached by
some of the noblest spirits among its teachers. These
ideas however, innocent as they would now appear, and
^ Pariicularismus is the convcni- pendence of the several local poCen*
ent name which the Germans have tates, who were or are mcmben
given to the policy, feeling, or sys- of the Germanic body.
tern which maintains the inde-
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
4'3
well founded as was the jealousy of Russian influence
which prompted their expression, were marked wilh fear
and suspicion by the narrow minds of the Prussian king
and the minister of Francis of Austria. In 1819, there-
fore, Metternich brought together, as if by accident, the
ministers of ten leading German courts at Karlsbad in
Bohemia, and procured their assent to a series of mea-
sures extinguishing the freedom of the press, restraining
imiversity teaching, forbidding societies and political
meetings, and erecting a sort of inquisition at Mentz for
the discovery and punishment of democratic agitators.
These measures were soon after adopted by the Federal
Diet at Frankfort, and followed by conferences of minis-
ters at Vienna. These produced the instrument known
as the Vienna Final Act (Schlussakt) of 1820, whereby
the constitution of the Confederation was further modi-
fied in a reactionary and anti-national spirit. Such
securities as existed for the rights of the subject in the
several states were diminished, while the Diet saw its
powers enlarged whenever they could be employed for the
suppression of free institutions, and received a frightfully
wide police jurisdiction through the territories of the
minor princes.
This Karlsbad Conference struck the keynote of the
policy of the Federal Diet during the three and thirty
dreary years that lie between 18 15 and the brief though
bright awakening of 1848". If the selfishness of rulers
were not the commonest moral of history, there would
be something extraordinary as well as offensive in the
horror of change and reform which was now exhibited
by these very princes who had, with Napoleon's help or
' See L. K. Aegidi, Aw dem Jahre 1819.
Condition 0/
Germany
under the
Confederal
tion.
414
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
The i arty
of progress
in Germany.
connivance, carried out by the mediatization of their
weaker neighbours a revolution far more sweeping, and
in point of law less defensible, than any which the patri-
otic reformers now proposed. These potentates, especi-
ally those of Northern Germany, were for the most part
possessed by the same reactionary feelings as their two
great neighbours; their rule was harsh and repressive,
conceding little or nothing to the demands of their sub-
jects, and prepared, especially after their alarms had been
renewed by the revolution of 1830 in France, to check
the most harmless expressions of the aspirations for
national unity. Such unity now appeared further off
than ever. While the old Empire lasted, princes and
peoples owned one common head in the Emperor, and
lived under a constitution which had descended, however
modified, from the days when the nation formed a single
powerful state. Now, by the mediatization of the lesser
principalities, the extinction of the Reichsritterschaft
(knights of the Empire), the absorption of all the free
cities save four, the class which had formed a link be-
tween the princes and the mass of the nation had been
removed ; the sovereigns had, in becoming fewer, become
more isolated and more independent ; they were members
rather of the European than of the German common-
wealth. Those moral effects of the War of LiberatioD,
from which so much had at first been hoped, now
seemed to have been lost utterly and for ever.
Meanwhile the German liberals laboured under the
immense difficulty of having no legitimate and constita-
tional mode of agitation, no lever, so to speak, by which
they could move the mass of their countrymen. They
were mere speakers and writers, because there was no-
thing else for them to do ; dreamers and theorista^ is
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
415
unthinking people in more fortunate countries called
them, because the field of practical politics was closed to
them. In only a few of the states did representative
assemblies exist; and these were too small and too
limited in their powers to be able to stimulate the poli-
tical interests of their constituents. Prussia herself had
no parliament of the whole monarchy until 1847: up
to that year there had been only local ' Landes Stande ; '
estates or diets for the several provinces.
The liberal party had two objects to struggle for — ^the
establishment or extension of free institutions in the
several states, and the attainment of national unity. As
respects the first of these, it may be remarked that the
mere passion for freedom in the abstract has never pro-
duced a great popular movement. Englishmen, Swiss,
and Americans may, through long habit, think it essential
to national happiness; but it is generally desired rather
as a means than as an end: and there must always
exist, in order to rouse a people to disaffection or insur-
rection, either such a withdrawal of liberties previously
enjoyed as wounds its pride and conservative feeling, or
else the infliction by the governing power of positive evils
which affect the subject in his daily life, his religion, his
social and domestic relations. Now in Germany, and
particularly in the Prussian State, such liberties had not
been known since primitive times; and there were few
serious practical grievances to be complained of From
the time of Frederick the Great the country had been well
and honestly administered; conscience was free, trade
and industry were growing, taxation was not heavy, the
press censorship did not annoy the ordinary citizen, and
the other restraints upon personal freedom were only those
to which the subjects of all the Continental monarchies
//s diffi-
culiies.
Its aims :
establish-
ment of coil'
stitutional
government.
4i6
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
Attainment
of national
unity.
had been accustomed. The habit of submission was
strong; and there existed in most places a good deal
of loyalty, irrational perhaps, but not therefore the less
powerful, towards the long-descended reigning houses.
In several of the petty states there was indeed serious mis-
government, and an arbitrary behaviour on the sovereign's
part which might well have provoked revolt Hessen-
Cassel, for instance, was ruled by the unworthy minions
of a singularly contemptible prince ; and in Hanover King
Ernest Augustus on his accession in 1837 abolished by a
stroke of the pen the constitution which had been granted
by his predecessor William. But these states were too
small for a vigorous political life ; the nobility depended
on the Court and were disposed to side with it; the power
of the Confederation hung like a thunder-cloud on the
horizon, ready to burst wherever Austria chose to guide
it. It was therefore hard for the liberals to excite their
countrymen to any energetic and concerted action; and
when the governments thought fit to repress their attempts
at agitation, this could be harshly done with little fear of
the consequences.
In labouring for the creation of one united German
state out of the multitude of petty principalities, the
party of progress found themselves at a still greater dis-
advantage. There was indeed a sentimental wish for it,
but only a sentiment; an idea which worked powerfuDy
upon imaginative minds, but had litde hold on the world
of fact and reality, little charm for the steady-going
burgher and the peasant whose vision was bounded by
his own valley. Some considerable practical benefits
might no doubt have been expected from its realization,
such as the establishment of a common code of laws» the
better execution of great public works, the protection of
THE NE W GERMAN EMPIRE,
417
the nation from the aggressions of France and Russia;
but these were objects whose importance it was hard to
bring home to the average citizen in peaceful times.
And where was the movement towards unity to begin?
Not in the Federal Diet, of all places, for it consisted of
the envoys of princes who would have been the first to
suffer. Not in the local legislatures, for they had no
power to deal practically with such questions, and would
^)eedily have been silenced had they attempted by discuss-
ing them to influence the policy of their masters. It was
therefore only through the carefully guarded press, and
occasionally in social or literary gatherings, that appeals
to the nation could be made, or the semblance of an agi-
tation kept up. There was no point to start from : it was all
aspiration and nothing more; and so this movement, to
which so many of the noblest hearts and intellects of
Germany devoted themselves (though the two greatest
stood aloof), made during many years Httie apparent
progress. The ZoUverein was indeed created, and thereby
a bond of union established whose advantages were soon
felt, but this was done by the individual action of Prussia
and the several States which one after another entered
into her views, not by the Diet as a national work.
Meanwhile the strictness of the repressive system was still
maintained : Prussia, though now ruled by the more liberal
Frederick William the Fourth, was still silent ; the influence
of Mettemich was still supreme.
Then came the revolution of 1848. The monarchy of
Louis Philippe fell with a crash that sounded over Europe,
and every German and Italian throne rocked to its founda-
tion. In Vienna, Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, not to speak
of smaller capitals, there came, sooner or later, risings more
or less formidable ; constitutions were promised or granted
s e
ThtRevo-
Ivtion of
1848.
4i8 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
by the terrified princes: the Federal Diet, after a hasty
declaration in favour of the liberties it had so long with-
held, abdicated to make way for a national Parliament,
which was duly summoned, and met at Frankfort on the
1 8th of May, 1848. This assembly appointed as Adminis-
trator of the Empire (Reichsverweser) the Archduke John
of Austria, and began to frame a constitution for miited
Germany. According to the draught, completed early in
1849, Germany was to be a federal state, under a heredi-
tary emperor, irresponsible, but advised by responsible
ministers; and with a parliament of two houses, one
representing the states, members of the Empire ; the other
the people. On the 28th of March the assembly offered
the imperial dignity to the King of Prussia \ He hesitated
to accept it without the consent of the other sovereigns;
and exactly a month afterwards definitely refused it, fear-
ing the jealousy of some of the princes, although twenty-
nine of them had already expressed their approval of the
scheme ; disliking several parts of the new constitution,
and feeling himself too weak and irresolute to take the
helm of the German state at a moment of such difficulty
and confusion. His refusal was a great, and as it proved,
a fatal discouragement to the liberals, for it dhunited
them, and it destroyed their hopes of a powerful material
support Nevertheless the Frankfort assembly sat fa
^ In 1847, when things seemed but had shown some real sympathj
quiet enough, Frederick William IV for the people. And this he hid:
had opened negociations with Aus- he heartily desired both the wdt
tria with a view to improving the being, and to a certain extent. dM
constitution of the Confederation, freedom of his own people and the
and making better provision for greatness of Germany ; bat he im
common defence and for internal unhappily entangled with notioai
communication. In the Berlin re- of divine right and variooi odiff
volution of March, 1848, he had mediaeval whimsies and •mtim**^
behaved with irresolution, no doubt,
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
419
some months longer, till, having migrated to Stuttgart,
it dwindled down at last into a sort of rump parliament,
and was suppressed by force, while Prussia, at first in
conjunction with Hanover and Saxony, started other and
narrower plans for national organisation, schemes modelled
after those of 1785 and 1806, but of which nothing ever
came \ Meantime the governments had recovered from
their first alarm. Austria had reconquered North Italy,
and had by Russia's help overpowered the Magyars;
France had restored the Pope ; everywhere over Europe
the tide of reaction was rising fast. In 1850 Austria and
Prussia took from the Archduke John such shadow of
power as still remained to him as Reichsverweser, and at
the conferences of Olmiitz Prussia resumed her attitude
of submissive adherence to Austria's policy. By the
middle of 185 1 the Confederation was re-established on
its old footing, with its old powerlessness for good, its
old capacities for mischief, and, it may be added, its old
willingness to use those capacities for the suppression of
free institutions in the more progressive states.
The effects, however, of the great uprising of 1848 were
not lost in Germany any more than in Italy and Hungary.
It had made things seem possible — seem even for a moment
accomplished — which had been till then mere visions ; it
had awakened a keen political interest in the people, stirred
their whole life, and given them a sense of national unity
such as they had not had since 18 14. By shewing the
governments how insecure were the foundations of their
arbitrary power, it had made them less ijnwilling to accept
change ; it had taught peoples how little was to be ex-
pected from the unforced goodwill of princes. From this
k They were debated at great length by an assembly conyoked a
Gotha.
£62
The
Reaction :
reestablish'
ment of the
Confedera'
tion.
Effects of
the move-
ment of
1848-49.
4^0
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
time, therefore, after the first reaction had spent itself, one
may observe a real though slow progress towards free
constitutional life. In some of the smaller states, and
particularly in Baden, it soon came to be the policy of
the government to encourage the action of the local par-
liament; and the Prussian assembly became in its long
and spirited struggle with the crown a political school of
incomparable value to the rest of Germany as well as to
its own great kingdom.
One other thing more the events of 1 848-1850 did
most effectively for the Germans, if indeed that wanted
doing : they made clear to the nation the hopelessness of
expecting anything from the Confederation. During the
last sixteen years of its existence, nothing, if we except the
promulgation under its sanction of a general code of com-
mercial law, was done by the Federal Diet for national
objects : its deliberations had for many years been carried
on in secret ; it spoke with no authority to foreign princes,
and behaved with sluggish irresolution in the question
which was again beginning to agitate Germany, of the
succession to Schleswig and Holstein, and the relation of
these duchies to the Danish Crown.
The restoration of the Federal constitution in 1850-51
was at the time regarded as merely provisional, accepted
only because Austria and Prussia could not be got to
agree upon any new scheme; and the successive projects
of reform which thereafter emanated, sometimes fion
governments, sometimes from voluntary associations, kept
the question of the reorganization of Germany and the
attainment of some sort of national unity, constantly before
the people. Thus, although nothing n^'as done, and the
weary discussions which went on moved the laughter of
other nations, the way was secretly but surely paved ftr
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE^.
421
revolution. In 1859 the liberals organised themselves in
what was called the National Union (National-Verein), a
body cx)ntaining numerous members in nearly all the
German States, and among them many distinguished pub-
licists and men of letters. It held general meetings from
time to time; and, when occasion arose, its permanent
committee issued pamphlets and manifestoes, explaining
the views and recommending the policy of the party.
This policy was not a very definite one, so far as practical
measm^es were concerned, yet tolerably clear in its ultimate
object — viz. the union of all Germany in one Federal
state (whether republican or monarchical), and if neces-
sary, the absolute exclusion of Austria therefrom. This
last feature procured for it from her adherents and from
the German conservatives generally, the name of the
Little German (Kleindeutsch) party ; and they, assuming
the title of Great Germans (Grossdeutschen, i. e. the
advocates of a Germany which should include Austria),
founded in 1862 a rival association, which called itself the
Reform Union, and in like manner held meetings and
issued manifestoes. It found strong support in Hanover,
Bavaria, and Wurtemburg, but comparatively little in the
middle states, and of course still less in Prussia. Its
policy was mainly defensive ; while the National Union,
whose tendencies would naturally have been philo-Prussian
and aggressive, found itself embarrassed by what seemed
the resolutely reactionary attitude taken up by the Prussian
king and ministers in the affairs of their own kingdom.
A contest respecting the organization and payment of
the army had broken out between the Government and
the Chamber — a contest embittered first by the accession
to the throne of the feudally-minded King William I
(hitherto Regent), whose assertion of the principle of
Parties in
Germany.
i
422
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
The Fur St en
Congress at
Frankfort.
divine right at his coronation at Konigsberg had surprised
and displeased thinking people, and afterwards by the
admission to the chief place in the ministry of a statesman
who was then supposed to be the champion of tyranny
and feudalism, even of the Austrian alliance. During the
struggle which raged in the years 1862-64, and which
at some moments seemed to threaten revolution, it was
impossible for Germany to hope for anything from a
power which refused to work constitutional government
at home, and treated the representatives of the people
with a roughness under which no one could tell that there
lay concealed a substantial conununity of purpose.
The liberals of the South and West were therefore in
1863 disposed fairly to abjure Prussia as given over
to a reprobate mind; and Austria thought she saw
her opportunity. Encouraged by the partial success
which had attended his efforts to unite and pacify the
different provinces of the monarchy by the creation
of a Reichsrath, Count Schmerling conceived the hope
of recovering by an appeal to the nation the ancient
primacy of the Hapsburgs, and thrusting the now un-
popular Prussia into the background. Accordingly in
August, 1863, the Emperor Francis Joseph invited the
reigning princes and representatives of the free cities to
meet him at Frankfort, to discuss a scheme of federal
reform which he there propounded, and which, while it
increased the power of Austria, appeared to strengthen
the cohesion of the Confederation, and to introduce,
though insufficiently, a popular element into its constitu-
tion. All save one attended ; but that one was the Kling
of Prussia. He had in the preceding year taken for his
prime minister Otto Edward Leopold, Freiherr of Bis-
I marck-Schbnhausen in the Old Mark of Brandenburg, a
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
433
man who, having been Prussian representative in the
Federal Diet from 1851 to 1859, had learned by expe-
rience the weakness of that body and its subservience
to Austria, and was now becoming impatient to try some
speedier, and if necessary more forcible, method than
diplomatic discussion of putting an end to the existing
dead- lock. At his suggestion, the Prussian Court refused
to have anything to do with the Austrian scheme, which
fell therewith to the ground, and the Diet was troubled
by no change for the rest of its unhonoured life.
Austria, however, would probably have tried to carry
through her project had not another question suddenly
arisen, which turned all thoughts in a different direction,
threw the German powers into new relations to one
another, and became at last the cause of the dissolution
of the Confederation itself. In November, 1863, Fre-
derick VII, king of Denmark died ; and the contest so
long foreseen and delayed between the Danes and the
Germans, respecting their rights over Schleswig and
Holstein, broke out with unexpected vehemence.
The Danish constitution of 1855 had incorporated these
two Duchies with Denmark for all purposes, although Hol-
stein had always been a part of Germany, while Schleswig
was by law indissolubly united to Holstein, and although
the inhabitants even of Schleswig were in great majority
of German speech. The Federal Diet had protested long
ago against this constitution as an infraction of its rights,
but it was not till October, 1863, that it decreed federal
execution against Denmark. When, a few weeks later.
Christian IX succeeded to the throne in virtue of the
arrangements which Frederick VII had been empowered
to make by the Treaty of London in 1852, no steps had
as yet been taken to give effect to the decree. But
The
Schleswiz-
Holstein
Question.
*At
474
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
Policy of
Prussia.
the eyes of Europe were at once turned upon tbe new
sovereign, whose title was disputed, and when, under
the pressure of the heated populace of Copenhagen, he
acceded to the constitution incorporating the duchies
with Denmark, he found himself and his kingdom at
once committed to the struggle. Prince Frederick of
Augustenburgi claimed Schleswig and Holstein, and was
supported not only by a considerable party in both
duchies, but by the general sentiment of the Germans, who
saw in his candidature the only chance of saving them
from the Danes. The agitation in Germany soon grew
vehement, and that the faster because the question was
one upon which all parties and sects could unite. The
National Union and Reform Union met, fraternised, and
appointed a joint permanent committee, which issued
addresses to the nation, established Schleswig-Holstein
Unions throughout the country, and promoted the enlist-
ment of bands of volunteers, who hurried to the border.
Even the Federal Diet, though the opposition of Prussia
and Austria prevented it from recognising Frederick as
Duke, carried out (against the will of those powers) the
resolution for federal execution by sending in December,
1863, a body of Saxons and Hanoverians to occupy
Holstein.
Piiissia had a difficult game to play, and she played it
with consummate skill. Her ministers were unwilling to
aid the Prince of Augustenburg, both because she was
bound to Denmark as one of the signataries of the Treaty
of London^", and because their views of the future included
^ Prince Frederick had never ™ The Confederaticm wu oot
assented to Frederick VII's arrange- bound by the Treaty of LondoOt H
ments, and contended that he was it had never been laid before the
not barred by his father^s renuncia- Diet. Pmssia and Aostzia woe.
tion of the rights of the family.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
425
Other contingencies which it would then have been prema-
ture to mention. But if hope and the voice of the nation
called on them to act, prudence forbade them to act alone.
It was essential to carry Austria along with them, not only
because the Austrian alliance would be needed if England,
France, and Russia threatened war, but because she could
in this way be made to share the unpopularity which
backwardness in the national cause was bringing upon
Prussia, and because she was thus alienated from Bavaria,
Hanover, and the other states of the second rank, with
which her relations had been, especially since the Frank-
fort Congress, so close and cordial. When the co-opera-
tion of Austria had been secured — partly by adroitly
playing on her fears of the democratic and almost revolu-
tionary character which the Schleswig-Holstein movement
was taking in Germany, partly by her own reluctance to
let Prussia gain any advantage by acting alone against
Denmark — the Prussian government resolved to take the
control of the quarrel out of the hands of the Diet, so as to
decide the fate of the two Duchies in the way most favour-
able to their own plans for the reconstruction of North
Germany. Accordingly Prussia and Austria appealed, as
they were undoubtedly entitled to do, to certain provisions
of the Treaty of London, recognising the special rights
of Schleswig ; and summoned Denmark to withdraw at
once the law of November i8th, 1863, whereby Schleswig
was finally incorporated with the Danish monarchy. When
the Danes refused, a strong Prussian and Austrian force
was poured into the Duchies, not without considerable in-
dignation on the part as well of the rest of Germany as of
the Prussian liberals, who believed that the object of this
invasion was to check the national movement, expel Prince
Frederick, and hand over Schleswig to Christian IX.
War with
Denmark.
436
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
Cession of
Schleswig
and
Holstein,
Questions
as to their
disposal.
They were soon better informed. Early in 1864 tbe
united army passed the Danewerk, stormed DCippel, over-
ran Jutland, and had the Danish king and people entirely
at their mercy. A Conference was summoned in London;
but it broke up without effecting anything ; and /when
the Germans resumed hostilities, and it was clear that
the expected help from England, Russia, or France »
would not be forthcoming, Denmark submitted, and by
the Treaty of Vienna (October, 1864) ceded Schleswig,
Holstein, and Lauenburg to the allied powers abso-
lutely. Prussia then pushed the Saxons and Hanoverians
out of Holstein, and began to strengthen herself and make
arrangements for the administration of the territor}' she
occupied; while Austria, seeing this, began to hesitate,
and suspect, and doubt whether her course had been
altogether wise. She was soon to be still more cruelly
undeceived.
Now that the Danes were for ever dispossessed, the
question arose — what was to become of the Duchies.
Everybody expected the recognition of Prince Frederick
of Augustenburg : the Diet was clearly in his favour, and
Austria seemed quite willing. Prussia, however, refused to
consent. Her crown lawyers, to whom the whole matter
had been referred, while not attempting to advocate
n It has been commonly believed
that Russia would not aid the Danes
on account of her obligations to
Prussia during the Polish insurrec-
tion ; and that Louis Napoleon re-
fused to stir because he was dis-
gusted at the cold reception given
to his proposal for a general Euro-
pean Congress not very long before.
The inaction of England was attri-
buted on the Continent partly to the
personal influence of the Sovereign,
partly to the supposed prevalence of
* peace at any price* doctrines. But
it really was in large measure due to
the fact that English statesmen and
public writers found, when they
looked into the matter, that the
Danes were substantially in tbe
wrong, though no doubt die hesita-
tion of France, without whose aid
it would have been folly to stir,
had something to do with the
matter.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE, ^ 427
certain ancient hereditary claims that had been put for-
ward on behalf of the house of Hohenzollern, pronounced
in an elaborate opinion that the title of Christian IX was
legally preferable to that of Prince Frederick, and that, as
his title had passed by the cession to the two allied powers,
the latter were now entirely free to deal with the ceded
territories as they pleased. Nevertheless, she professed
herself ready to recognise Frederick as duke upon certain
conditions, which were declared to be essential to the
safety of Prussia on her north-west frontier, as well as to
the protection of Schleswig-Holstein itself against the
hostility of Denmark. These conditions included not
only a strict defensive and offensive alliance of the new
principahty with Prussia, but an incorporation of its army
and fleet with hers, an absorption of its postal and tele-
graphic system, the cession of its fortresses, and, in fact,
a pretty complete subjection to her authority in military
matters and in external politics. These proposals were,
as was expected, rejected by Prince Frederick, trusting to
the support of Austria, and buoyed up by the general
sympathy which his pretensions found not only in the rest
of Germany, but even in the Prussian Chamber, which
still maintained unshaken its opposition to the foreign
policy and schemes of military organization of Herr von
Bismarck's government. Meanwhile, voices began to be
raised in the Duchies for annexation to Prussia ; Austria
grew more and more suspicious; the relations of the
officials of the two powers established in the conquered
territory became daily less friendly. Things seemed
last ripening towards a war, when, on the mediation of
Bavaria and Saxony, the Convention of Gastein was
signed between the rival sovereigns in the autumn of
1865. By this treaty Schleswig was in the meantime
4:S SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
to be held by Prussia, Holstein by Austria, the qoestioii
of the ultimate disposal of both duchies being reserved;
while Austria sold her rights over Lauenburg to Frosna
for 2,500,000 rix-doUars. This was felt to be a hoDow
truce, and its hoUowness, despite the efforts of the Diet
to arrange matters, was soon manifest. The Austrian
authorities, knowing that they could not permanexitljr
retain Holstein, allowed an agitation to be kept up there
on behalf of Prince Frederick. Prussia vehemently pro-
tested against this, and required Austria to maintain the
status quo. Notes of complaint and recrimination woe
constantly passing between the two powers^; notes whoic
tone became always more menacing. Then each accnsed
the other of arming, Austria summoning the Diet to pre-
pare to restrain Prussia, Prussia beginning to shadow
forth plans for a reform in the federal constitution. Mean-
while both states were arming fast, and it became dear
that the only question was which could first strike a bknr,
and upon what allies each could rely p. Prussia had se-
cured Italy: Austria managed to carry with her the majoritf
of the greater German princes. In the memozable last
sittings of the Diet of June nth and 14th, 1866, Austria's
motion to mobolize the federal contingents, with a view
to execution against Prussia, was supported by Bavaria,
o Austria at one time proposed pronounce on the rights of Moce
to let Prussia have Holstein in ex- Frederick. This Prussia dedsnl
change for part of Silesia : at to be an infraction of the CoBfCfr
another she offered to leave the tion of Oastein; and her troop
disposal of the Duchies to be deter- accordingly crossed the Edtft ii
mined by the Diet. Prussia refused order to re-occupy Holsteiii invirtiic
both propositions, well knowing, of her condominate ri^its oder
as regards the latter, that the ded- the treaty of Vienna. Aartrit
sion of the Diet was foregone. withdrew to avoid a colUsioo; vk
p The immediate cause of the made her final motion in the M
war was the convocation by Austria which brought on the deduitka
of the states of Holstein, in order to of war.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
420
Saxony, Hanover, Wiirtemberg, Hessen-Cassel, Hessen-
Darmstadt, and several of the minor states, thus giving
her a large majority ; while, for Prussia's counter-proposi-
tion for a reform in the constitution of the Confederation,
there voted only Luxemburg and four of the * curiae,'
consisting of northern and middle states of the third rank,
seventeen in all out of the thirty-three. The partisans
of both sides having thus committed themselves, there
was no use in further resisting Austria in the Diet;
so Prussia, having entered her protest against its
proceedings, withdrew from the Confederation, declared
war upon Hanover and Saxony on June i6th, upon
Austria on June i8th, and pushed her armies forward
with a speed which seemed almost to paralyse her
opponents.
The great military events of 1866 and 1870 are too
fresh in our memories to make it necessary to recount
them here; nor is it worth while to inquire who was
technically in the right in the dispute which had arisen
between Austria and Prussia relative to the administration
of the Duchies and the interpretation of the Convention of
Gastein. Ever since Frederick the Great's time, it had
been plain that the rivalry of the <, two great monarchies
was an insuperable obstacle to the unity of the nation.
It was no less plain to the resolute and clear-sighted
minister who ruled at Berlin that this rivalry could be put
an end to by the sword alone; and the question that
remains, whether the importance of the object to be
attained justified an appeal to force, with all its attendant
miseries, is one which men will answer according to their
estimate of the moral and political value of that object.
Fortunately the military superiority of Prussia, and her
alliance with Italy, made the struggle far shorter than
430
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
The Peace
of Prague,
onlookers in the rest of Europe had expected ; and the
victors had the good sense to be content with some-
thing short of the complete fulfilment of their designs.
For the Preliminaries of Nikolsburg and Peace of PiagiKi
though they followed one of the most decisive victories
of modern times, had nevertheless only half solved tbe
problem that lay before Germany, and established a system
which to patriotic eyes might well seem imsatisfactoij.
It is true that Austria was thereby excluded from tbe
Germanic body, and the ground left free for Prussia
to form a new Confederation, in which she should be
dominant, and which the Court of Vienna undertook to
recognize. But with Austria went her German population
of seven millions, filling the vast territories of Upper and
Lower Austria, Tyrol, Styria, and part of Bohemia-
districts which had during many centuries formed a part
of the old Empire. The new league, moreover, at whose
head Prussia placed herself, included only the states north
of the river Main, and thus, if it drew closer than before
the bonds between those states, drew also a more marked
distinction than heretofore between the two halves of tbe
country, leaving the great principalities of Bavaria, WilP
temberg, and Baden in a much more complete isolation.
Germany, in fact, might appear to have purchased the
completer unity of her northern peoples by the sacrifice of
her unity as a whole. It had been stipulated in tbe Treaty
of Prague that the South German States should be at
liberty to enter into a separate league of their own ; and
the French government doubtless hoped that now, when
the scheme of a North German federation, broached in
1806, had been at length carried out, Napoleon's Con-
federation of the Rhine, under the protectorate of France,
would reappear in the South as a counterpoise to Prussia's
THE NE W GERMAN EMPIRE
431
The North
German
Confedera-
tion.
power. Very diiferent was the turn which events took.
Within a few months after the war of 1866, Bavaria,
Wurtemburg, and Baden — induced, it was supposed, by
their desire to be admitted to the new ZoUverein which
Prussia was forming — entered into military treaties with the
North German Confederation, whereby they bound them-
selves to unite their armies to its army, in the event of any
attack on Germany by a foreign power. Meanwhile the
constitution of the North Germaa Confederation, although
it left a nominal independence to the minor princes, per-
mitting them to send and receive diplomatic agents to
and from other courts, levy local taxes, and summon their
local legislative bodies as heretofore, effected a fusion of
their military forces, which were placed under the com-
mand of the king of Prussia ; vested in him, as president,
the conduct of the foreign policy of the Confederation,
and the right of making war and peace (this last with the
consent of the federal parliament), and transferred to the
control of the federal parliament, over which the king
presided through his nominee the federal chancellor, all
legislation upon a variety of important topics, including
the taxation for federal objects, and the control of the
currency and the postal and telegraphic system. Prussia
at the same time not only increased but consolidated
her dominions by annexing the extensive territories of
Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hessen-Cassel, Nassau, and
the free city of Frankfort. There was thus formed what
was substantially, if not nominally, a single or united
rather than a federal state. And although much that
was anomalous and incomplete might be remarked in its
constitution, as could hardly fail to be the case where
one member had twenty-four millions of population and
the remaining twenty-one only five millions among them
432
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
Attitude of
the French
Empire.
all, it had the advantage of trying the experiment of
union where it was easiest, among the compaiativdy
homogeneous North German States. It formed a co-
hesive nucleus, all the more cohesive that it was compan-
tively small ; and by accustoming the citizens of diflferent
principalities to act together in a common assembly, the
North German Parliament, it gave them a feeling of com-
mon citizenship, which mitigated such discontent as mi^
have been produced by the loss of local independence.
Temporary, however, as the organisation of the North
German Confederation evidently was, no one predicted
for it a life of four years only ; nor would most peqpk
have expected its development into a grander and more
comprehensive union to be the work of its bittezest
enemy. The alarm of France at the revelation and the
increase of Prussia's military power by the campaigns of
1866, was heightened by the publication of the secret
treaties with the South German States. Peace was with
difficulty preserved when the question of the cession of
Luxemburg arose ; and from that time, at least, both
countries felt that there existed only a truce full of sus-
picion between them. France seems to have been hurried
into speedier action by the belief that the militaiy treaties
had been extorted from the South German powers, and
that there was serious disaffection among the inhabitants
of the newly annexed districts, which ought to be taken
advantage of as soon as possible. But men were aston-
ished, and our astonishment is hardly lessened by what
we have since learnt, that her ruler and his connseDois
should have fired the tr^in so suddenly, and should, with
a sort of judicial blindness, have chosen the most firivoloos
of pretej^ts, and done their best to make the war they
declared against Prussia with so light a heart, a natioiMl
THE NE W GERMAN EMPIRE,
433
war, in which all Germany felt its interests and feelings
involved. This it at once became. Seldom had such a
national rising been seen — so swift, so universal, so enthu-
siastic, sweeping away in a moment the heartburnings of
liberals and feudals in Prussia, the jealousies of North
and South Germans, of Protestants and Catholics. Every
citizen, every soldier, felt that this struggle was a struggle
for the greatness and freedom of the nation ; and the un-
broken career of victory which carried the German arms
over the east and centre of France, and placed them at
last triumphant in the capital of their foes, proved, in the
truest sense, what strength there is in a righteous cause.
For it was, even more than the admirable organisation of
their armies, the skill of their generals, the corruption and
weakness of the Bonapartist court — it was the passionate
ardour of the whole German people, who felt that at last a
crisis had come when every motive called on them to put
forth their utmost efforts, when the cause of patriotism
and the cause of justice were absolutely the same, that
gave them that courage and devotion, that self-control
even in the moment of victory, to which European history
scarcely supplies a parallel.
Never before for centuries, nor even in the War of
Liberation of 1814, had the whole people felt and acted
so completely as one. All saw that the time had now
come to give this practically realised unity its formal poli-
tical expression ; nor was there a doubt as to what that
form should be. The imperial name under which Ger-
many had won her first glories in the great days of the
middle ages, was that to which the sentiment of the nation
turned ; and it had the advantage of sparing the suscep-
tibilities of the sovereigns whose loyal adherence to the
national cause had given them a better claim on the regard
F f
The War
with France,
1870-71.
434
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER.
Constitution
of the new
German
Empire.
of their subjects, than most of them had before possessed^.
By a strange caprice of fate, it was in a hall of the palace
at Versailles, which the arch-enemy of Germany had reared,
that the first of the German potentates offered to the
king of Prussia, in the name of princes and peoples, that
imperial crown which his brother had refused in 1849.
On the 31st of December, 1870, sixty -four years after the
dissolution of the old Empire, Germany became again
a single state in the eyes of Europe.
The constitution of the new Empire is in its main
features that of the North German Confederation, modi-
fied by the treaties whereby Baden, Wtirtemberg, and
Bavaria, respectively, entered the pre-existing body. Each
of these states obtained its due representation in the
federal council and federal assembly, and each reserved
for itself certain powers or immunities beyond those
enjoyed by the North German States; Bavaria, in par-
ticular, retaining a control over her army, her postal,
railway, and telegraphic system, and her general legis-
lation, which leaves her in a position of great comparative
independence. It would, therefore, be a serious error to
regard the work of unification as complete, or the Ger-
manic Empire as a centralised state.^^ It is rather to be
considered a very peculiar federation, which, as respects
the North German members, is a strict one, conceding to
q Especial credit has been thought
due to the youthful king of Bavaria,
whose patriotism and sympathy with
the feelings of the mass of his people
determined at a critical moment
the action of his wavering ministry,
and perhaps by consequence that of
the government of Wiirtemberg
also.
' The character of the Empire
as a State, and not a mere fieden-
tion, is perhaps most clearly Men m
the position assigned to Alsace and
and the ceded parts of Lorraine ai
* Reichslander,' territories forming 1
part of the Empire but not of inj
one of the States which compose it,
and governed immediately by tbe
central imperial administntioii.
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE.
435
them few and unimportant state rights ; but, as regards
the two greatest, Bavaria and Wtirtemberg, is extremely
loose, amounting to little more than a close defensive and
offensive millitary alliance, with a joint foreign policy,
a common commercial system, and a common legislation
on a few topics. How far such a constitution can be
smoothly worked, is a problem on which experience alone
can throw light. For it cannot be supposed that the same
unity of sentiment which displayed itself at a moment
of excitement in the presence of a powerful enemy, will
necessarily continue to exist in more peaceful times,
or under the rule of less able and patriotic ministers.
Not only the existence of separate Courts, where a long
descended prince is surrounded by a dignified nobility,
but also the differences of character, habits, historical
associations, and religion among the various German
races, place difficulties in the way of a complete national
union, which long years will be needed to remove. It is
hard to estimate the power of these centrifugal forces, as
compared with those opposite ones which the habit of
joint political action will create ; but it is at any rate clear
that the process of fusion must be a slow one. Outside,
moreover, of this new organization, there still remain the
seven millions of German-speaking subjects of Austria,
of whose reunion to the German state there is no imme-
diate prospect, and whose admission at present would
make the problem of welding the nation completely
together even more difficult than it now is.
Observers in other countries are hardly less liable ta
fall into the opposite error of misunderstanding the nature
of the great political change of the last eight years, of
supposing it to be more sudden and more accidental, so
to speak, than it really is, and to be mainly due to the
F f 2
Causes of
the progresi
of Germany
towards
unity.
436 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
forcible means employed by the present Chancellor of the
Empire. The truth rather is, that here, as in many
similar instances which might be quoted, there had been,
as years rolled on, a constant ripening towards change
and a growing feeling for unity, although the strength of
this feeling was not revealed till the moment came which
gave it a field for vigorous action. First evoked by the
great struggle of the War of Liberation, it has been
slowly developed and directed by a variety of concurrent
forces; partly by that desire for political freedom and
equal civil rights which found its nearest enemy in the
tyranny of many of the petty princes \ partly by the
decline, so evident through all Europe, of the ancient
sentiment of personal loyalty, and the substitution therefor
of a rational conception of the nature of government and
the power of the popular will ; partly by the better know-
ledge of their brethren which increased facilities of com-
munication gave to every division of the German race;
but most of all by what we call the feeling or pasfflon
of nationality, the desire of a people already conscious
of a moral and social unity, to see such unity expressed
and realised under a single government, which shall give
it a place and name among civilized states. The most
powerful factors in the creation of this national spirit,
were the brilliant literary activity of Germany since the
days of Lessing, and the awakened interest and pride
of the people in their earlier histor}', which was one of the
first fruits of that literary revival. Causes not dissimilar
were at work in Italy, though there the actual oppression
of foreign rulers made the sentiment more passionate.
And it need not be doubted that the example of the efiforts
which Italy, Hungary, and Poland, not to speak of smaller
peoples, were making to attain or reconquer national
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
437
political life, had its influence upon the Germans, however
little sympathy those efforts may have found among them.
Time, and the long labours of many noble hearts
addressing their countrymen through the press and in the
Universities, were needed to mature this feeling of moral,
to strengthen this passion for political unity, to make it
familiar and dear to the mass of the people, to give
it a hold upon their imagination. It was not wonderful
that in looking on the apathy of their fellow-citizens and
the selfishness of their princes, these great men should
sometimes have despaired of success. And even when
the feeling had been created and the occasion came
which displayed its strength, it might have failed to fulfil
its work, had not the power to use and guide it been
lodged in the hands of a forceful and keen-sighted prac-
tical statesman. It was with Germany even as with
Italy, where the work of Gioberti, Manin, Mazzini, and
their brethren, might have remained unfinished but for
Cavour. And, as in Italy, the work was not carried
through in the way or by the means which the first
labourers had for the most part intended or desired. The
creation of a state de novo on ground cleared of all the
existing principalities, a state which, even if in form a
monarchy (though most would have preferred a republic)
should be based on the recognition of popular rights,
was what the ideal politicians of both countries had looked
forward to. But in both it was by the advance of an
existing state, which extended itself to include wider and
wider territories, and gave to them its organisation, that
the unity of the nation was brought about. And this was
done with little or no change in the internal constitution
of the growing kingdom, little or no movement towards a
resettlement of society on democratic foundations. In
Nature of
the process
in Germany
and Italy.
438
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
* Prvssia'i>
mission ';
real cha-
racter of
her policy.
the constitution of the North German Confederation and
the new German Empire, there is no mention and littk
indirect recognition of those * Fundamental Rights of the
German people/ on which the Frankfort Parliament of
1848-49 spent so much precious time and toil.
Too much has perhaps been said of late years about
Prussia's mission. Neither in the words or acts of her
great Frederick (nor indeed in those of his predecessors)
is there a trace of what may be called Pan-Teutonic
patriotism, of any enthusiasm for the greatness and
happiness of Germany as a whole. His purpose is to
build up a strong and well- administered Prussian king-
dom : for his German neighbours he has no more
regard than for Frenchmen or Swedes ; for the German
language and literature little but contempt. The policy
of his three successors was distinctiy Prussian rather
than German ; and the romantic Frederick William the
Fourth disappointed the hopes of the nation almost as
grievously in 1849 as Frederick William the Third had
done thirty-five years before. No European court has
been more consistently practical than that of Berlin;
nor any apparently less conscious of a magnificent
national vocation. Her rulers have eschewed senti-
mental considerations themselves, and have seldom tried
to awaken them in the minds of the people, or to
turn them to account where they existed. When their
interests coincided with those of Germany at large,
it was well : but they were not accustomed to pro-
claim themselves her champions, or the apostles of her
national regeneration. Nevertheless it had for a long
time been evident that if a political regeneration was to
be brought about by force, it was from. Prussia ak>ne of
the existing principalities that anything could be hoped,
THE NE W GERMAN EMPIRE,
439
since she alone united the character, the traditions, and
the material power that were needed to lead the country.
Ever since the Reformation the Hapsburg princes and
their policy had been regarded with aversion by the more
intelligent and progressive part of the nation; while
Prussia, recognised from the days of the Great Elector as
the leading Protestant power, naturally became the repre-
sentative of intellectual liberality and enlightenment. In
recent times she had, by the foundation and wise en-
couragement of the two great universities of Berlin and
Bonn, conferred eminent benefits on German learning and
science, and gained a corresponding hold upon the re-
spect of the educated classes. If her people were in some
respects less richly gifted than those of the middle and
southern states, she yet possessed a practical energy and
decision in which they were sometimes deficient ; she
acted while they speculated and waited. She had given
the first example in Germany of a well-governed modern
state, compact, effective, full of life ; and in creating it
she was really rendering the greatest possible service to
the German people. For this state, being a strong
reality, which had stood the test of adversity and been
matured by experience, whose well-knit administrative
organisation commanded the respect, if not always the
aflfection, of its subjects, was found able to expand
itself, so as to embrace the other populations and terri-
tories which from time to time were added to it. And
it expanded, not only, as Austria had done in earlier
centuries, towards the east, among peoples alien in blood
and speech, who remained unfriendly to the original
German nucleus, but also and chiefly westwards, or at
least over districts whose inhabitants, being themselves
Germans, were rapidly fused and became not less
Causes of
her success.
440 SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
patriotically-minded than those of the Mark of Branden-
burg itself. After the fall of Napoleon it acquired and
soon assimilated the superb Rhenish and Westphalian
provinces : in 1866 it was enlarged by other territories
hardly less important, while at the same time its military,
and to a great extent its financial system, were applied to
Saxony, Mecklenburg, and the minor North German
principalities. Thus the enormous difficulty of creating
a state de novo was avoided by the extension of tbe
existing state; and if Germany, as the more idealistic
school of politicians complain, has been in this way
turned into a larger Prussia, the practical school may ask
whether this, result (if the matter be more than a question
of names) is not one that may be acquiesced in when
the object of national aspiration has been substantially
attained. Moreover, if Germany is Prussianized, so wiD
Prussia be in the same process Germanized by the in-
fusion or addition of the South German races.
Looking therefore to the form which the political re-
construction of Germany has taken, this reconstruction
may fairly be said to be Prussia's work. But that woik
could never have been accomplished without the efforts
of those very * sentimental ' or * romantic ' politicians iriw
found themselves first persecuted as agitators, and then
pushed aside when the moment for action came. For it
was they who prepared the feelings of the nation for this
revolution, and who raised to the height of a great
national movement, justified by the popular will, ¥^
would otherwise have been a career of violent sdf-
aggrandisement. It was with Germany as with Italy,
where the work of Cavour could never have been accom*
plished without the previous labours of the greater and
loftier Mazzini.
THE NE W GERMAN EMPIRE,
441
The question which has often been asked of late, How
far this new Empire is the lawful successor or representa-
tive of the Empire which expired in 1806, need not, after
what has been said in earlier chapters, receive here more
than a passing mention. For it will be remembered that
the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, the crea-
tion of Otto the Great, was formed by the union (which
eventually became a fusion) in one person of two
quite distinct political entities, the German kingdom,
which was then passing from primitive tribe-chieftainship
into a feudal monarchy, and the Roman Empire with its
claims of universal autocratic sway, expressing on its
historical side the traditional reverence for the name of
Rome, and on its theological the idea of the unity of all
Christians in a visible state and church. In the new
Empire there is no such union : it represents one only of
those two elements, the German kingdom which Otto
received from his father before his fatal journey to
Rome. It has put away, let us hope for ever, the
dream of dominion over peoples of a different blood
and speech, for it is based upon, has indeed been created
in virtue of, that very principle of nationality to which
the theory of the Holy Empire was most conspicuously
opposed.
The imperial name has indeed been revived, both on
account of its venerable associations and because it best
seems to express the titular superiority of the head of the
state over the kings and grand dukes whose dominions
compose its body. But the idea of an Emperor of a
district, be it great or small, was wholly repugnant to
mediaeval doctrine, which could imagine one Emperor
only, lord of all Christians, just as it could recognise only
one Pope. And it is, perhaps, some lingering respect for
Relation of
the new
German
Empire to
the Holy
Roman
Empire.
442
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
tional
y in
'y and
rmany.
this feeling that has caused the official style of the present
sovereign to be * German Emperor/ that is, * Emperor
in Germany,' instead of * Emperor of Germany.'
It is therefore in strictness not to Otto the Great and
his long line of successors down to Francis II that the
Emperor William succeds, but to the German kings
Conrad 1 and Henry the Fowler, that Henry the Fowler
who in one of his expeditions against the Wendish hea-
then stormed their fort of Brannibor, and founded there,
to guard the north-eastern frontier, that Mark of Branden-
burg which has grown into the Prussian monarchy. The
power of the modem sovereign is indeed of a very dif-
ferent nature from that of those remote predecessors, &r
more effective in his patrimonial lands than Henry's was
in Saxony ; far more limited over Bavaria than was that
of the Frankish and Saxon princes, even in the days of
Duke Arnulf the Wicked. This loose and anomalous
federal constitution is the heritage of the old Empire,
which in endeavouring to win for the Emperor a com-
manding European international position, allowed kings
and princes to spring up beside him in Germany, and
wrest from him nearly all the domestic power which had
once been his. But if in this the influence of that great
shadow of the past be thought pernicious, it ought not
the less to be remembered, that to it is in great measure
due this last renewal of national life. It is the tradition
of a glorious unity, in the days when Germany led the
world, that has made Germany again the central power of
continental Europe, and the arbiter of its destinies.
The parallelism between the course of events in Ger-
many and in Italy which has several times already been
referred to, appears most strikingly in the events of 187a
As it was by the war of 1866, which, in putting an end
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE,
443
to the long dualism of Austria and Prussia, made a
united Germany possible, that Italy recovered her Vene-
tian provinces, so it was the war of 1870 that, even while
it re-established the Germanic Empire, completed the unity
of Italy by making Rome again her possession and her
capital. The Popedom which, in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries inflicted a fatal wound upon the Holy Empire,
had in modern times allied itself with Austria and the
petty despotisms of the peninsula, had done its utmost
to check as well the union as the freedom of. the Italian
people, and had raised those pretensions to a temporal
sway which had been one chief cause of its hostility to the
mediaeval Emperors almost to the rank of an article of
faith. It now found itself involved in the fall of its
ancient ally France, and saw that temporal dominion
perish with the triumph of its ancient Teutonic enemies.
The first German victories compelled the recall of the
French troops from Rome, and allowed the Italians to
establish themselves there ; a few months later the swell-
ing current of success brought about the union of North
and South Germany in a single state. The same great
struggle which restored political unity to the one nation
completed it in the other ; and at the very moment when
the imperial name was revived in the Transalpine coim-
tries, the ancient imperial seat upon the Tiber became
the capital of an Italian monarchy. The two great races
whose national life had been sacrificed to the mediaeval
Empire regain it together, and regain it by the defeat of
that Empire's old antagonists, the ecclesiastical power
and the French monarchy. The triumph of the principle
of nationality is complete ; the old wrongs are redressed ;
the old problems solved: we seem to have closed one
great page in the world's history, and pause to wonder
444
SUPPLEMENTARY CHAPTER,
and conjecture what the next may have to unfold No
one who has looked below the surface of the events tbat
have passed in Europe during the last thuly years can
have failed to be struck by the rapidity and completeness
of the changes those years have witnessed, and by the
new aspect which political thought, as well as practical
politics, has taken. Through" western and central Europe .
the small states have disappeared, and the great states
have reached their natural boundaries of race and lan-
guage. Free and even comparatively democratic con-
stitutions have been established in many ; and where this
has not been the case, the rights of the subject have yet
been in theory substantially admitted. It is now the
passions and interests of peoples rather than of princes
that are the potent factors in politics. The divine right
of kings and aristocracies, the authority of the state to
control the individual conscience or enforce religious
conformity, find scarcely a defender : the principles of
the Holy Alliance seem to lie centuries behind. Mean-
while other questions, other diflSculties, begin to thicken
upon us, as on a stormy day a new mass of clouds rises
from the darkening west before the last one has been
scattered into the blue or swept beneath the opposite
horizon. One of these problems, an old one indeed in
a new form, — that which respects the attitude of an in-
fallible church under an infdlible head to the temporal
government — the German state has akeady been caDed
on to confront : others of an economical rather than a
purely political character threaten the stability of 80ciet|r
there as they have long done in France. The foundatka
of kingdoms on a national basis does not seem to hm
made the contagion of social disturbances less dangerooi;
nor need Germany think that with the restoration of tte
THE NEW GERMAN EMPIRE, 445
npire there has begun for her, any more than for the
>t of Europe, an era of peace, ease and happiness.
:t there is reason to trust that that spirit of patriotism
d self-control which lately shone forth on so great a
latre and with such splendid results, will enable the
:rman people to succeed, not only in perfecting the
ernal unity of their state and developing the popular
ment in its constitution, but also in overcoming the
)re serious perils which threaten it, hke the other great
lustrial communities of the world, from the mutual
lousies and conflicting interests of different classes in
:iety. To have created a great military state is much,
it is only a small part of the task which lies before the
ilized nations of the present.
APPENDIX.
NOTE A.
On the Burcundi£S.
It would be hard to mention any geographical name
which, by its application at different times to different
districts, has caused, and continues to cause, more con-
fusion than this name Burgundy. There may, therefore,
be some use in a brief statement of the more important
of those applications. Without going into the minutiae of
the subject, the following may be given as the ten senses
in which the name is most frequently to be met with : —
I. The kingdom of the Burgundians (regnum Burgun-
dionuvi), founded a.d. 406, occupying the whole valley of
the Saone and lower Rhone, from Dijon to the Mediterra-
nean, and including also the western half of Switzerland.
It was destroyed by the sons of Clovis in a.d. 534.
II. The kingdom of Burgundy (regnum BurgundicB),
mentioned occasionally under the Merovingian kings as
a separate principality, confined within boundaries appa-
rently somewhat narrower than those ot the older king-
dom last named.
III. The kingdom of Provence or Burgundy {regnum
ProvincicE seu Burgundice) — also, though less accurately,
called the kingdom of Cis-Jurane Burgundy — was founded
by Boso in a.d. 879, and included Provence, Dauphin^,
the southern part of Savoy, and the country between the
Saone and the Jura.
448 APPENDIX.
IV. The kingdom of Trans- Jurane Burgundy {x^gnum
lurense, Burgundia Transiurensis), founded by Rudolf in
A.D. 888, recognized in the same year hy the Emperor
Amulf, included the northern part of Savoy» and all
Switzerland between the Reuss and the Jura.
V. The kingdom of Burgundy or Aries {regmtm Bur*'
gundtcB, regnum Arelaiense\ formed by die union, under
Conrad the Pacific, in a.d. 937, of the kingdoms described
above as III and IV. On the death, in 1032, of the last
independent king, Rudolf III, it came partly by bequest,
partly by conquest, into the hands of the Emperor Con-
rad II (the Salic), and thenceforward formed a part of
the Empire. In the thirteenth century, France began to
absorb it, bit by bit, and has now (since the annexation
of Savoy in 1861) acquired all except the Swiss portion.
VI. The Lesser Duchy (Burgundia Minor\ (Klein
Burgund), corresponded very nearly with what is now
Switzerland west of the Reuss, including the Valais. It
was Trans- Jurane Burgundy (IV) minus the parts of
Savoy which had belonged to that kingdom. It disap-
pears from history after the extinction oi the house of
Zahringen in the thirteenth century. Legally it was part
of the Empire till A.t>. 1648, though i»actically inde-
pendent long before that date.
VII. The Free County or Palatinate of Burgundy
(Franche-Comt^), (Freigrafschaft), (called also Upper
Burgundy), to which the name of Cis- Jurane Burgundy
originally and properly belonged, lay between the Saone
and the Jura. It formed a part of III and V, and was
therefore a fief of the Empire. The French dukes of
Burgundy were invested with it in A9.D. 1384. Its capital,
the imperial city of Besan^on, was given to Spain in
1 65 1, and by the treaties of Nimwc^gea, 1678-9, it was
ceded to the crown of France.
APPENDIX. 449
VIII. The Landgraviate of Burgundy (Landgrafschaft)
lay in what is now Western Switzerland, on both sides of
the Aar, between Thun and Solothum. It was a part of
the Lesser Duchy (VI), and, like it, is hardly mentioned
after the thirteenth century.
IX. The circle of Burgundy (Kreis Burgund), an ad-
ministrative division of the Empire, was established by
Charles V in 1548; and included the Free County of
Burgundy (VII) and the seventeen provinces of the
Netherlands, which Charles inherited from his grand-
mother Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold.
X. The Duchy of Burgundy (Lower Burgundy) (Bour-
gogne), the most northerly part of the old kingdom of the
Burgundians, was always a fief of the crown of France, and
a province of France till the Revolution. It was of this
Burgundy that Philip the Good and Charles the Bold were
Dukes. They were also Counts of the Free County (VII).
There was very nearly being an eleventh Burgundy.
In 1784 Joseph II proposed to the Elector of Bavaria to
give him the Austrian Netherlands, except the citadels
of Luxemburg and Limburg, with the title of King of
Burgundy, in exchange for his Bavarian dominions, which
Joseph was anxious to get hold of. The Elector con-
sented, France (bribed by the offer of Luxemburg and
Limburg) and Russia approved, and the project was only
baffled by the promptitude of Frederick the Great in
forming the League of Princes to preserve the integrity
of German territories.
The most copious and accurate information regarding
the obscure history of the Burgundian kingdoms (III, IV,
and V) is to be found in the contributions of Baron Frederic
de Gingins la Sarraz, a Vaudois historian, to the Archw/ilr
Schweizer Geschichte, See also an Essay entitled The Franks
and the Gauls in Mr. E. A. Freeman's Historical Essays.
450 APPENDIX.
NOTE B.
On the Relations to the Empire of the Kingdok
OF Denmark, and the Duchies of Schleswig and
HOLSTEIN.
The history of the relations of Denmark and the
Duchies to the Romano-Germanic Empire is a very small
part of the great Schleswig-Holstein controversy. But
having been unnecessarily mixed up with two questions
properly quite distmct, — the first, as to the relation of
ScMeswig to Holstein, and of both jointly to the Danish
crown; the second, as to the diplomatic engagements
which the Danish kings have in recent times contracted
with the German powers, — it has borne its part in making
the whole question the most intricate and interminable
that has vexed Europe for two centuries and a half.
Setting aside irrelevant matter, the facts as to the Empire
are as follows :—
I. The Danish kings began to own the supremacy of
the Prankish Emperors early in the ninth century. Having
recovered their independence in the confusion that fol-
lowed the fall of the Carolingian dynasty, they were again
subdued by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, and
continued tolerably submissive till the death of Frederick
II and the period of anarchy which followed. Since that
time Denmark has always been independent, although her
king was, until the treaty of a.d. 1865, a member of the
German Confederation as duke of Holstein and Lauen-
burg.
II. Schleswig was in Carolingian times Danish; the
Eyder being, as Eginhard tells us, the boundary between
Saxonia Transalbiana (Holstein), and the Terra Noit-
APPENDIX. 45 r
mannorum (wherein lay the town of Sliesthorp), inhabited
by the Scandinavian heathen. Otto the Great conquered
all Schleswig, and, it is said, Jutland also, and added the
southern part of Schleswig to the immediate territory of
the Empire, erecting it into a margraviate. So it remained
till the days of Conrad II, who made the Eyder again the
boundary, retaining of course his suzerainty over the
kingdom of Denmark as a whole. But by this time the
colonization of Schleswig by the Germans had begun;
and ever since the numbers of the Danish population
seem to have steadily declined, and the mass of the people
to have grown more and more disposed to sympathize
with their southern rather than their northern neighbours.
III. Holstein always was an integral part of the Em-
pire, as it was afterwards of the Germanic Confederation
and is now of the new German Empire.
452 APPENDIX,
NOTE C.
On certain Imperial Titles and Ceremonies.
This subject is a great deal too wide and too intricate
to be more than touched upon here. But a few brief
statements may have their iise ; for the practice of the
Germanic Emperors varied so greatly from time to time,
that the reader becomes hopelessly perplexed without
some clue. And if there were space to explain the
causes of each change of title, it would be seen that the
subject, dry as it may appear, is very far from being a
barren or a dull one.
I. Titles of Emperors.
Charles the Great styled himself ' Carolus serenissimus
Augustus, a Deo coronatus, mag^us et pacificus imperator,
Romanum (or Romanorum) guberans imperium, qui et
per misericordiam Dei rex Francorum et Langobardonim.'
Subsequent Carolingian Emperors were usually entitled
simply * Imperator Augustus.' Sometimes * rex Franco-
rum et Langobardorum ' was added ».
Conrad I and Henry I (the Fowler) were only German
kings.
A Saxon Emperor was, before his coronation at Rome,
*rex,' or *rex Francorium Orientalium,' or 'Francorum
atque Saxonum rex ;' after it, simply 'Imperator Augus-
tus.' Otto III is usually said to have introduced the fonn
' Romanorum Imperator Augustus,' but some authorities
state that it occurs in documents of the time of Lewis L
* Waitz (Deutsche Ver/assungs- in the timet of the Caiolingiiiiift
geschiehte) says that the phrase but in no official documents.
* semper Augustus * may be found
APPENDIX. 453
Henry II and his successors, not daring to take the
title of Emperor till crowned at Rome (in conformity with
the superstitious notion which had begun with Charles the
Bald), but anxious to claim the sovereignty of Rome, as
indissolubly attached to the German crown, began to call
themselves * reges Romanorum.' The title did not, how-
ever, become common or regular till the time of Henry IV,
in whose proclamations (issued before his Roman coro-
nation) it occurs constantly.
From the eleventh century till the sixteenth, the invari-
able practice was for the monarch to be called * Romanorum
rex semper Augustus,' till his coronation at Rome by the
Pope ; after it, 'Romanorum Imperator semper Augustus.'
In A.D. 1508, Maximilian I, being refused a passage to
Rome by the Venetians, obtained a bull from Pope Julius
II permitting him to call himself * Imperator electus'
(erwahlter Kaiser). This title Ferdinand I (brother of
Charles V) and all succeeding Emperors took immediately
upon their German coronation, and it was till a.d. i 806
their strict legal designation ^, and was always employed
by them in proclamations or other official documents.
The term * elect ' was however omitted even in formal
documents when the sovereign was addressed or spoken
of in the third person ; and in ordinary practice he was
simply * Roman Emperor.'
Maximilian added the title ' Germaniae rex,' which had
never been known before, although the phrase * rex Ger-
manorum ' may be found employed once or twice in early
times. * Rex Teutonicorum,' * regnum Teutonicum V
»> There is some reason to think c These expressions seem to have
that towards the end of the Empire been intended to distinguish the
people had begun to fancy that kingdom of the eastern or Ger-
• crwiihlter ' did not mean * elect/ manic Franks from that of the
but • elective.* Cf. note ", p. 365. Western or Gallicized Franks
454 APPENDIX.
occur often in the tenth and eleventh centuries. A great
many titles of less consequence were added from time to
time. Charles the Fifth had seventy-five, not, of course,
as Emperor, but in virtue of his vast hereditaiy pos-
sessions \
It is perhaps worth remarking that the word 'Emperor*
has not at all the same meaning now that it had even so
lately as two centuries ago. It is now a commonplace,
not to say vulgar, title, somewhat more pompous than that
of King, and supposed to belong especially to despots.
It is given to all sorts of barbarous princes, like those of
China and Abyssinia, in default of a better name. It is
peculiarly affected by new dynasties; and has indeed
grown so fashionable, that what with Emperors of Brazil,
of Hayti, and of Mexico, the good old tide of King seems
in a fair way to become obsolete «. But in former times
there was, and could be but one Emperor ; he was always
(Francigense), which having been time earlier,
for some time * regnum Francorum ' It is right to remirk that
Occidentalium,' grew at last to be what is stated here can be takm
simply * regnum Francix/ the East as only generally and probably
Frankish kingdom being swallowed true : so great are the discrepan-
up in the Empire. cies among even the most careAd
It is not very easy to say pre- writers on the subject, and io
cisely when the name ' Francia ' numerous the forgeries of a later
came to denote, to Europe gene- age, which are to be found amoqf
rally, what we now call France, the genuine docnments of the eariy
Leopold of Bamberg, in the four- Empire. Goldast's CkiU^iom^ lor
teenth century, complains of it, as instance, are full of forgeriei and
then a fixed use. In the thirteenth anachronisms. Detailed informatioa
century Snorri Sturlason speaks of may be found in Pfeffinger, Meter,
Otto the Great as collecting an and Putter, and in the host of writen
army from ' Saxonland, Fraldand, to whom they refer.
Friesland, and Vendiand,' appa- • We in England may be though
rently denoting by Frakland the to have made some slight mofc-
old Frankish country (i^. orientalis) ment in the same dtrectioo. by caB-
{Heimskringla^ Olafs Saga Tryg" ing the united great couocfl of tha
gvasonar). InEngland the name had Three Kingdoms the Imperial Pu^
no doubt changed its meaning some liament.
APPENDIX. 455
mentioned with a certain reverence : his name summoned
up a host of thoughts and associations, which we cannot
comprehend or sympathize with. His office, unlike that
of modern Emperors, was by lt6 very nature elective and
not hereditary; and, so far from resting on conquest
or the will of the people, rested on and represented
pure legality. War could give him nothing which law
had not given him already : the people could delegate
no power to him who was their lord and the viceroy
of God.
II. The Crowns.
Of the four crowns something has been said in the text.
They were those of Germany, taken at Aachen in earlier
times, latterly at Frankfort, once or twice at Regensburg ;
of Burgundy, at Aries ; of Italy, sometimes at Pavia, more
usually at Milan or Monza ; of the world, at Rome.
The German crown was taken by every Emperor after
the time of Otto the Great ; that of Italy by every one,
or almost every one, who took the Roman down to
Frederick III, but by none after him ; that of Burgundy, it
would appear, by four Emperors only, Conrad II, Henry
III, Frederick I, and Charles IV. The imperial crown
was received at Rome by most Emperors till Frederick
III ; after him by none save Charles V, who obtained
both it and the Italian at Bologna in a somewhat informal
manner. From Ferdinand I onwards the Emperor bound
himself by his capitulation, ' sich zum besten befleissigen
zu wollen die kayserliche Cron auch in ziemlich gelegener,
Zeit zum schiersten zu erlangen.' At the Diet of Ratisbon
in 1653 (when Ferdinand archduke of Austria was chosen
king of the Romans) the Protestants protested against
this article ; but the Emperor, appealing to the Golden
Bull, insisted on its retention. In the capitulation of
456 APPENDIX.
Leopold I, however, and his successors down to Francis
II, the article was modified so as to bind the new sovereign
*die Rbmische-Kbnigliche Cron forderlichst zu empfan-
gen, und alles dasjenige dabey zu thun so sich derenthal-
ben gebiihret/
It should be remembered that none of these inferior
crowns were necessarily connected with that of the Roman
Empire, which might have been held by a simple knight
without a foot of land in the world. For as there had
been Emperors (Lothar I, Lewis II, Lewis of Provence,
son of Boso, Guy, Lambert, and Berengar) who were
not kings of Germany, so there were several (all those
who preceded Conrad II) who were not kings of Bur-
gundy, and others (Arnulf for example, who were not
kings of Italy. And it is also worth remarking, that
although no crown save the German was assumed by
the successors of Charles V, their wider rights remained
in full force, and were never subsequently relinquished.
There was nothing, except the practical difficulty and
absurdity of such a project, to prevent Francis II from
having himself crowned at Aries ^, Milan, and Rome.
III. The King of the Romans (Romischer K6nig>
It has been shewn above how and why, about the time
of Henry II, the German monarch began to entitle him-
self * Romanorum rex.' Now it was not uncommon in
the Middle Ages for the heir-apparent to a throne to be
crowned during his father's lifetime, that at the death of
the latter he might step at once into his place. (Coio-
' Although to be sure the Bur- kingdom of Sardinia, tod the SwJM
gundian dominions had all passed Confederation,
from the Emperor to France,' the
APPENDIX. 457
nation, it must be remembered, which is now merely a
spectacle was in those days not only a sort of sacrament,
but a matter of great political importance.) This plan
was specially useful in an elective monarchy, such as Ger-
many was after the twelfth century, for it avoided the
delays and dangers of an election while the throne was
vacant. But it seemed against the order of nature to
have two Emperors at once^, and as the sovereign's
authority in Germany depended not on the Roman but
on the German coronation, the practice came to be that
each Emperor during his own life procured, if he could,
the election of his successor, who was crowned at Aachen,
in later times at Frankfort, and took the title of * King
of the Romans.' During the presence of the Emperor
in Germany he exercised no more authority than a Prince
of Wales does in England, but on the Emperor's death he
succeeded at once, without any second election or coro-
nation, and assumed (after the time of Ferdinand I) the
title of * Emperor Elect ^.' Before Ferdinand's time, he
would have been expected to go to Rome to be crowned
there. While the Hapsburgs held the sceptre, each
monarch generally contrived in this way to have his son
or some other near relative chosen to succeed him. But
many were foiled in their attempts to do so ; and, in such
cases, an election was held after the Emperor's death,
according to the rules laid down in the Golden Bull.
? Nevertheless, Otto II was Romano-Germanic Empire in this
crowned Emperor, and reigned for respect might be adduced from the
some time along with his father, history of the old Roman, as well
under the title of * Co-Imperator.' as of the Byzantine Empire.
So Lothar I was associated in the ^ Maximilian had obtained this
Empire with Lewis the Pious, as title, 'Emperor Elect,* from the
Lewis himself had been crowned Pope. Ferdinand took it as of
in the lifetime of Charles. Many right, and his successors followed
analogies to the practice of the the example.
458 APPENDIX.
The first person who thus became king of the Romans
in the lifetime of an Emperor seems to have been Henry
VI, son of Frederick I.
It was in imitation of this title that Napoleon called his
son king of Rome.
APPENDIX. 459
NOTE D.
Lines contrasting the Past and Present of Rome.
DuM simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placebant,
Militia, populo, moenibus alta fui :
At simul effigies arasque superstitiosas
Deiiciens, uni sum famulata Deo,
Cesserunt arces, cecidere palatia diviim,
Servivit populus, degeneravit eques.
Vix scio quae fuerim, vix Romae Roma recorder ;
Vix sinit occasus vel meminisse mei.
Gratior haec iactura mihi successibus illis ;
Maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens :
Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Caesare Petrus,
Plus cinctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit.
Stans domui terras, infernum diruta pulso.
Corpora stans, animas fracta iacensque rego.
Tunc miserae plebi, modo principibus tenebrarum
Impero : tunc urbes, nunc mea regna polus.
Written by Hildebert, bishop of Le Mans, and after-
wards archbishop of Tours (born a.d. 1057). Extracted
from his works as printed by Migne, PatrologicB Cursus
Completm *.
* See note «*, p. 271.
i
i '.i
• '" '■
INDEX.
A.
Aachen, 72, 77, 86, 148, 212, 318
note, 455.
Adalbert (St.), 246; the church
founded at Rome to leceive his
ashes, 287.
Adelheid (Queen of Italy), ac-
count of her adventures, 83.
Adolf of Nassau, 221, 222, 263.
Adso, his Viia Anticbristi, 114
note.
AisTULF the Lombard, 39.
Alaric, his desire to preserve the
institutions of the Empire, 17,
I Q ; his feelings towards Rome,
270.
Alberic (consul or senator'), 83.
Albert I (son of Rudolf of Haps-
burg\ 221, 224, 263.
Albigenses, revolt of the, 242.
Alboin, his invasion of Italy, 36.
Alcuin of York, 59, 66, 06, 201.
Alexander III (Pope), Frederick
I's contest with, 170; their
meeting at Venice, 171.
Alfonso of Castile, his double
election with Richard of Eng-
land, 217, 229.
America, discovery of, 3 r 3.
Anastasius, his account of the
coronation of Charles, fc
Angelo (Michael), rebuilding of
the Capitol by, 296.
Antichrist, views lespecting, in
the earlier Middle Ages, 114
note ; in later times, 336.
Architecture, Roman, 48, 291 ;
analogy between it and the civil
and ecclesiastical constitution,
297 ; preservation of an antique
character in botii, 297.
Ardoin (Marquis of Ivrea), 149.
Aristocracy, barbarism of the, in
the Middle Ages, 290; struggles
of th e Teutonic Emperors against
the, 391.
Aries ; see Burgundy.
Arnold of Bresda, Rome under,
174' 253, 377; put to death at
the instance of Pope Hadrian,
279; 300 note.
Arndlf (Emperor), 78, 81, 83.
Athanaric, 17.
Athanasius, 12.
Athadlf the Visigoth, his thoughts
and purposes respecting the Ro-
man Empire, 19, 30.
Augsburg, 260 ; treaty of, 337.
Augustine. St., 94.
Aulic Council, the, 343, 345
note.
Austria, Privilege of, aoo; her
claim to represent Ae Roman
Empire, 371, 384; her German
policy. 353» 413; attempte to
reform the Federal Diet, 422 ;
joins Prussia in making war on
Denmark, 425; excluded from
the Germanic body, 430.
462
INDEX.
Austrian succession, war of the,
355.
Avignon, exactions of the papal
court of, 220; its subservience
to France, 220, 244.
AviTUS, letter of, on Sigismund*s
behalf, 18.
B.
Barbarians, feared by the Romans,
14; Roman armies largely com-
posed of, 14: admitted to Ro-
man titles and honours, 15;
their feelings towards the Ro-
man Empire, 16; their desire
to preserve its institutions, 17;
value of the Roman officials and
Christian bishops to the, 19.
Bartolommeo (San), the church
of, 288.
Basil the Macedonian and Lewis
II, 191.
* Basileus,* the title oC 143, 192.
Basilica, erected at Aadien by
Charles the Great, 74 note.
Belisabius, his war with the
Ostrogoths, 29, 274.
Bell-tower, or campanile, in the
churches of Rome, 295.
Benedict of Soracte, 51 note.
Benedict VIII (Pope), alleged
decree of, 197.
Benevento, the Annals of, 150.
Berencab of Friuli (Emperor), 82 ;
his death, 83.
Berenoar II (King of Italy), 83.
Bernard (St.), 109 note.
Bible, rights of the Empire proved
from 3ie, 112 ; perversion of its
meaning, 114.
BiSMARCK-SCHONHAUSEN (OttO E.
L. von), 422 sqq.
Bohemia, acquired by Luxemburg
A.D. 1309, 222; the king of, an
elector, 230.
Boniface VIII (Pope), his ex-
travagant pretensions, 109 248;
declares himself Vicar of the
Empire, 219 note.
Boso, (King of Burgundy), 81,
447.
Brandenburg, the Mark and Mar-
grave of, 402 sqq.; Electorate
attached to, 229.
Britain, abandoned by Imperial
Government, 24; Roman Law
not wholly forgotten in, at a
late date, 32; Koman oisigns
and devices in, 259.
Buildings, the old, of Rome, de*
struction and alteration of, by
invaders, 292; by the Romans
of the Middle Ages, 293; by
modem restorers of churches,
293.
Bull, the Golden, of Charles IV,
225, 230, 237.
Burgundy, the kingdom of. Otto's
policy towards, 144; added to
the Empire under Conrad 11,
151 ; effect of its loss on the
Empire, 308 ; confusion cansed
by the name, 395: ten senses
in which it is met with, 447-9;
attempt to erect a new kingdom
of, 447.
Byzantium, effect of the removal
of the seat of power to, 9;
Otto's policy towards, 143 ; at-
titude towards Emperors, 189.
C.
Campanile ; sm Bell-tower.
Canon law, correspondence be-
tween it and the Corpns Juris
Civilis, loi ; its consolidatioa
by Gregory IX, lis, J17.
Capet (Hugh), 142.
Capitol, rebuilding of tfae^ \lS
Michael Angelo, 296.
Capitulary of a.d. ids, 65.
Caracalla (Emperor), effect of
his edict, 6.
Carolingian Emperors, 76!.
INDEX.
463
Carolingian Empire of the West,
its end in a. d. 888, 78 ; Floras
the Deacon's lament over its
dissolution, 85 note.
Carroccio, the, 178 note, 289.
Cathari and other heretics, spread
of, 242.
Catholicity or Romanism, 94,
106.
Cavour, Camillo, 435 438.
Celibacy, enforcement of, 158.
Cenci, name of, 290 note.
CuABLEMAONB ; see Charles I.
Chables I, Emperor (the Great),
extinguishes the Lombard king-
dom, 41 ; is received with
honours by Pope Hadrian and
the people, 41 ; his ambitious
aims, 42 ; his treatment of Pope
Leo in, 44 ; title of ' Champion
of the Faith and Defender of
the Holy See' conferred upon,
47; crowned at Rome, 48; im-
portant consequences of his
coronation, 50, 52 ; its real
meaning, 52, 80, 81; contem-
porary accounts, 53, 64, 65, 84;
their uniformity, 56; illegality
of the transaction, 56; three
theories respecting it held four
centuries after, 57 ; was the
coronation a surprise ? 58 ; his
reluctance to assume the im-
perial title, 60; solution sug-
gested by DoUinger, 60; seeks
the hand of Irene, 61 ; defect of
his imperial title, 61 ; theore-
tically the successor of the whole
Eastern line of Emperors, 62,
63; has nothing to fear from
Byzantine Princes, 63; his
authority in matters ecclesias-
tical, 64; presses Hadrian to
declare Constantine VI a
heretic 64 ; his spiritual des-
potism applauded by subsequent
Popes, 64 ; importance attached
by him to the Imperial name,
65 ; issnes a Capitulary, 65 ;
draws closer the connexion of
Church and State, 66 ; new posi-
tion in civil affairs acquired with
the Imperial title, 67, 68, 69; his
position as Frankish king, 69,
70 ; partial failure of his attempt
to breathe a Teutonic spirit into
Roman forms, 70, 71 ; his per-
sonal habits and sympathies, 71 ;
groundlessness of the claims of
Uie modem French to, 71 : the
conception of his Empire Roman,
not Teutonic, 72; his Empire
held together by the Church,
73 ; his character generally, 73,
74; impress of his mind on
mediaevjii society, 74; buried"
at Aachen, 74; inscription on
his tomb, 74; canonised as a
saint, 75, 177 note; his plan of
Empire, 76.
Chables II, Emperor (the Bald),
77. '56, 157-
Charles III, Emperor (the Fat),
78,81.
Charles IV, Emperor, 223; his
electoral constitution, 225 ; his
Golden Bull, 225, 237 ; general
results of his policy, 236; his
object through life, 237; the
University of Prague founded
by, 238 ; welcomed into Italy
by Petrarch, 256.
Charles V, Emperor, accession of,
321 ; casts in his lot with the
Catholics, 323 ; failure of his
repressive policy, 324; his death,
335-
Charles VI, Emperor, 351, 353,
354-
Charles VII, Emperor, his disas-
trous reign, 354.
Charles VIII (King of France),
his pretensions on Naples and
Milan, 317.
Charles Martel, 36, 58.
Chablss of Valois, 223.
464
INDEX,
Charles the Bold and Frederick
III, 250-
Chemnitz, his comments on the
condition and prospects of the
Empire, 342.
Childebic, his deposition by the
Holy See, 39.
Chivalry, the orders of, 351.
Church, the, opposed by the Em-
perors, 10 ; growth of, 10 ;
alliance of, with the State, lo, 66,
107, 38 7 ; organisation of, framed
on the model of the secular
administration, 11 ; the Em-
peror the head of, 12; maintains
the Imperial idea, 13 ; attitude
of Charles the Great towards,
65, 66; the bond that holds
together the Empire of Charles,
73 ; first gives men a sense of
unity, 92 ; how regarded in Mid-
dle Ages, 92, 374 ; draws tighter
all bonds of outward union, 94 ;
unity of, felt to be analogous to
that of the Empire, 93 ; becomes
the exact coimterpart of the
Empire, 99, loi, 107, 330; po-
sition of, in Germany, 128 ;
Otto's position towards, 129;
effects of the Reformation upon,
329 ; influence of the Empire
upon the history of, 386.
Churches, national, 95, 333.
Churches of Rome, destruction of
old buildings by modem re-
storers of, 293 ; mosaics and
bell-tower in the, 295.
Cities, in Lombardy, 175 ; growth
of, in Germany, 1 79; their power,
223.
Civil law, revival of the study of,
172 ; its study forbidden by the
Popes in the thirteenth century,
254-
CiviLis, the Batavian, 17.
Clergy, aversion of the Lombards
to the, 37; their idea of political
luiity, 96 ; their power in the
eleventh century, 129; GregMy
VH's condemnation of f^dal
investitures to the, 158; thor
ambition and corruptica in Uie
later Middle Age, 291.
Clovis, his desire to preserve the
institutions of the Kmpire^ 17,
30 ; his unbroken success, 35.
Coins, papal, 279 note.
CoLONNA (John), Petrardi's letters
to, 271 and note; the fiumlyoC
282.
Commons, the German, 133, 316.
Concoixlat of Worms, 163.
Confederation of the Rlune, pro-
visions of the, 362; members of,
406.
Confederation, the Germanic, esta-
blishment of, 367 409; condition
of Germany under, 41 1 ; fall o^
368, 426 sqq.
Confederation, the North German,
428 sqq.
Conrad I (King of the East
Franks), 122, 226, 440.
CoNBAD II, the reign of, 151;
comparison between the prero-
gative at his accession and at
the death of Henry V, 165 ; the
crown of Burgundy first gained
by, 194.
CoNBAD III, 165, 378.
Conrad IV, 210.
CoNBADiN (Frederick II's grand-
son), murder of^ 211.
Constance, the Council ofi iso,
254, 301 ; the peace o( signed
by Frederick I, 178.
CoNSTANTiNE, his vigorons p<dicj,
8; the Donation of^ 43, lOOb
289 note.
Constantinople,captare of, 305,313.
Coronations, ceremonies at, iia;
the four, gone through by the
Emperors, 193, 405; their
meaning, 195 ; churdies in
which they were perfoniied«
285, 289.
INDEX,
465
Corpus Juris Civilis, correspond-
ence between, and the Canon
Law, 10 1.
Councils, General, right of Em-
perors to summon, 11 1.
Counts Palatine, Otto's institution
of, 125.
Cbescbntids, 146.
Crown, the Imperial, the right to
confer, 57, 61, 81 ; not legally
attached to Frankish crown or
nation, 81 ; how treated by
the Popes, 82.
Crowns, the four, 193, 403.
Crusades, the, 164, 166, 179, 193,
205, 209.
D.
Dante, 206 ; his attitude towards
the Empire, 256 ; his treatise Be
Monarchia^ 263; sketch of its
argument, 263 sqq. ; its omis-
sions, 269, 300.
Dark Ages, existing relics of the
art of the, 295.
Decretals, the False, 156.
Denmark, 143 ; imperial authority
in, 184 ; contest respecting
Schleswig Holstein with, 423 ;
war of Austria and Prussia with,
426; cedes the duchies, 426;
its relations to the Empire,
448.
Diet, the, 126, 316, 356; its rights
as settled a.d. 1648, 343; its
altered character a.d. 1654,
347 ; its triflings. 353 ; Diet of
the Germanic Confederation,
412,413,418,423,428.
Diocletian, his vigorous policy,
8.
Divine right of the Emperor, 247.
DoLLiNGER (Dr. von), 60 note.
Dominicans, the order of, 205.
Donation of Constanline, forgery
of the, 43, 100, 118 note, 261
note.
Dukes, the, in Germany, 125.
E.
East, imperial pretensions in the,
189.
Eastern Church, the, 191.
Eastern Empire, its relations with
the Western, 24, 25 ; decay of
its power in the West, 45 ; now
regardied by the Popes, 46.
Edict of Caracalla, 6.
Edward II (King of England)
his declaration of England's
independence of the I^pire,
187.
Edwabd in (King of England)
and Lewis the Bavarian, 187;
his election against Charles IV,
223.
EoiNHABD, his statement respect-
ing Charles's coronation, 58,
60.
Elective constitution of the Em-
pire, the, 227; difficulty of main-
taining the principle in practice,
233. ; its object the choice of the
fittest man, 233 ; restraint of the
sovereign, 234; recognition of
the popular will, 234.
Elector, the title of, its history,
227-233 ; retained by Landgrave
of Hessen Cassel, 233 ; person-
ages upon whom it was con-
ferred by Napoleon, 233.
Electoral body m primitive times,
226.
Electoral function, conception of
the, 236.
Electorate, the Eighth, 333; the
Ninth, 232.
Electors, the Seven, 165, 229; their
names and offices, 231 note;
the question of their vote, 258
note.
Hh
^66
IND E X.
Emperor, the position of, in the
second century, 5,6; the head of
the Church, 1 2, 23, 1 1 1 ; sanctity
of the name, 22, 120; corre-
spondence between his position
and functions and those of the
Pope, 104; proofs from me-
diaeval documents, 109; and
from the coronation ceremonies,
112; illustrations from mediae-
val art, 116; nature of his
power, 1 20 ; fusion of his func-
tions with those of German
King, 127, 439; his office feu-
dalized, 130 ; attitude of By-
zantine Emperors towards, 189;
his dignities and titles, 193,
258, 262, 404 ; the title not
assumed till the Roman corona-
tion, 196 ; origin and results of
this practice, 196; policy of,
222; his office as peace-maker,
246, 247 ; divine right of the,
257 ; his right of creating kings,
2.nO ; his international place at
the Council of Constance, 254 ;
change in titles of, 318 ; his
rights as settled a.d. 1648, 343 ;
altered meaning of the word
now-a-days, 405 ; revival of the
title in Germany, 434, 439.
Emperors, meaning of their four
coronations, 193, 195, 406; per-
sons eligible as, 252; after
Henry VII, 264; their short-
sighted policy towards Rome,
278 ; their visits to Rome, 283 ;
their approach. 284; their en-
trance, 285 ; hostility of the
Pope and people to the, 285;
their burial-places, 288 note ;
nature of the question at issue
between the Popes and the,
388 ; their titles, 403.
Emperors, Carolingian, 76.
Emperors, Franconian, 133.
Emperors, Hapsburg, beginning
of their influence in Germany,
31a; their policy, 307, wi\
repeated attempts to set Uiem
aside, 353 ; causes of the long
retention of the throne by the,
353; modem pretensions di^
37i» 384-
Emperors, Italian, 80.
Emperors, Saxon, 133.
Emperors, Swabian or Hohen-
staufen, 57, 165, 167.
Emperors, Teutonic, defiects in
their title, 61 ; their short-
sighted policy, 378; their me-
morials m Rome, 288; names
of those buried in Italy, 288
note; their straggles against
nationality, aristocracy, and po-
pular fre^om, 391.
Empire, the Roman, grovrth of
despotism in, 5 ; obliteration of
national distinctions in, 6 ; nnitj
of, threatened from without and
from within, 7, 8 ; preserved for
a time by the policy of Diocle-
tian and Constantine, 8, 9 ; pai^
tition of^ 9 ; influence of the
Church in supporting^ 13; ai^
mies of, composed of barbuians,
15 ; how r^arded by the bar-
barians, 16; belief in eternity
of, 20 ; reunion of Italy to, 39 ;
its influence in the Transalpine
provinces, 30; influence ot re-
ligion and jurispmdenoe in siq>-
porting, 31, 33 ; belidf in, not
extinct in the eighth century,
44; restoration of by Charles
Uie Great, 48 ; the ' trandation*
of the, 52, III, 175, 218; di-
vided between the grandsons of
Charles, 77 ; dissolution of^ 78;
ideal state supposed to be em-
bodied in, 99; never, stricUy
speaking, restored, 102.
Empire, the Holy Roman, created
by Otto the Great, 80, 103 ; a
prolongation of the Empire of
Charles, 80 ; wherein it oifieied
INDEX.
467
therefrom, 80; motives for es-
tablishment of, 84; identical
with Holy Roman Church, io6 ;
its- rights proved from the Bible,
1 1 a ; its anti-national character,
1 20 ; its union with the German
kingdom, 122; dissimilarity be-
tween the two, 127; results of
the imion, 128; its pretensions
in Hungary, 1 83 ; in Poland, 1 84 ;
in Denmark, 184; in France,
185 ; in Sweden, 185 ; in Spain,
185; in England, t86 ; in Naples,
188; in Venice, 188; in the
East, 189; the epithet 'Holy*
applied by Frederick I, 199 ;
origin and meaning of epithet,
200 ; its fall with Frederick II,
210 ; Italy lost to, 211 ; change
in its position, 214; its con-
tinuance due to its connexion
with the German kingdom, 214;
its relations with the Papacy, 153,
155, 217; its financial distress,
223 ; theory of, in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, 239 ; its
duties as an international judge
and mediator, 249 ; why an in-
ternational power, 249 ; illus-
trations, 250; attitude of new
learning towards, 253, 255, 257 ;
doctrine of its rights and func-
tions never carried out in fact,
254 ; end of its history in Italy,
264, 306 ; relation between it
and the city of Rome, 298 ;
reaches its lowest point in Fred-
erick IIPs reign, 303 ; its loss
of Burgundy, 307 ; and of Swit-
zerland, 308 ; change in its
character, 310, 315; effects of
the Renaissance upon, 314 ;
effects of the Reformation upon,
321, 327 ; influence of the lat-
ter upon the name and associa-
tions of, 334; narrowing of
its bounds, 343 ; causes of the
continuance of, 347 ; its relation
Hh
to the balance of power, 348 ;
its position in Europe, 349 ; its
last phase, 354; signs of its
approaching fall, 359; its end,
366 ; the desire for its re-cstab-
Ushment, 367, 411; unwilling^
ness of certain states, 367;
technically never extingui^eid,
368 note ; summary of its nature
and results, 369; claim of
Austria to represent, 371; of
France, 371 ; of Russia, 371 ;
of Greece, 371 ; of the Turks,
371 ; parallel between the Pa-
pacy and, 372, 376 ; never truly
mediaeval, 376 ; sense in which
it was Roman, 377; its con-
dition in the tenth century, 377 ;
essential principles of, 380 ;
its influence on Germany, 381 ;
Austria as heir of, 384 ; its bear-
ing on the progress of Europe,
386 ; ways in which it affected
the political institutions of the
Middle Ages, 386 ; its influence
upon modern jurisprudence, 386 ;
upon the history of the Church,
387 ; influence of its inner life
on the minds of men, 389 ; prin-
ciples adverse to, 391 ; change
marked by its fall, 392 ; its re-
lations to the nationalities of
Europe, 393 ; difficulty of fully
understanding, 395 ; its pro-
posed revival in 1840-9,
418 ; revived in Germany,
434.
Empire and Papacy, interdepend-
ence of, loi ; consequences, loa;
struggle between, 153 ; their re-
lations, 155, 216; pai^el be-
tween, 371 ; compared as per-
petuation of a name, 375.
Empire, Western, last days of the,
24 ; its extinction by Odoacer,
26 ; its restoration, 34.
Empire, French, under Napoleon,
363.
4(>8
INDEX.
Empire, the new German, 395,
400, 435. 441-
ENaELBEBT, 1 1 3 note.
England, 45 ; Otto's position to-
wards, 143; authority not ex-
ercised by any Emperors in, 186 ;
vague notion that it must de-
pend on the Empire, 186; im-
perial pretensions towards, 187 ;
position of the regal power in,
as compared with Germany,
216; feudalism in, 346.
Estate, Third, scarcely existed .in
time of Otto the Great, 132.
EuDSS (Count of Champagne),
Europe, bearing of the Empire on
the progress of, 386; on the
nationalities of, 393.
F.
False Decretals, the, 156.
Ferdinand I, 318 note, 325, 453.
Ferdinand II, accession of, 337 ;
his plans, 337 ; deprives the
Palsgrave Frederick of his elec-
toral vote, 232.
Feudal aristocracy, power of the,
221.
Feudal king, his peculiar relation
to his tenants, 1 24.
Feudalism, 90, 1 23 ; reason of its
firm grasp upon society, 124;
hostility between it and impe-
rialism, 131 ; its results in
France, 346 ; in England, 347 ;
in Germany, 347 ; struggles of
the Teutonic Emperors against,
apt-
Financial distress of the Empire,
223.
Florus the Deacon's lament over
the dissolution of the Carolin-
gian Empire, 85 note.
Fontenay, battle of, 77.
France, modem, dates from Hugh
Capet, 142 ; imperial authority
exercised in, 185 ; her irritatioD
at Germany's precedence, 185 ;
growth of the r^al power in,
as compared with Gennany,
215 ; alliance of the Protestants
with, 327; territory sained by
treaties of WestphaUa, 544;
feudalism in, 346 ; under Napo-
leon, 363 ; her claim to repre-
sent the Roman Enxpire. 371,
379 ; inaction in the ^^bleswig-
Holstein question, 426; &•
Clares war upon Prussia, 432;
recais her troops from Rraoe^
443.
Francia ocddentalis, given to
Charles the Bald, 77.
Francis I (Emperor)^ reign oC
354.
Franois n (Emperor), aooesgion
of> 359 ; resignation of imperial
crown by, i, 366, 413.
Franciscans, the order of, 205.
Franconia, extinction of the duke-
dom of, 222.
Franconian Emperors, 133.
* Frank,' sense in which the name
•was^used, 142 note.
Franks, rise of the, 34 ; sncces of
their arms, 35 ; Cadiolics from
the first, 36; their greatnem
chiefly due to the clergy, 36;
enter Rome, 48.
Franks, the West, Otto's policy
towards, 142.
Frankfort, synod held at, 64;
coronations at, 318 note, 404;
national assembly meets at, 418 ;
annexed to Prussia, 108, 439.
Frederick I (Barbarmsa), his
brilliant reign, 167, 179; his
relations to Uie Popedom, 167 ;
his contest with Pope Hadrian
IV, 169, 286 ; incident at tiidr
meeting on the way to Rome^
285 note ; his contest with Pope
Alexander m, 1 70 ; their meet-
ing at Venice, 171 ; magnifiomt
IND E X.
469
ascriptions of dignity to, 17.^;
assertion of his prerogative in
Italy, 174; his version of the
• Translation of the Empire,*
1 75 ; his dealings with Milan
and Tortona, 175 ; his tempo-
rary succcess, 177; victory of
the Lombards over, 1 78 ; his
prosperity as German king, 178 ;
his death, 179; legend respect-
ing him, 180 ; extent ol his
jurisdiction, 182 ; his dominion
in the East, 189 ; his letter to
Saladin, 189 ; anecdote of, 195.
"Frederick II, character of, 207 ;
events of his struggle with the
Papacy, 209 ; results of his
reign, 221; the charge of heresy
against, 252 note; memorials
left by, in Rome, 287.
Prederick III, abases himself
before the Romish court, 220;
Charles the Bold seeks an ar-
rangement with, 250; his cala-
mitous reign, 304.
Predertck i^Count Palatine and
King of Bohemia), deprived by
Ferdinand II of his electoral
vote, 232.
Frederick of HohenzoUem, sixth
burggrave of Numberg, 403,
Frederick II of Prussia (the
Great), 350. 355i 35^ note;
405-7* 438, 449-
Freedom popular, growth of, 241 ;
struggles of the Teutonic Em-
perors against, 391.
G.
Gallic race, political character of
the, 379.
Gastein, convention of, 427.
Gauverfassung, 123.
Gerbert (Pope Sylvester 11), 146.
• German Emperor,' the title of,
127, 319' 439-
Germanic constitution, the, 221 ;
influence upon, of the theory of
the Empire as an international
power, 309 ; attempted reforms
of, 315 ; means by which it was
proposed to effect them, 316 ;
causes of their failure, 316.
Germany, beginning of the na-
tional existence of^ 77 ; chooses
Arnulf as king, 78 ; overrun by
Hungarians, 79 ; establishment
of monarchy in, by Henry the
Fowler, 79 ; desires the restora-
tion of the Carolingian Empire,
86 ; position of in the tenth cen-
tury, 122 ; union of the Empire
with, 122; results of the union,
128 ; dissimilarity of the two
systems, 127; feudalism in, 123 ;
the feudal polity of, generally,
125 ; nature of the history of, till
the twelfth century, 1 26 ; princes
of, ally themselves with the Pope
against the Emperor, 162 ; its
hatred of the Romish Court,
169 ; the position of under Frede-
riaa Barbarossa, 179; growth
of towns in, 179, 223; decline
of imperial power in, 211, 215 ;
deplorable state of, during the
Great Interregnum, 213 ; en-
croachments of nobles in, 221,
228 ; kingdom of, not originally
elective, 225 ; how it ultimately
became elective, 226; changes
in the constitution of, 228; its
weakness as compared with
other states of Europe, 304;
its loss of imperial territories,
305 ; its internal weakness, 306 ;
position of the Emperor in, com-
pared with that of his predeces-
sors in Europe, 311 ; beginning
of the Hapsburg influence in,
312 ; first consciousness of its
nationality, 317; destruction of
its State-system, 326; its trou-
bles, 326 ; finally severed from
Rome, 343 ; after the peace of
470
INDEX.
Westphalia, 345; effect of a
number of petty independent
states upon, 346 ; feudalism in,
346; its political life in the
eighteenth century, 348 ; foreign
thrones acquired by its princes,
349; French aggression upon,
349; its weakness and stagnation,
350; popular feeling in at the
close of eighteenth century, 357 ;
Napoleon in, 364; changes in,
by war of 1866, 367 note ; in-
fluence of the Holy Empire on,
381 ; denationalization of^ 401,
402 ; war of liberation in, 408 ;
reconstitution of, 409, 410 ; aims
of the liberal party in, 415-41 7 ;
revolutions in, 417-419; parties
in, 442 ; war of against France,
432 ; causes of movement for
national unity in, 435, sqq. ;
parallelism of history of Ger-
many and Italy, 442.
Gerson, chancellor of Paris, plans
of, 303.
Ghibeline, the name of, 306.
Goethe, 237 note, 318 note, 359.
Golden Bull of Charles IV, 225,
330- 237.
Goths, wisest and least cruel of
the Germanic family, 28 ; Arian
Goths regarded as enemies by
Catholic Italians, 29.
Greece, her influence in, the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries,
241, 253 ; her claim to repre-
sent the Roman Empire, 371.
Greeks and Latins, origin of their
separation, 37 note.
Greeks, effect of their hostility
upon the Teutonic Empire, 210.
Gregory the Great, fame of his
sanctity and writings, 31 ; means
by which he advanced Rome's
ecclesiastical authority, 154.
Greqort II (Pope), reason of his
reluctance to break with the
Byzantine princes, 102.
Gbeoobt III (Pope) appeals to
Charles Martel for sncoou
against the Lombards, 39.
Greoort V (Pope), 146W
Gbbqort VII (.Pope), his con-
demnation of feudal investitiiRS
to the clergy, 158 ; war between
him and Henry IV, 159; his
letter to William the Conqaeror,
160 ; passage in his second ex-
communication of Henry, i6x ;
results of the struggle between
them, 162; his death, i6a; his
theory as to the rights of the
Pope with respect to the cileo-
tion of Emperors, ai7; . his
silence about the Translation of
the Empire, 218 ; his simile be-
tween the Empire and the Pope-
dom, 375 ; his demands on the
Emperor, 389.
Gbegobt DC (rope), Canon law
consolidated by, 102; called the
' Justinian of the Church,' loa.
Greoort X (Pope), 219.
Gbotiub, 387.
Guelf, the name oC 306.
Gunx) or Gur, of Spoleto (Em-
peror), 82.
OuisoAED, Robert, 293.
GuNDOBALD the Burgundiaxi, 95.
Guntheb of Schwartzburg, aaa.
GdSTAVUS ADOLFHUBy 338.
H.
I
Hadrian I (Pope), summons
Charles (the Great) to resist
the Lombards, 41 ; motites of
his policy, 42 ; his allusion to
Constantine's Donation, 118
note.
Hadrian IV fPope), FrederidkFs
contest with, 169, a86; his
pretensions, 197.
Hallam, Henry, his view of tiie
grant of a Roman dignity to
Clovis, 30 note.
IND E X.
471
Hanseatic Confederacy, 2?3, 350.
Hapsburg, the castle of, 213 note.
Harald the Blue-toothed, 143.
Henry I (the Fowler), 79, 122,
132, 226, 440.
Henry II crowned Emperor, 149.
Henry III (Emperor), power of
the Empire at its meridian
under, 151 ; his reform of the
Popedom, 152 ; results of his
encroachments, 152; his death,
153.
Henry IV, election of, 226 note ;
w£.r between him and Gregory
VII, 159 ; his humiliation, 159 ;
results of the struggle, 162 ; his
death, 162.
Henry V, Emperor, his claims
over ecclesiastics, 163 ; his quar-
rel with Pope Paschal II, 163 ;
his perilous position, 163 ; com-
parison between the prerogative
at his death and that at the
accession of Conrad II, 165 ;
tumults at his coronation, 286.
Henry VI, Emperor, 188; his
proposal to unite Naples and
Sicily to the Empire, 206 ; op-
position to the scheme, 206;
his untimely death, 206.
Henry VII (Emperor), 221, 223 ;
in Italy, 263 ; his death, 264.
Henry II (King of France), as-
sumes the title of • Protector of
the Germanic Liberties,* 327.
Henry II (King of England), his
submissive tone towards Frede-
rick I, 186.
Henry V (King of England), re-
fuses submission to the Emperor
Sigismund, 187.
Henry VIII (King of England),
336 note.
Hessen-Cassel, Elector of, de-
throned, 232 note.
Hilary, the Deacon, quoted, 21
note.
HiLDEBERT (Bishop of Le Mans),
his lines contrasting the past
and present of Rome, 458,
Hildebrand ; see Gregory VII.
HiPPOLYTDS a Lapide, the treatise
of, 342.
Hohenstaufen ; se« Emperors, Swa-
bian.
Hohenstaufen, the castle of^ 165
note.
Hohenzollem, the castle of, 403.
Holland, declared independent,
345.
Holstein, its relations to the Em-
pire, 428.
Hugh Capet, 142.
Hugh of Burgundy, 83.
Hungarians, the, 143.
Hungary, imperial authority ex-
ercised in, 183 ; its connexion
with the Hapsburgs, 184 note.
Huss, the writings of, 242.
I.
Iceland, 185, 265.
Iconoclastic controversy, 38.
*Imperator electus,* the title of,
318, 408.
Imperialism, Roman, French, and
medijEval, 378.
Imperial titles and ceremonies,
193. 403-
Innocent III (Pope), his exertions
on behalf of Otto IV, 206 ;
his pretensions, 209, 217, 218.
Innocent IV (Pope), his struggle
with Frederick II, 208.
Innocent X (Pope) on the number
of the electors, '227 note; his
protest against the peace of
Westphalia, 344.
International power,' the need of
an, 243; why the Roman Em-
pire an, 249.
Interregnum, the Great, state of
Germany during, 213 ; enables
the feudal aristocracy to extend
their power, aai.
472
INDEX.
Investitures, the struggle of the,
i6a.
iRELAifD, 203 note ; 336 note.
Irene (Empress), behaviour of,
47. 61.
Irminsftl, overthrow of, by Charles
the Great, 69 ; meaning of name,
69 note.
Italian Emperors, 80.
Italian nationality, era at which
its first rudiments appeared,
140.
Italians, modem, their feelings
towards Rome, 300.
Italy, under Odoacer, 26, 27 ; at-
tempt of Theodoric to establish
a national monarchy in, 27 ;
reconquered by Justinian, 2g ;
harassed by the Lombards, 37 ;
condition of, previous to Otto's
descent into, 80; Otto the
Great's first expedition into, 84 ;
its connexion with Germany,
87 ; Otto's rule in, 139 ; liber-
ties of the northern cities of, 150 ;
Frederick I in, 174 ; Henry VII
in, 263; lost to the Empire,
211, 306 ^ names of Emperors
buried in, 288 note ; the nation
at the present day, 392 ; par-
allel between its history and
that of Germany, 442.
Italy, Southern, 150.
J.
John VIIT (Pope), 156.
John XII (Pope), crowns Otto
the Great, 87 ; plots against
him, 134; his reprobate life,
1 34 ; Liudprand's list of the
charges against, 135; letter re-
counting them sent to him, 136 ;
his reply, 136; Otto's answer,
136; deposed by Otto, 137;
regret of the Romans at his
expulsion, 137; his return and
death, 138.
John XXII (Pope\ bis conflict
with Lewis IV, 3ao.
Joseph II (Emperor), reign 0(^355,
405 ; scheme for the erection of a
new kingdom of Burgundy. 449,
Julius Casab, 394, 3(^.
{ULius II (Pope), 318.
urisprudence, influence of, ii sap-
porting the Empire, 31 ; aver-
sion of the Romish court to tbe
ancient, 253 ; influence of tiie
Empire on modem, 386.
Jurists, their attitude towards im-
perialism, 257.
Justinian, Italy reconquered by,
29 ; study of the l^slation oC
241. 357- , ^
* Justinian of the Church,' title of,
conferred on Gregory IX, 102.
Jutland, Otto I penetrates btc
143; ovemm by Austria and
Prussia, 426.
K.
Kings, the Emperor's right of
creating, 250.
Knighthood, analogy between
priesthood and, 251.
Lactantius, his belief in the eter^
nity of the Roman Empire, 21.
Lambert (Emperor) (son of Guido
of Spoleto), 82.
Landgrave of Thuringia, choice of
tbe, commanded by the Pope,
219.
Lateran Palace at Rome, mosiic
of the, 117, 289.
Latins and Greeks, story of the
origin of their separation, 37
note.
Lauresheim, Annals of, tiieir ac-
count of the coronation of
Charles, 53.
Law, old, the influence
INDEX.
473
by, 32 ; era of the revived study
of, 277.
Learning, revival of, 241 ; con-
nexion between it and imperial-
ism, 255.
Leo I (Pope), his assertion of
universal jurisdiction, 154.
Leo the Isadrian (Emperor), his
attempt to abolish the worship
of images, 38.
Leo III (Pope), his accession, 43 ;
his adventures, 44 ; crowns
Charles at Rome on Christmas
Day (a.d. 800), 3, 49 ; charter
of, issued on same day, 106;
relation of, to the act of corona-
tion, 52, 53.
Leo VIII (Pope), 138.
Leonine city, the, 287 note.
Leopold I (Emperor), ninth elec-
torate conferred by, 232.
Leopold II (Emperor), 356.
Lewis I, Emperor (the Pious), 76,
77.
Lewis II (Emperor), 77, 104
note, 191, 456.
Lewis III (Emperor) (son of Bo-
so), 82.
Lewis IV (Emperor), his conflict
with Pope John XXII, 220.
Lewis XII (King of France), his
pretensions on Naples and Mi-
lan, 317.
Lewis XIV (King of France), 349.
Lewis (the German) (son of Lewis
the Pious), 77.
Lewis the Child (son of Amulf),
122.
Literature, revival of, 241 ; con-
nexion between it and impe-
rialism, 255.
LiUDPRAND (Bishop of Cremona),
his list of the accusations against
John XII, 135; account of his
embassy to Constantinople, 141.
LiUDPRAND (King of the Lom-
bards), attacks Rome and the
exarchate, 38.
Lombard citi6s, 1 75 ; their victory
over Frederick I, 1 78.
Lombards, arrival of the, in Italy
(a.d. 568), 30, 37 ; their aversion
to the clergy, 37 ; the Popes
seek help from the Franks
against the, 39 ; extinction of
their kingdom by Charles, 41.
LoTHAR I (Emperor) (son of Lewis
the Pious), 77, 456.
LoTHAR II (Emperor), election of,
165, 228.
LoTHAR (son of Hugh of Bur-
gundy), 83.
Lotharingia or Lorraine, 78, 79,
143. 183, 344, 352.
Luneville, the Peace of, 365.
Luther, Dr. Martin, 321, 336.
M.
Magnus, name of, 75 note.
Majesty, the title of, 248 note.
Mallum, assembly so called, 126.
Manuel Comnenus, 193.
Mario (Monte), 284.
Marsilius of Padua, his ' de Im-
perio Romano,' 231 note.
Maximilian I (Emperor), 232,
312; character of his epoch,
310; events of his reign, 315 ;
his title of * Imperator electus,'
318, 453; his proposals to re-
cover Burgundy and Italy, 310.
Maximilian II (Emperor), 32^
Mayfield, the popular assembly so
called, 126.
Mazzini, Giuseppe, 435, 438.
Mediaeval art, rights of the Em-
pire set forth in, 116.
Mediaeval monuments, causes of
the want of in Rome, 290.
Mbttebnioh, 411 sqq.
Michael, Eastern Emperor, 61.
Michael Anoelo, Capitol rebuilt
by, 296.
Middle Ages, the state of the
human mind in, 90; theology
o^j 95 ; philosophy of, 97 ; re-
474
INDEX.
latlons of Church and State
during, 107, 389 ; mode of in-
terpreting Scriptures in, 114;
art of, 116 ; opposition of theory
and practice in, 133, 262; resd
beginning of, 204 ; reverence
for ancient forms and phrases
in, 359; absence of the idea
of change or progress in, 260 ;
the city of Rome in, 271 ;
barbarism of the aristocracy in,
290 ; ambition and corruption
of the clergy in the latter, 291 ;
destruction of old buildings by
the Romans of, 292 ; existing
relics of, in Rome, 295 ; aspira-
tion for unity during, 373 ; the
Visible Church in tie, 373 ;
ferocity of the heroes of, 385 ;
ways in which the Empire
affected the political institutions
of, 386 ; idea of the communion
of saints during, 390.
Milan, Frederick I's dealings with,
1 75 ; the rebuilding of, 178 ; vic-
tory of Frederick II over, 288 ;
pretensions of Charles VIII and
Lewis XII of France on, 317.
Mohammedanism, rise of, 45.
Moissac, Chronicle of, its account
of the coronation of Charles,
54. 84.
MoMMSBN, Theodor, quoted, 394.
Monarchy, universal, doctrine of,
9i» 97-
Monarchy, elective, 233.
Mosaics in the churches of Rome,
295-
MuLLBB, Johannes von, quoted,
357.
Munster, the treaty of; tee West-
phalia.
N.
Naples, imperial authority in, 188,
205; pretensions of Charles VIII
and Lewis XII of France on,
317.
Napoueon Bonapabtb, comptred
with Charles the Gr^it, 74 ; ex-
tinction of Electorates tgr* 333;
Emperor of the West, 360 ; his
belief that he was the snccessor
of Charlemagne. 361 ; attitiide
of the Papacy towards, 36a ; his
mission in Germany, 364; be-
haviour towards Prussia, 406.
Nationalities of Europe, the for-
mation o^ 243 ; relations of the
empire to the, 393.
Nationality, struggles of the Teu-
tonic Emperors against, 391.
Neo-Platonism, Alejcandrian, effect
of. 7.
Nicsea, first council of, 23, 303;
second council of^ 64.
NiCEPHOBUS, 16, 192.
Nicholas I (Pope) and the case
of Teutberga, 354.
Nicholas II (^Pope), fixes a rmUur
body to elect the Pope, 158.
Nicholas V (Pope), 280, 293,
314-
Nobles, the, in feudal times, 135,
221 ; encroachments of the^ 228.
Niimberg, 260, 403.
O.
Occam, the English Frandsctii,
220.
Odo, or Eudes, king of Frmnoe, 81.
Odoacbb, extinction of the Western
Empire by (a.d. 476), 25 ; his
origmal position, 25 note; his
assumption of the title of King,
26 ; nature of his govmnment,
27.
Oftatus (Bishop of Milevis), his
treatise CoiUra Donatistai^ 13
note.
Orsini, the £unily of, 282..
Osnabriick, treaty of; u§ West-
phalia.
Ostrogoths, 24 ; war between Be-
lisarius and the, 274.
INDEX,
475
Otto I, the Great, appealed to
by Adelheid, 84; his first ex-
pedition into Italy, 84; invita-
tion sent by the Pope to, 84;
his victory over the Hungarians,
85 ; crowned emperor at Rome,
87 ; his coronation a favourable
opening to sacerdotal claims,
155; causes of the revival of the
Empire under, 84 ; his corona-
tion feast the inauguration of
the Teutonic realm, 123; con-
sequences of his assumption of
the imperial title, 128 ; his posi-
tion towards the Church, 128.;
changes in title, 129; his im-
perial office feudalized, 130 ;
the Germans made a single
people by, 131 ; incidents which
befel him in Rome, 1 34 ; inquires
into the character and manners
of Pope John XII, 135; his
letters to John, 136; deposes
John, 136; appoints Leo in his
stead, 137 ; his suppression of
the revolts of the Romans on
account of John, 138; his rule
in Italy, 1 39 ; resumes Charles's
plans of foreign conquest, 140 ;
his policy towards Byzantium,
141 ; seeks for his heir the hand
of the princess Theophano, 141 ;
his policy towards the West
Franks, 142; his northern and
eastern conquests, 143; extent
of his empire, 144; comparison
between it and that of Charles,
144 ; beneficial results of his
rule, 145 ; how styled by Nice-
phorus, 192.
Otto II, 142 ; memorials left by,
in Rome, 288.
Otto III, his plans and ideas, 146,
147, 148 ; his intense religious
belief in the Emperor's duties,
147 ; his reason for using the
title * Romanorum Imperator,*
147 ; his early death, 148, 227;
his burial at Aachen, 148; re-
spect in which his life was so
memorable, 1 49 ; compared with
Frederick II, 207 ; his expostu-
lation with the Roman people,
286 note ; memorials left by, in
Rome, 287.
Otto IV, Pope Innocent Ill's ex-
ertions in behalf of, 206 ; over-
thrown by Innocent, 207; ex-
planation of a curious seal of,
267 note.
P.
Paloravb (Sir F.), his view of the
grant of a Roman dignity to
Clovis, 30 note.
Palsgrave, of the Rhine, deprived
of his electoral vote, 232 ; rein-
stated, 232.
Panslavism, Russia's doctrine of,
371-
Papacy, the Teutonic reform of,
146; Henry Ill's purification
of, 152, 204; Frederick Ps bad
relations with, 168; growth of
its power, 153; its relations
with the Empire, 153, 155, 716;
its condition after the dissolu-
tion of the Carolingian Empire,
276; its attitude towards Na-
poleon, 362.
Papacy and Empire, interdepen-
dence of, loi ; its consequences,
T02 ; struggle between them, 153 ;
their relations, 155, 216; pa-
rallel between, 372 ; compared
as perpetuations of a name, 375.
Papal elections, veto of Emperor
on, 138, 155.
Partition treaty of Verdun, 77,
Paschal II (Pope), his quarrel
with Henry V, 163.
Patrician of the Romans, import
of the title, 40; date when it
was bestowed on Pipin, 40 note.
Patbitius, secretary of Frederick
476
INDEX.
Ill, on the poverty of the Em-
pire, 224.
Pavia, the Council of, and Charles
the Bald, 156.
Persecution, Protestant, 332.
Peter's (St.), old, 48.
Petrarch, his feelings towards
the Empire, 255 ; towards the
city of Rome, 271.
PFEFFINQER, quoted, 354 notc, &c.
Philip of Hohenstaufen, contest
between Otto of Brunswick and,
206 ; his assassination, 206.
Philosophy, scholastic, spread of,
in the thirteenth century, 241.
PiPiN of Herstal, 35.
PiPiN the Short appointed suc-
cessor to Childeric, 39 ; twice
rescues Rome from the Lom-
bards, 39; receives the title of
Patrician of the Romans, 40 ;
import of this title, 40; date
at which it was bestowed, 40
note.
PiDS VII (Pope), 362.
Placitum, the popular assembly so
called, 126.
PoDiEBRAD (George), King of
Bohemia, 223.
Poland, imperial authority in, 184 ;
independent, 305; partition of,
348. , .
Politics, beginning of the existence
of, 242.
Popes, emancipation of the, 37,
•37, 282, 283 ; appeal to the
Franks for succour against the
Lombards, 39 ; their reasons for
desiring the restoration of the
Western Empire, 45, 46; their
theory respecting the coronation
of Charles, 5 7 ; their profligacy
in the tenth century, 82, 85,
276 ; their theory respecting the
chair of St. Peter, 99 ; their posi-
tion and functions, 104 ; growth
of their pretensions, 108, 159,21 7 ;
and power, 153 ; their relations
to the Emperor, 155 ; thdr tem-
poral power, 157; their posi-
tion as international judges,
244; reaction against their
pretensions, 244, 277; thdr
aversion to the study of andent
jurisprudence, 253 ; hostility ot
to the Germans, 285 ; nature
of the question at issue between
the Emperors and, 588 ; £Edl of
their temporal power, 441.
Po iCARO (Stephen), conspiracy of,
280.
Prsetaxation, the so-called right
of, 228,-229.
Pragmatic Sanctions of Frederick
II, 212, 221.
Prague, University of, a 38; peace
of, 430.
Prerogative, Imperial, contrast of,
at accession of Conrad II and
death of Henry V, 165.
Priesthood, analogy between
knighthood and, 251.
Princes, league of, formed by
Frederick me Great, 355, 449.
Protestant States, their conduct
after the Reformation, 333.
Protestants of Germany, £eir al-
liance with France, 337.
Prussia, kingdom of, 353, 355,
357» 403 sqq.; good adminis-
tration in, 415 ; offer of imperial
title to king of, 4x8; constitu-
tional struggle in, 421 ; stands
aloof from Fiirsten Congress,433;
policy of in Schleswig-Holstein
question, 435 sqq.; vdthdiaws
from the Confederation, 430;
king of, becomes Emperor, 434;
* German Mission ' of, 438 sqq.
Public Peace and Imperial Cham-
ber, establishment of the, 315.
R.
Radulfos de Coluuka, his ac-
count of the origin of the sept-
INDEX.
477
ration of Greeks and Latins, 37
note.
Ravenna, exarch of, 28.
Reformation, dawnings of the, 241 ;
Charles V's attitude towards
the, 323 ; influence of its spirit
on the Empire, 321, 327 ; its
real meaning, 327 ; its effect
on the doctrines regarding the
Visible Church, 329 ; conse-
quent effect upon the Empire,
330 ; its small immediate in-
fluence on political and religious
liberty, 331 ; conduct of the
Protestant States after the, 33-2.
its influence on the name and
associations of the Empire,
334.
Religion, influence of, in support-
ing the Empire, 31; wars of,
332.
Renaissance, the, 241, 313.
* Renovatio Romani Imperii,* sig-
nification of the seal bearing
legend of, 103.
Rhense, Electoral Union at, 2.20,
236.
Rhine, towns of the, 223 ; provi-
sions of the Confederation of the,
365-
RiCHABD I (King of England), pays
homage to the Emperor Henry
VI, ife6; his release, 187.
Richard (Earl of Cornwall), his
double election with Alfonso X
of Castile, 212, 229.
Richelieu, policy of, 339.
RiciMEB (patrician), 25.
RiENZi. Petrarch's letter to the
Roman people respecting, 256 ;
his character and career, 279.
Romans, revolts of the, at the ex-
pulsion of Pope John XII, 137,
138 ; Otto's vigorous measures
against the, 138; their revolt
from the Iconoclastic Emperors
of the East, 275 ; the title of
King of the, 456.
Romanism or Catholicity, 94, 106.
Rome, commanding position of, in
the second centuiy, 7 ; prestige
of, not destroyed by the parti-
tion of the Empire, 9 ; lingering
influences of her Church and
Law, 31, 32 ; claim of, to the
right of conferring the imperial
crown, 57, 61, 81 ; republican
institutions of, renewed, 83;
profligacy of, in the tenth cen-
tury, 82, 85 ; under Arnold of
Brescia, 1 74 ; imitations of old,
258; in the Middle Ages, 271 ;
absence of Gothic in, 273 ;
causes of her rapid decay, 274;
peculiarities of her position, 275;
her internal history from the
sixth to the twelfth century,
275 ; her condition in the ninth
arid tenth centuries, 275 ; growth
of a republican feeling in, 277 ;
short-sighted policy of the Em-
perors towards, 278; causes of
the failure gf the struggle for
independence in, 281 ; her in-
ternal condition, 281 ; her
people, 281 ; her nobility 282 ;
her bishop, 282 ; relation ' of
the Emperor to, 283 ; the Em-
perors* visits to, 283 ; dislike of,
to the Germans, 285 ; memorials
of Otto III in, 287 ; of Otto II,
288; of Frederick II, 288;
causes of the want of mediaeval
monuments in, 290; barbarism
of the aristocracy of, 290; ambi-
tion, weakness, and corruption
of the clergy of, 291 ; tendency of
her builders to adhere to the
ancient manner, 291 ; destruc-
tion and alteration of old build-
ings in, 292 ; her modem
churches, 294; existing relics
of Dark and Middle Ages in,
295 ; changed aspect of, 296 ;
analogy between her architec-
ture and the civil and ecdesias-
478
INDEX.
tical constitution, 297; relation
of, to the Empire, 298 ; feelings
of modem Italians towards, 300 ;
perpetuation of the name of,
370; parallel instances, 370;
capital of the Italian kingdom,
396, 443 ; Hildebert's lines con-
trasting Uie past and present of,
458.
Romulus Auoustulus, his resig-.
nation at Odoacer's bidding,
RuDOLP (the Emperor) of Haps-
burg, 213, 219, 221, 222, 230;
financial distress under, 224;
Schiller's description of the
coronation feast of, 231 note,
262.
Rudolf II (Emperor), 337.
RuDOLP of Swabia, 162.
RuDOLP I (King of Transjurane
Burgundy\ 81.
Rudolf III (King of Burgundy),
his proposal to bequeath Bur-
gundy to Henry II, 151.
Russia, her claim to represent the
Roman Empire, 371 ; her in-
fluence in Germany, 411.
S.
Sachsenspiegel, the, 108 note, 169
note.
St. Peter's at Rome, 48, 285,
289.
St. John Lateran at Rome, 264,
289.
Saladin (the Sultan), Frederick
I's letter to, 189.
Santa Maria Novella at Florence,
fresco in, 118.
Saxon Emperors, 133.
Saxony, extinction of the dukedom
of, 222.
Schleswig, its annexation by Otto,
143 ; its relation to the Empire,
450-
Scholastic philosophy, spread oC
in the thirteenth century, z^v.
Seal, ascribed to a.d. 800, 103.
Septimius Sevsbds, concentntioQ
of power in his hsuids, 5, 6.
Seboius IV (Pope), 228 note.
Seven Years' War, 355.
Sicambri, probably tiie chief aonroe
of the Frankish nation, 34.
Sicily, imperial authority in, x88,
205.
SiGiSMUND (the Burgundian king),
his desire to preserve the insti-
tutions of the Empire, 18.
SioiSMUND (Emperor), his visit to
Henry V, 187; at the Council
of Constance, 254, 505, grants
Brandenburg to Frederick of
Hohenzollein, 403.
Simony, measures taken against,
158.
Slavic races, the, 27, 143, a6i,
381.
Smalkaldic league, the, 334, 407.
Southern Italy, 150.
Spain, Otto's position towards, 143 ;
authority not exercised by any
Emperor in, 185; comptred
with Germany, 305.
Speyer, Diet of, iii note,
Stephania (widow of Ciescentiiis),
148.
Swabia, extinction of the dukedom
of, 222 ; the tovms of, 323, 317.
Sweden, improbability of impoial
pretensions to, 185.
Swiss Confederation, the, 308;
declared independent by treaties
of Westphalia, 345.
Sylvester I (Pope), 43/
Stlvesxeb n (Pope), 14$.
T.
Taxes, mode of collecting in Ro-
man Empire, 9 note.
Tebtullian, his feelings towaidi
2ADEX.
479
the Roman Empire, ai note, 23
note.
Tkutberga (wife of Lothar), the
famous case of 2S4.
Teutonic race, political character
of the, 379.
Theodebert (son of Clovis), his
desire to preserve the institu-
tions of the Empire, 18.
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, his
attempt to establish a national
monarchy in Italy, 27, 28, 392 ;
its failure, 29; his usual place
of residence, 28 note; prosperity
under his reign, 29.
Thegdosius (the Emperor), his
abasement before St. Ambrose,
12.
Theophano (princess), 141.
Thirty Years* War, 337 ; its un-
satisfactory results, 338 ; sub-
stantial gain from it to the Ger-
man princes, 341.
Thomas (St.). his statement re-
specting the election of Empe-
rors, 227.
Thomas (St.) (of Canterbury), 171.
Tithes, first enforced by Charles
the Great, 67.
Titles, change of, 129, 319, 403.
Tortona, 175.
Transalpine provinces, influence of
the Empire in, 30.
•Translation of the Empire,' 52,
111,175,218.
Transubstantiation, 320 note.
Turks, the, 305 ; their claim to re-
present the Roman Empire, 371.
TuuPiN (Archbishop), 51 note.
U.
University of Prague, foundation
of, 238.
Unity, political, idea of, upheld by
the clergy. 96.
Urban IV (Pope), on the right
of choosing the Roman king,
229.
V.
Venice, her attitude, 171; impe-
rial pretensions towards, ibS;
maintains her independence, 188.
Verdun, partition treaty of, 77.
Vienna, Congress of, 367, 410
sqq.
ViLLANi (Matthew), his idea of
the Teutonic Emperors, 306;
his etymology of Guelf and
Ghibeiine, 306 note.
Visigothic kings of Spain, the
Empire's rights admitted by
the, 30.
W.
Wallbnstbin, 338.
Wenzel (Emperor), 223.
Western Empire, its last days,
24, 25; its extinction by Odo-
acer, 26 ; its restoration, 34.
Westphalia, the Peace of, 340 ; its
advantages to France, 344; to
Sweden, 344 ; its importance in
imperial history, 342.
WiCKLiFFE, excitement caused by
his writings, 242.
William the Conqueror, letter of
Hildebrand to, 160.
WiPPO, 226 note.
WiTDKiND, 85 note.
WoiTECH (St. Adalbert), 770.
World-Monarchy, the idea of a,
91 ; influence of metaphysics
upon the theory, 97.
World-Religion, the idea of a, 91 ;
coincides with the World-Em-
pire, 92.
Worms, Concordat of, 163; Diet
of, 3ai»336-
• ■
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