The Holy Roman Empire
by Viscount James Bryce Bryce · English · Gutenberg #44101 · 854,065 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Holy Roman Empire
Author: Viscount James Bryce Bryce
Release date: November 4, 2013 [eBook #44101]
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Language: English
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THE
HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE
BY
JAMES BRYCE, D.C.L.
_FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE
and
PROFESSOR OF CIVIL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD_
THIRD EDITION REVISED
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1871
OXFORD:
By T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, and E. Pickard Hall,
PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The object of this treatise is not so much to give a narrative history
of the countries included in the Romano-Germanic Empire--Italy during
the middle ages, Germany 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 dissertation; and to combine with an exposition of
what may be called the theory of the Empire an outline of the
political history of Germany, as well as some notices of the affairs
of mediæval Italy. To make the succession of events clearer, a
Chronological List of Emperors and Popes has been prefixed[1].
The present edition has been carefully revised and corrected
throughout; and a good many additions have been made to both text and
notes.
LINCOLN'S INN,
August 11, 1870.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The author has in preparation, and hopes before long to complete
and publish, a set of chronological tables which may be made to serve
as a sort of skeleton history of mediæval Germany and Italy.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
Introductory.
CHAPTER II.
The Roman Empire before the Invasion of the Barbarians.
The Empire in the Second Century 5
Obliteration of National distinctions 6
Rise of Christianity 10
Its Alliance with the State 10
Its Influence on the Idea of an Imperial Nationality 13
CHAPTER III.
The Barbarian Invasions.
Relations between the Primitive Germans and the Romans 15
Their Feelings towards Rome and her Empire 16
Belief in its Eternity 20
Extinction by Odoacer of the Western branch of the Empire 26
Theodoric the Ostrogothic King 27
Gradual Dissolution of the Empire 30
Permanence of the Roman Religion and the Roman Law 31
CHAPTER IV.
Restoration of the Empire in the West.
The Franks 34
Italy under Greeks and Lombards 37
The Iconoclastic Schism 38
Alliance of the Popes with the Frankish 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
Question 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 at Rome 87
CHAPTER VII.
Theory of the Mediæval 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
CHAPTER VIII.
The Roman 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 140
Comparison of his Empire with the Carolingian 144
Character and Projects of the Emperor Otto III 146
The Emperors Henry II and Conrad II 150
The Emperor Henry III 151
CHAPTER X.
Struggle of the Empire and the Papacy.
Origin and Progress of Papal Power 153
Relations of the Popes with the early Emperors 155
Quarrel of Henry IV and Gregory VII 159
Gregory's Ideas 160
Concordat of Worms 163
General Results of the Contest 164
CHAPTER XI.
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
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 188
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
CHAPTER XIV.
The Germanic Constitution--the Seven Electors.
Germany in the Fourteenth Century 222
Reign of the Emperor Charles IV 225
Origin and History of the System of Election, and of the
Electoral Body 225
The Golden Bull 230
Remarks on the Elective Monarchy of Germany 233
Results of Charles IV's Policy 236
CHAPTER XV.
The Empire as an International Power.
Revival of Learning 240
Beginnings of Political Thought 241
Desire for an International Power 242
Theory of the Emperor's Functions as Monarch of Europe 244
Illustrations 249
Relations of the Empire and the New Learning 251
The Men of Letters--Petrarch, Dante 254
The Jurists 256
Passion for Antiquity in the Middle Ages: its Causes 258
The Emperor Henry VII in Italy 262
The _De Monarchia_ of Dante 264
CHAPTER XVI.
The City of Rome in the Middle Ages.
Rapid Decline of the City after the Gothic Wars 273
Her Condition in the Dark Ages 274
Republican Revival of the Twelfth Century 276
Character and Ideas of Nicholas Rienzi 278
Social State of Mediæval Rome 280
Visits of the Teutonic Emperors 282
Revolts against them 284
Existing Traces of their Presence in Rome 286
Want of Mediæval, and especially of Gothic Buildings, in
Modern Rome 289
Causes of this; Ravages of Enemies and Citizens 291
Modern Restorations 292
Surviving Features of truly Mediæval Architecture--the
Bell-towers 294
The Roman Church and the Roman City 296
Rome since the Revolution 299
CHAPTER XVII.
The Renaissance: Change in the Character of the Empire.
Weakness of Germany 302
Loss of Imperial Territories 303
Gradual Change in the Germanic Constitution 307
Beginning of the Predominance of the Hapsburgs 310
The Discovery of America 311
The Renaissance and its Effects on the Empire 311
Projects of Constitutional Reform 313
Changes of Title 316
CHAPTER XVIII.
The Reformation and its Effects upon the Empire.
Accession of Charles V 319
His Attitude towards the Reformation 321
Issue of his Attempts at Coercion 322
Spirit and Essence of the Religious Movement 325
Its Influence on the Doctrine of the Visible Church 327
How far it promoted Civil and Religious Liberty 329
Its Effect upon the Mediæval Theory of the Empire 332
Upon the Position of the Emperor in Europe 333
Dissensions in Germany 334
The Thirty Years' War 335
CHAPTER XIX.
The Peace of Westphalia: Last Stage in the Decline
of the Empire.
Political Import of the Peace of Westphalia 337
Hippolytus a Lapide and his Book 339
Changes in the Germanic Constitution 340
Narrowed Bounds of the Empire 341
Condition of Germany after the Peace 342
The Balance of Power 345
The Hapsburg Emperors and their Policy 348
The Emperor Charles VII 351
The Empire in its last Phase 352
Feelings of the German People 354
CHAPTER XX.
Fall of the Empire.
The Emperor Francis II 356
Napoleon as the Representative of the Carolingians 357
The French Empire 360
Napoleon's German Policy 361
The Confederation of the Rhine 362
End of the Empire 363
The German Confederation 364
CHAPTER XXI.
Conclusion: General Summary.
Causes of the Perpetuation of the Name of Rome 366
Parallel instances: Claims now made to represent the Roman
Empire 367
Parallel afforded by the History of the Papacy 369
In how far was the Empire really Roman 374
Imperialism: Ancient and Modern 375
Essential Principles of the Mediæval Empire 377
Influence of the Imperial System in Germany 378
The Claim of Modern Austria to represent the Mediæval Empire 381
Results of the Influence of the Empire upon Europe 383
Upon Modern Jurisprudence 383
Upon the Development of the Ecclesiastical Power 384
Struggle of the Empire with three Hostile Principles 388
Its Relations, Past and Present, to the Nationalities
of Europe 390
Conclusion: Difficulties caused by the Nature of the
Subject 392
APPENDIX.
NOTE A.
On the Burgundies 395
NOTE B.
On the Relations to the Empire of the Kingdom of Denmark
and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein 398
NOTE C.
On certain Imperial Titles and Ceremonies 400
NOTE D.
Hildebert's Lines contrasting the Past and Present of Rome 406
INDEX 407
DATES OF
SEVERAL IMPORTANT EVENTS
IN THE HISTORY OF THE EMPIRE.
B.C.
Battle of Pharsalia 48
A.D.
Council of Nicæa 325
End of the separate Western Empire 476
Revolt of the Italians 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 1176
Death of Frederick II 1250
League of the three Forest Cantons of Switzerland 1308
Career of Rienzi 1347-1354
The Golden Bull 1356
Council of Constance 1415
Extinction of the Eastern Empire 1453
Discovery of America 1492
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
Formation of the German Confederation 1815
Establishment of the North German Confederation 1866
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
OF
EMPERORS AND POPES.
A. D. B. C.
Augustus. 27
A. D.
Tiberius. 14
Caligula. 37
Claudius. 41
42 St. Peter, (according
to Jerome).
Nero. 54
67 Linus, (according to
Jerome, Irenæus,
Eusebius).
68 Clement, (according Galba, Otho, Vitellius,
to Tertullian and Vespasian. 68
Rufinus).
78 Anacletus (?).
Titus. 79
Domitian. 81
91 Clement, (according
to later writers).
Nerva. 96
Trajan. 98
100 Evaristus (?).
109 Alexander (?).
Hadrian. 117
119 Sixtus I.
129 Telesphorus.
Antoninus Pius. 138
139 Hyginus.
143 Pius I.
157 Anicetus.
Marcus Aurelius. 161
168 Soter.
177 Eleutherius.
Commodus. 180
Pertinax. 190
Didius Julianus. 191
Niger. 192
193 Victor (?). Septimius Severus. 193
202 Zephyrinus (?).
Caracalla, Geta,
Diadumenian. 211
Opilius Macrinus. 217
Elagabalus. 218
219 Calixtus I.
Alexander Severus. 222
223 Urban I.
230 Pontianus.
235 Anterius or Anteros. Maximin. 235
236 Fabianus.
The two Gordians, Maximus
Pupienus, Balbinus. 237
Gordian the Younger. 238
Philip. 244
Decius. 249
251 Cornelius. Gallus. 251
252 Lucius I. Volusian. 252
253 Stephen I. Æmilian, Valerian,
Gallienus. 253
257 Sixtus II.
259 Dionysius.
Claudius II. 268
269 Felix.
Aurelian. 270
275 Eutychianus. Tacitus. 275
Probus. 276
Carus. 282
283 Caius.
Carinus, Numerian,
Diocletian. 284
Maximian, joint Emperor
with Diocletian. 286
296 Marcellinus. [305(?)
304 Vacancy. Constantius, Galerius. 304(?)
Licinius. or 307]
308 Marcellus I. Maximin. 308
Constantine, Galerius,
Licinius, Maximin,
Maxentius, and Maximian
reigning jointly. 309
310 Eusebius.
311 Melchiades.
314 Sylvester I.
Constantine (the Great)
alone. 323
336 Marcus I.
337 Julius I. Constantine II,
Constantius II,
Constans. 337
Magnentius. 350
352 Liberius.
Constantius alone. 353
356 Felix (Anti-pope).
Julian. 361
Jovian. 363
Valens and Valentinian I. 364
366 Damasus I.
Gratian and Valentinian I. 367
Valentinian II and
Gratian. 375
Theodosius. 379
384 Siricius.
Arcadius (in the East),
Honorius (in the West). 395
398 Anastasius I.
402 Innocent I.
Theodosius II. (E) 408
417 Zosimus.
418 Boniface I.
418 Eulalius (Anti-pope).
422 Celestine I.
Valentinian III. (W) 424
432 Sixtus III.
440 Leo I (the Great).
Marcian. (E) 450
Maximus, Avitus. (W) 455
Majorian. (W) 455
Leo I. (E) 457
461 Hilarius. Severus. (W) 461
Vacancy. (W) 465
Anthemius. (W) 467
468 Simplicius.
Olybrius. (W) 472
Glycerius. (W) 473
Julius Nepos. (W) 474
Leo II, Zeno, Basiliscus
(all E.) 474
Romulus Augustulus. (W) 475
(End of the Western Line
in Romulus Augustus. 476)
(Henceforth, till A.D. 800,
Emperors reigning at
483 Felix III[2]. Constantinople).
Anastasius I. 491
492 Gelasius I.
496 Anastasius II.
498 Symmachus.
498 Laurentius (Anti-pope).
514 Hormisdas.
Justin I. 518
523 John I.
526 Felix IV.
Justinian. 527
530 Boniface II.
530 Dioscorus (Anti-pope).
532 John II.
535 Agapetus I.
536 Silverius.
537 Vigilius.
555 Pelagius I.
560 John III.
Justin II. 565
574 Benedict I.
578 Pelagius II. Tiberius II. 578
Maurice. 582
590 Gregory I (the Great).
Phocas. 602
604 Sabinianus.
607 Boniface III.
607 Boniface IV.
Heraclius. 610
615 Deus dedit.
618 Boniface V.
625 Honorius I.
638 Severinus.
640 John IV.
Constantine III,
Heracleonas,
Constans II. 641
642 Theodorus I.
649 Martin I.
654 Eugenius I.
657 Vitalianus.
Constantine IV (Pogonatus). 668
672 Adeodatus.
676 Domnus or Donus I.
678 Agatho.
682 Leo II.
683(?) Benedict II.
685 John V. Justinian II. 685
685(?) Conon.
687 Sergius I.
687 Paschal (Anti-pope).
687 Theodorus (Anti-pope).
Leontius. 694
Tiberius. 697
701 John VI.
705 John VII. Justinian II restored. 705
708 Sisinnius.
708 Constantine.
Philippicus Bardanes. 711
Anastasius II. 713
715 Gregory II.
Theodosius III. 716
Leo III (the Isaurian). 718
731 Gregory III.
741 Zacharias. Constantine V
(Copronymus). 741
752 Stephen (II).
752 Stephen II (or III).
757 Paul I.
767 Constantine (Anti-pope).
768 Stephen III (IV).
772 Hadrian I.
Leo IV. 775
Constantine VI. 780
795 Leo III.
Deposition of Constantine
VI by Irene. 797
Charles I (the Great). 800
(Following henceforth the
new Western line).
Lewis I (the Pious). 814
816 Stephen IV.
817 Paschal I.
824 Eugenius II.
827 Valentinus.
827 Gregory IV.
Lothar I. 840
844 Sergius II.
847 Leo IV.
855 Benedict III. Lewis II. 855
855 Anastasius (Anti-pope).
858 Nicholas I.
867 Hadrian II.
872 John VIII.
Charles II (the Bald). 875
Charles III (the Fat). 881
882 Martin II.
884 Hadrian III.
885 Stephen V.
891 Formosus. Guido. 891
Lambert. 894
896 Boniface VI. Arnulf. 896
896 Stephen VI.
897 Romanus.
897 Theodore II.
898 John IX.
Lewis (the Child).[+] 899
900 Benedict IV.
Lewis III (of Provence). 901
903 Leo V.
903 Christopher.
904 Sergius III.
911 Anastasius III.
Conrad I.[+] 912(?)
913 Lando.
914 John X.
Berengar. 915
Henry I (the Fowler).[+] 918
928 Leo VI.
929 Stephen VII.
931 John XI.
936 Leo VII. Otto I (the Great).[+] 936
939 Stephen VIII.
941 Martin III.
946 Agapetus II.
955 John XII.
Otto I, crowned at Rome. 962
963 Leo VIII.
964 Benedict V (Anti-Pope?).
965 John XIII.
972 Benedict VI.
Otto II. 973
974 Boniface VII (Anti-pope?).
974 Domnus II (?).
974 Benedict VII.
983 John XIV. Otto III 983
985 John XV.
996 Gregory V.
996 John XVI (Anti-pope).
999 Sylvester II.
Henry II (the Saint). 1002
1003 John XVII.
1003 John XVIII.
1009 Sergius IV.
1012 Benedict VIII.
1024 John XIX. Conrad II (the Salic). 1024
1033 Benedict IX.
Henry III. 1039
1044 Sylvester (Anti-pope).
1045( Gregory VI.
1046 Clement II.
1048 Damasus II.
1048 Leo IX.
1054 Victor II.
Henry IV. 1056
1057 Stephen IX.
1058 Benedict X.
1059 Nicholas II.
1061 Alexander II.
1073 Gregory VII (Hildebrand).
1080 (Clement, Anti-pope).
1086 Victor III.
1087 Urban II.
1099 Paschal II.
Henry V. 1106
1118 Gelasius II.
1118 Gregory, (Anti-pope).
1119 Calixtus II.
1121 (Celestine, Anti-pope).
1124 Honorius II.
Lothar II (the Saxon). 1125
1130 Innocent II.
(Anacletus, Anti-pope).
1138 Victor (Anti-pope). [*]Conrad III. 1138
1143 Celestine II.
1144 Lucius II.
1145 Eugenius III.
Frederick I (Barbarossa). 1152
1153 Anastasius IV.
1154 Hadrian IV.
1159 Alexander III.
1159 (Victor, Anti-pope).
1164 (Paschal, Anti-pope).
1168 (Calixtus, Anti-pope).
1181 Lucius III.
1185 Urban III.
1187 Gregory VIII.
1187 Clement III.
Henry VI. 1190
1191 Celestine III.
1198 Innocent III. [*]Philip, Otto IV
(rivals). 1198
Otto IV. 1208
Frederick II. 1212
1216 Honorius III.
1227 Gregory IX.
1241 Celestine IV.
1241 Vacancy.
1243 Innocent IV.
[*]Conrad IV, [*]William,
(rivals). 1250
1254 Alexander IV. Interregnum. 1254
[*]Richard (earl of
Cornwall).
[*]Alfonso (king of
Castile), (rivals). 1257
1261 Urban IV.
1265 Clement IV.
1269 Vacancy.
1271 Gregory X.
[*]Rudolf I (of Hapsburg). 1272
1276 Innocent V.
1276 Hadrian V.
1277 John XX or XXI.
1277 Nicholas I
1281 Martin IV.
1285 Honorius IV.
1289 Nicholas IV.
1292 Vacancy. [*]Adolf (of Nassau). 1292
1294 Celestine V.
1294 Boniface VIII.
[*]Albert I. 1298
1303 Benedict XI.
1305 Clement V.
Henry VII. 1308
1314 Vacancy. Lewis IV. 1315
(Frederick of Austria,
rival).
1316 John XXI or XXII.
1334 Benedict XII.
1342 Clement VI.
Charles IV. 1347
1352 Innocent VI. (Günther of Schwartzburg,
rival).
1362 Urban V.
1370 Gregory XI.
1378 Urban VI,
Clement VII [*]Wenzel. 1378
(Anti-pope).
1389 Boniface IX.
1394 Benedict (Anti-pope).
[*]Rupert. 1400
1404 Innocent VII.
1406 Gregory XII.
1409 Alexander V.
1410 John XXII or Sigismund. 1410
XXIII. (Jobst of Moravia, rival).
1417 Martin V.
1431 Eugene IV.
[*]Albert II. 1438
1439 Felix V (Anti-pope).
Frederick III. 1440
1447 Nicholas V.
1455 Calixtus IV.
1458 Pius II.
1464 Paul II.
1471 Sixtus IV.
1484 Innocent VIII.
1493 Alexander VI. [*]Maximilian I. 1493
1503 Pius III.
1503 Julius II.
1513 Leo X.
Charles V.[3] 1519
1522 Hadrian VI.
1523 Clement VII.
1534 Paul III.
1550 Julius III.
1555 Marcellus II.
1555 Paul IV.
[*]Ferdinand I. 1558
1559 Pius IV.
[*]Maximilian II. 1564
1566 Pius V.
1572 Gregory XIII.
[*]Rudolf II. 1576
1585 Sixtus V.
1590 Urban VII.
1590 Gregory XIV.
1591 Innocent IX.
1592 Clement VIII.
1604 Leo XI.
1604 Paul V.
[*]Matthias. 1612
[*]Ferdinand II. 1619
1621 Gregory XV.
1623 Urban VIII.
[*]Ferdinand III. 1637
1644 Innocent X.
1655 Alexander VII.
[*]Leopold I. 1658
1667 Clement IX.
1670 Clement X.
1676 Innocent XI.
1689 Alexander VIII.
1691 Innocent XII.
1700 Clement XI.
[*]Joseph I. 1705
[*]Charles VI. 1711
1720 Innocent XIII.
1724 Benedict XIII.
1740 Benedict XIV.
[*]Charles VII. 1742
[*]Francis I. 1745
1758 Clement XII.
[*]Joseph II. 1765
1769 Clement XIII.
1775 Pius VI.
[*]Leopold II. 1790
[*]Francis II. 1792
1800 Pius VII.
Abdication of Francis II. 1806
1823 Leo XII.
1829 Pius VIII.
1831 Gregory XVI.
1846 Pius IX.
[*] Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome.
[+] The names marked with a + are those of German kings who never made any
claim to the imperial title.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] Reckoning the Anti-pope Felix (A.D. 356) as Felix II.
[3] Crowned Emperor, but at Bologna, not at Rome.
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTORY.
Of those who in August, 1806, read in the English newspapers that the
Emperor Francis II had announced 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, 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
brilliance, of grand characters 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 restricted 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 necessarily 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 pursuance 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 civilization: to shew
how such a combination was possible; how Charles and Otto were led to
revive the imperial title in the West; how far during the reigns of
their successors it preserved the memory of its origin, and influenced
the European commonwealth of nations.
Strictly speaking, it is from the year 800 A.D., when a King of the
Franks was crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III, that the
beginning of the Holy Roman Empire must be dated. But in history there
is nothing isolated, and just as to explain a modern Act of Parliament
or a modern conveyance of lands we must go back to the feudal customs
of the thirteenth century, so among the institutions of the Middle
Ages there is scarcely one which can be understood until it is traced
up either to classical or to primitive Teutonic antiquity. Such a mode
of inquiry is most of all needful in the case of the Holy Empire,
itself no more than a tradition, a fancied revival of departed
glories. And thus, in order to make it clear out of what elements the
imperial system was formed, we might be required to scrutinize the
antiquities of the Christian Church; to survey the constitution 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
polity whose influence on the minds of the mediæval 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 absolutism fully matured; we shall mark how
the new religion, rising in the midst of a hostile power, ends by
embracing and transforming it; and we shall be in a position to
understand what impression the whole huge fabric of secular and
ecclesiastical government which Roman and Christian had piled up made
upon the barbarian tribes who pressed into the charmed circle of the
ancient civilization.
CHAPTER II.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS.
[Sidenote: The Roman Empire in the second century.]
[Sidenote: Obliteration of national distinctions.]
[Sidenote: The Capital.]
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 impunity. Republican forms had never been known in the
provinces at all, and the aspect which the imperial administration had
originally assumed there, soon reacted on its position in the capital.
Earlier rulers had disguised 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 Septimius
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 Roman state was preserved in his title of General;
his provincial lieutenants were military governors; and a more
terrible enforcement of the theory was found in his dependence on the
army, at once the origin and support of all authority. But, as he
united in himself every function of government, his sovereignty was
civil as well as military. Laws emanated from him; all officials acted
under his commission; the sanctity of his person bordered on divinity.
This increased concentration of power was mainly required by the
necessities of frontier defence, for within there was more decay than
disaffection. Few troops were quartered through the country: few
fortresses checked the march of armies in the struggles which placed
Vespasian and Severus on the throne. The distant 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
disappeared. 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
_coloniæ_, the working of the equalized and equalizing Roman law, the
even pressure of the government on all subjects, the movement 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 illustrious 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 completed the work which trade and literature and
toleration 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 superiority. Speculative philosophy lent her aid
to this general assimilation. Stoicism, with its doctrine of a
universal system of nature, made minor distinctions between 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 sacrifice 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.
[Sidenote: Diocletian and Constantine.]
Scarcely had these slowly working influences brought about this unity,
when other influences began to threaten 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 monarchs apart, owning no
allegiance to the possessor of the capital.
The founding of the kingdoms of modern Europe might have been
anticipated by two hundred years, had the barbarians been bolder, or
had there not arisen in Diocletian a prince active and politic enough
to bind up the fragments before they had lost all cohesion, meeting
altered conditions by new remedies. By dividing and localizing
authority, he confessed that the weaker heart could no longer make its
pulsations felt to the body's extremities. He parcelled out the
supreme power among four persons, and then sought to give it a
factitious strength, by surrounding it with an oriental pomp which his
earlier predecessors would have scorned. The sovereign's person became
more sacred, and was removed further from the subject by the
interposition of a host of officials. The prerogative of Rome was
menaced by the rivalry of Nicomedia, and the nearer greatness of
Milan. Constantine trod in the same path, extending the system of
titles and functionaries, separating the civil from the military,
placing counts and dukes along the frontiers and in the cities, making
the household larger, its etiquette stricter, its offices more
important, though to a Roman eye degraded by their attachment to the
monarch's person. The crown became, for the first time, the fountain
of honour. These changes brought little good. Heavier taxation
depressed the aristocracy[4]: population decreased, agriculture
withered, serfdom spread: it was found more difficult to raise native
troops and to pay any troops whatever. The removal 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 preserved 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[5].
[Sidenote: Christianity.]
[Sidenote: Its alliance with the State.]
For that nationality was now beginning to be supported 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
communication 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 mercenary spirit, for the league was inevitable. Of the evils and
dangers incident to the system then founded, there was as yet no
experience: of that antagonism between Church and State which to a
modern appears so natural, there was not even an idea. Among the Jews,
the State had rested upon religion; among the Romans, religion had
been an integral part of the political constitution, a matter far more
of national or tribal or family feeling than of personal[6]. Both in
Israel and at Rome the mingling of religious with civic patriotism had
been harmonious, 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 became its counterpart. Suddenly called
from danger and ignominy to the seat of power, and finding her
inexperience 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 disputes affecting the whole Christian world, she sought
the interposition of the sovereign; in all else she strove not to sink
in, but to reproduce for herself the imperial system. And just as with
the extension of the Empire all the independent rights of districts,
towns, or tribes had disappeared, so now the primitive freedom and
diversity of individual Christians and local Churches, already
circumscribed 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 oligarchical character of her government. Thus, under the
combined force of doctrinal theory and practical needs, there shaped
itself a hierarchy of patriarchs, metropolitans, 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 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 inchoate 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[7], 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 remained 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
before: the abasement of Theodosius the Emperor before Ambrose the
Archbishop admitted the supremacy of spiritual authority. In the
decrepitude of old institutions, 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 themselves; and when in
the fifth century the horizon grew black with clouds of ruin, those
who watched with despair or apathy the approach of irresistible foes,
fled for comfort to the shrine of a religion which even those foes
revered.
[Sidenote: It embraces and preserves the imperial idea.]
But that which we are above all concerned to remark 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 worshippers 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[8].
FOOTNOTES:
[4] According to the vicious financial system that prevailed, the
_curiales_ in each city were required to collect the taxes, and when
there was a deficit, to supply it from their own property.
[5] See the eloquent passage of Claudian, _In secundum consulatum
Stilichonis_, 129, _sqq._, from which the following lines are taken
(150-60):--
'Hæc est in gremio victos quæ sola recepit,
Humanumque genus communi nomine fovit,
Matris, non dominæ, ritu; civesque vocavit
Quos domuit, nexuque pio longinqua revinxit.
Hujus pacificis debemus moribus omnes
Quod veluti patriis regionibus utitur hospes:
Quod sedem mutare licet: quod cernere Thulen
Lusus, et horrendos quondam penetrare recessus:
Quod bibimus passim Rhodanum, potamus Oronten,
Quod cuncti gens una sumus. Nec terminus unquam
Romanæ ditionis erit.'
[6] In the Roman jurisprudence, _ius sacrum_ is a branch of _ius
publicum_.
[7] Tertullian, writing circ. A.D. 200, says: 'Sed quid ego amplius de
religione atque pietate Christiana in imperatorem quem necesse est
suspiciamus ut eum quem Dominus noster elegerit. Et merito dixerim,
noster est magis Cæsar, ut a nostro Deo constitutus.'--_Apologet._
cap. 34.
[8] See the book of Optatus, bishop of Milevis, _Contra Donatistas_.
'Non enim respublica est in ecclesia, sed ecclesia in republica, id
est, in imperio Romano, cum super imperatorem non sit nisi solus
Deus:' (p. 999 of vol. ii. of Migne's _Patrologiæ Cursus completus_.)
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 constituting its centre and representing its unity.
CHAPTER III.
THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
[Sidenote: The Barbarians.]
[Sidenote: Admitted to Roman titles and honours.]
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 Mediterranean 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[9] 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[10], to
take service under the Roman flag, and rise to a distinction in the
legion which some feud denied them at home. This 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 prætorians 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 majority of the troops; after Theodosius, a Roman
is the exception. The soldiers of the Eastern Empire in the time of
Arcadius are almost all Goths, vast bodies of whom had been settled in
the provinces; while in the West, Stilicho[11] can oppose Rhodogast
only by summoning 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 republic might assert, the maxim of the
Empire had always been that birth and race should exclude no subject
from any post which his abilities deserved. This principle, which had
removed all obstacles from the path of the Spaniard Trajan, the
Pannonian Maximin, the Numidian Philip, was afterwards extended to the
conferring of honour and power on persons who did not even profess to
have passed through the grades of Roman service, but remained leaders
of their own tribes. Ariovistus had been soothed by the title of
Friend of the Roman People; in the third century the insignia of the
consulship[12] were conferred on a Herulian chief: Crocus and his
Alemanni entered as an independent body into the service of Rome;
along the Rhine whole tribes received, under the name of Laeti, lands
within the provinces on condition of military service; and the foreign
aid which the Sarmatian had proffered to Vespasian against his rival,
and Marcus Aurelius had indignantly rejected in the war with Cassius,
became the usual, at last the sole support of the Empire, in civil as
well as in external strife.
Thus in many ways was the old antagonism broken down--Romans admitting
barbarians to rank and office, barbarians catching something of the
manners and culture of their neighbours. And thus when the final
movement came, and the Teutonic tribes slowly established themselves
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
provincials 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.
[Sidenote: Their feelings towards the Roman Empire.]
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
fabrication 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 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 amusement, had adorned Milan and
Verona, Arles, Treves, and Bordeaux. A deeper awe would strike them as
they gazed on the crowding worshippers and stately ceremonial of
Christianity, most unlike their own rude sacrifices. The exclamation
of the Goth Athanaric, when led into the market-place of
Constantinople, may stand for the feelings of his nation: 'Without
doubt the Emperor is a God upon earth, and he who attacks him is
guilty of his own blood[13].'
[Sidenote: Their desire to preserve its institutions.]
The social and political system, with its cultivated language and
literature, into which they came, would impress fewer of the
conquerors, but by those few would be admired 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 existing 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[14]. Alaric became master-general of
the armies of Illyricum. Clovis exulted in the consulship; his son
Theodebert received Provence, the conquest of his own battle-axe, as
the gift of Justinian. Sigismund the Burgundian king, created count
and patrician by the Emperor Anastasius, professed the deepest
gratitude and the firmest faith to that Eastern court which was
absolutely powerless to help or to hurt him. 'My people is yours,' he
writes, 'and to rule them delights me less than to serve you; the
hereditary devotion of my race to Rome has made us account those the
highest honours which your military titles convey; we have always
preferred what an Emperor gave to all that our ancestors could
bequeath. In ruling our nation we hold ourselves but your lieutenants:
you, whose divinely-appointed sway no barrier bounds, whose blessed
beams shine from the Bosphorus into distant Gaul, employ us to
administer the remoter regions of your Empire: your world is our
fatherland[15].' A contemporary historian has recorded the remarkable
disclosure of his own thoughts and purposes, made by one of the ablest
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 Cæsar Augustus. But when experience taught me
that the untameable barbarism of the Goths would not suffer them to
live beneath the sway of law, and that the abolition of the
institutions on which the state rested would involve the ruin of the
state itself, I chose the glory of renewing and maintaining by Gothic
strength the fame of Rome, desiring to go down to posterity as the
restorer of that Roman power which it was beyond my power to replace.
Wherefore I avoid war and strive for peace[16].'
Historians have remarked how valuable must have been the skill of
Roman officials to princes who from leaders of tribes were become
rulers of wide lands; and in particular 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 wish to extinguish it never crossed the mind of the
barbarians[17]. The conception of that Empire was too universal, 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.
[Sidenote: The belief in its eternity.]
There were especially two ideas whereon it rested, and from which it
obtained a peculiar strength and a peculiar direction. The one was the
belief that as the dominion of Rome was universal, so must it be
eternal. Nothing like it had been seen before. The empire of Alexander
had lasted a short lifetime; and within its wide compass were included
many arid wastes, and many tracts where none but the roving savage had
ever set foot. That of the Italian city had for fourteen generations
embraced all the most wealthy and populous regions of the civilized
world, and had laid the foundations of its power so deep that they
seemed destined to last for ever. If Rome moved slowly for a time, her
foot was always planted firmly: the ease and swiftness of her later
conquests proved the solidity of the earlier; and to her, more justly
than to his own city, might the boast of the Athenian historian be
applied: that she advanced farthest in prosperity, 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[18]. The proud
belief of his countrymen which Virgil had expressed--
'His ego nec metas rerum, nec 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 supplications 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[19].' With the triumph of
Christianity this belief had found a new basis. For as the Empire had
decayed, the Church had grown stronger; and now while the one,
trembling at the approach of the destroyer, saw province after
province torn away, the other, rising in stately youth, prepared to
fill her place and govern in her name, and in doing so, to adopt and
sanctify and propagate anew the notion of a universal and unending
state.
[Sidenote: Sanctity of the imperial name.]
The second chief element in this conception was the association of
such a state with one irresponsible governor, the Emperor. The hatred
to the name of King, which their earliest political struggles had left
in the Romans, 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 domestic 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[20]. From the time of Julius and Augustus his person had been
hallowed by the office of chief pontiff[21] and the tribunician power;
to swear by his head was considered the most solemn of all oaths[22];
his effigy was sacred[23], even on a coin; to him or to his Genius
temples were erected and divine honours paid while he lived[24]; and
when, as it was expressed, he ceased to be among men, the title of
Divus was accorded to him, after a solemn consecration[25]. 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 proposed as a test to the Christians on their trial.
Under the new religion the form of adoration vanished, the sentiment
of reverence remained: the right to control Church as well as State,
admitted at Nicæa, and habitually exercised by the sovereigns of
Constantinople, made the Emperor hardly less essential to the new
conception of a world-wide Christian monarchy than he had been to the
military despotism of old. These considerations 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.
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 subject; the Roman city was no longer the seat of government,
nor did her capture extinguish the imperial power, for the maxim was
now accepted, Where the Emperor is, there is Rome[26]. But her
continued existence, not permanently occupied by any conqueror,
striking the nations with an awe which the history or the external
splendours of Constantinople, Milan, or Ravenna could nowise inspire,
was an ever new assertion of the endurance of the Roman race and
dominion. Dishonoured and defenceless, 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.
[Sidenote: Last days of the Western Empire.]
[Sidenote: Its extinction by Odoacer, A.D. 476.]
In the history of the last days of the Western Empire, 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[27], 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 have seemed to reign
by hereditary right, but after their extinction in Valentinian III
each phantom Emperor--Maximus, Avitus, Majorian, Anthemius,
Olybrius--received 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 supposed to constitute a single Empire, and the rulers of
the East interfered more than once to raise to the Western throne
princes they could not protect upon it. Ricimer's insolence quailed
before the shadowy grandeur of the imperial title: his ambition, and
Gundobald his successor's, were bounded by the name of patrician. The
bolder genius of Odoacer[28], 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 Cæsars. When, at Odoacer's bidding, Romulus Augustulus,
the boy whom a whim of fate had chosen to be the last native Cæsar 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 Eastern 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[29]. The Emperor granted what he could not
refuse, and Odoacer, taking the title of King[30], 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 Diocletian, 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
the sceptre of the world, and head an undivided Catholic Church[31].
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
commensurate 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.
[Sidenote: Odoacer.]
[Sidenote: Theodoric.]
[Sidenote: Italy reconquered, by Justinian.]
Odoacer's monarchy was not more oppressive than those of his
neighbours in Gaul, Spain, and Africa. But the mercenary _fœderati_
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
chieftain, the greatest of all the barbarian conquerors, the
forerunner 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[32], was the establishment of a
national monarchy in Italy. Brought up as a hostage in the court of
Byzantium, he learnt to know the advantages of an orderly and
cultivated society and the principles by which it must be maintained;
called in early manhood to roam as a warrior-chief over the plains of
the Danube, he acquired along with the arts of command a sense of the
superiority of his own people in valour and energy and truth. When the
defeat and death of Odoacer had left the peninsula at his mercy, he
sought no further conquest, easy as it would have been to tear away
new provinces from the Eastern realm, but strove only to preserve and
strengthen the ancient polity of Rome, to breathe into her decaying
institutions the spirit of a fresh life, and without endangering 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[33]: all that was most noble among them shone forth now in
the rule of the greatest of the Amali. From his palace at Verona[34],
commemorated in the song of the Nibelungs, he issued equal laws for
Roman and Goth, and bade the intruder, if he must occupy part of the
lands, at least respect the goods and the person of his
fellow-subject. Jurisprudence and administration remained in native
hands: two annual consuls, one named by Theodoric, the other by the
Eastern monarch, presented an image of the ancient state; and while
agriculture and the arts revived in the provinces, Rome herself
celebrated the visits of a master who provided for the wants of her
people and preserved with care the monuments of her former splendour.
With peace and plenty men's minds took hope, and the study of letters
revived. The last gleam of classical literature gilds the reign of the
barbarian. By the consolidation of the two races under one wise
government, Italy might have been spared six hundred years of gloom
and degradation. It was not so to be. Theodoric was tolerant, but
toleration was itself a crime in the eyes of his orthodox subjects:
the Arian Goths were and remained strangers and enemies among the
Catholic Italians. Scarcely had the sceptre passed from the hands of
Theodoric to his unworthy offspring, when Justinian, who had viewed
with jealousy the greatness of his nominal lieutenant, determined to
assert his dormant 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 again reunited in fact, as it
had been all the while united in name, to the Roman Empire, the
peninsula was divided into counties and dukedoms, and obeyed the
exarch of Ravenna, viceroy of the Byzantine court, 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.
[Sidenote: The Transalpine provinces.]
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 admitted 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 delight 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[35].
They already obeyed him, but his power was now legalised 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[36].
[Sidenote: Lingering influences of Rome.]
[Sidenote: Religion.]
Yet the severed limbs of the Empire forgot by degrees their original
unity. As in the breaking up of the old society, which we trace from
the sixth to the eighth century, rudeness and ignorance grew apace, as
language and manners were changed by the infiltration of Teutonic
settlers, as men's thoughts and hopes and interests were narrowed by
isolation from their fellows, as the organization 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 altogether 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.
[Sidenote: Jurisprudence.]
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 unity of faith and discipline, the common bond of
all Christian men. That unity must have a centre, that centre was
Rome. A succession of able and zealous pontiffs extended 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 power
over men's souls more durable than that which she had lost over their
bodies[37]. Only second in importance to this influence was that which
was exercised by the permanence of the old law, and of its creature
the municipality. 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
Visigothic 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[38]. 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 submission 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 preserved 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 different; 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 themselves: 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[9] 'Addiderat consilium coercendi intra terminos imperii.'--Tac.
_Ann._ i. 2.
[10] Tac. _Ann._ ii. 9.
[11] Stilicho, the bulwark of the Empire, seems to have been himself a
Vandal by extraction.
[12] Of course not the consulship itself, but the _ornamenta
consularia_.
[13] Jornandes, _De Rebus Geticis_, cap. 28.
[14] Tac. _Hist._ i. and iv.
[15] 'Vester quidem est populus meus sed me plus servire vobis quam
illi præesse delectat. Traxit istud a proavis generis mei apud vos
decessoresque vestros semper animo Romana devotio, ut illa nobis magis
claritas putaretur, quam vestra per militiæ titulos porrigeret
celsitudo: cunctisque auctoribus meis semper magis ambitum est quod a
principibus sumerent quam quod a patribus attulissent. Cumque gentem
nostram videamur regere, non aliud nos quam milites vestros credimus
ordinari.... Per nos administratis remotarum spatia regionum: patria
nostra vester orbis est. Tangit Galliam suam lumen orientis, et radius
qui illis partibus oriri creditur, hic refulget. Dominationem vobis
divinitus præstitam obex nulla concludit, nec ullis provinciarum
terminis diffusio felicium sceptrorum limitatur. Salvo divinitatis
honore sit dictum.'--Letter printed among the works of Avitus, Bishop
of Vienne. (Migne's _Patrologia_, vol. lix. p. 285.)
This letter, as its style shews, is the composition not of Sigismund
himself, but of Avitus, writing on Sigismund's behalf. But this makes
it scarcely less valuable evidence of the feelings of the time.
[16] 'Referre solitus est (_sc._ Ataulphus) se in primis ardenter
inhiasse: ut obliterato Romanorum nomine Romanum omne solum Gothorum
imperium et faceret et vocaret: essetque, ut vulgariter loquar, Gothia
quod Romania fuisset; fieretque nunc Ataulphus quod quondam Cæsar
Augustus. At ubi multa experientia probavisset, neque Gothos ullo modo
parere legibus posse propter effrenatam barbariem, neque reipublicæ
interdici leges oportere sine quibus respublica non est respublica;
elegisse se saltem, ut gloriam sibi de restituendo in integrum
augendoque Romano nomine Gothorum viribus quæreret, habereturque apud
posteros Romanæ restitutionis auctor postquam esse non potuerat
immutator. Ob hoc abstinere a bello, ob hoc inhiare paci
nitebatur.'--Orosius, vii. 43.
[17] Athaulf formed only to abandon it.
[18] See, among other passages, Varro, _De lingua Latina_, iv. 34;
Cic., _Pro Domo_, 33; and in the _Corpus Iuris Civilis_, Dig. i. 5,
17; l. 1, 33; xiv. 2, 9; quoted by Ægidi, _Der Fürstenrath nach dem
Luneviller Frieden_. The phrase 'urbs æterna' appears in a novel
issued by Valentinian III.
Tertullian speaks of Rome as 'civitas sacrosancta.'
[19] Lact. _Divin. Instit._ vii. 25: 'Etiam res ipsa declarat lapsum
ruinamque rerum brevi fore: nisi quod incolumi urbe Roma nihil
istiusmodi videtur esse metuendum. At vero cum caput illud orbis
occident, et ῥύμη esse cœperit quod Sibyllæ fore aiunt, quis dubitet
venisse iam finem rebus humanis, orbique terrarum? Illa, illa est
civitas quæ adhuc sustentat omnia, precandusque nobis et adorandus est
Deus cœli si tamen statuta eius et placita differri possunt, ne citius
quam putemus tyrannus ille abominabilis veniat qui tantum facinus
moliatur, ac lumen illud effodiat cuius interitu mundus ipse lapsurus
est.'
Cf. Tertull. _Apolog._ cap. xxxii: 'Est et alia maior necessitas nobis
orandi pro imperatoribus, etiam pro omni statu imperii rebusque
Romanis, qui vim maximam universo orbi imminentem ipsamque clausulam
sæculi acerbitates horrendas comminantem Romani imperii commeatu
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 honoret et salvum velit cum toto Romano
imperio quousque sæculum stabit: tamdiu enim stabit.' So too the
author--now usually supposed to be Hilary the Deacon--of the
Commentary on the Pauline Epistles 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.
[20] For example, by the 'restitutio natalium,' and the 'adrogatio per
rescriptum principis,' or, as it is expressed, 'per sacrum oraculum.'
[21] Even the Christian Emperors took the title of Pontifex Maximus,
till Gratian refused it: ἀθέμιστον εἶναι Χριστιάνῳ τὸ σχῆμα
νομίσας.--Zosimus, lib. iv. cap. 36.
[22] 'Maiore formidine et callidiore timiditate Cæsarem observatis quam
ipsum ex Olympo Iovem, et merito, si sciatis.... Citius denique apud
vos per omnes Deos quam per unum genium Cæsaris peieratur.'--Tertull.
_Apolog._ c. xxviii.
Cf. Zos. v. 51: εἰ μὲν γὰρ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν τετυχήκει διδόμενος ὁρκὸς, ἦν
ἂν ὡς εἰκὸς παριδεῖν ἐνδίδοντας τῇ τοῦ θεοῦ φιλανθρωπίᾳ τὴν ἐπὶ τῇ
ἀσεβείᾳ συγγνώμην. ἐπεὶ δὲ κατὰ τὴν τοῦ βασιλέως ὀμωμόκεσαν κεφαλῆς,
οὐκ εἶναι θεμιτὸν αὐτοῖς εἰς τὸν τοσοῦτον ὅρκον ἐξαμαρτεῖν.
[23] Tac. _Ann._ i. 73; iii. 38, etc.
[24] 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
Augustan poets, Virg. _Georg._ i. 42; iv. 462; Hor. _Od._ iii. 3, 11;
Ovid, _Epp. ex Ponto_, iv. 9. 105.
[25] Hence Vespasian's dying jest, 'Ut puto, deus fio.'
[26] ὅπου ἂν ὁ βασιλεὺς ᾖ, ἐκεῖ ἡ Ῥώμη.--Herodian.
[27] If the accounts we find of the Armorican republic can be trusted.
[28] Odoacer or Odovaker, as it seems 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.
[29] Αὔγουστος ὁ Ὀρέστου υἱὸς ἀκούσας Ζήνωνα πάλιν τὴν βασιλείαν
ἀνακεκτῆσθαι τῆς ἕω ... ἠνάγκασε τὴν βουλὴν ἀποστεῖλαι πρεσβεῖαν
Ζήνωνι σημαίνουσαν ὡς ἰδίας μὲν αὐτοῖς βασιλείας οὐ δέοι, κοινὸς δὲ
ἀποχρήσει μόνος ὢν αὐτοκράτωρ ἐπ' ἀμφοτέροις τοῖς πέρασι. τὸν μέντοι
Ὀδόαχον ὑπ' αὐτῶν προβεβλῆσθαι ἱκανὸν ὄντα σώζειν τὰ παρ' αὐτοῖς
πράγματα πολιτικὴν ἐχὼν νοῦν καὶ σύνεσιν ὁμοῦ καὶ μάχιμον. καὶ δεῖσθαι
τοῦ Ζήνωνος πατρικίου τε αὐτῷ ἀποστεῖλαι ἀξίαν καὶ τὴν τῶν Ἰτάλων
τουτῷ ἐφεῖναι διοίκησιν.--Malchus ap. Photium in _Corp. Hist. Byzant._
[30] Not king of Italy, as is often said. The barbarian kings did not
for several centuries employ territorial titles; the title 'king of
France,' for instance, was first used by Henry IV. Jornandes tells us
that Odoacer never so much as assumed the insignia of royalty.
[31] Sismondi, _Histoire de la Chute de l'Empire Occidentale_.
[32] 'Nil deest nobis imperio vestro famulantibus.'--Theodoric to
Zeno: Jornandes, _De Rebus Geticis_, cap. 57.
[33] 'Unde et pæne omnibus barbaris Gothi sapientiores exstiterunt
Græcisque pæne consimiles.'--Jorn. cap. 5.
[34] Theodoric (Thiodorich) seems to have resided usually at Ravenna,
where he died and was buried; a remarkable building which tradition
points out as his tomb stands a little way out of the town, near the
railway station, but the porphyry sarcophagus, in which his body is
supposed to have lain, has been removed thence, and may be seen built
up into the wall of the building called his palace, situated close to
the church of Sant' Apollinare, and not far from the tomb of Dante.
There does not appear to be any sufficient authority for attributing
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' Apollinare 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; it is doubtful whether any
traces of it remain, for the old foundations which we now see may have
belonged to the fortress erected by Gian Galeazzo Visconti in the
fourteenth century.
[35] 'Igitur Chlodovechus ab imperatore 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 vocitatus.'--Gregory of Tours, ii. 58.
[36] Sir F. Palgrave (_English Commonwealth_) considers this grant as
equivalent to a formal ratification of Clovis' rule in Gaul. Hallam
rates its importance lower (_Middle Ages_, 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 distant provinces.
[37] 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 provexerunt ut gens sancta, populus electus,
civitas sacerdotalis et regia, per sacram B. Petri sedem caput orbis
effecta latius præsideres religione divina quam dominatione
terrena.'--_Sermon on the feast of SS. Peter and Paul._ (Opp. _ap._
Migne tom. i. p. 336.)
[38] 'Ius Romanum est adhuc in viridi observantia et eo iure
præsumitur quilibet vivere nisi adversum probetur.'--Maranta, quoted
by Marquard Freher.
CHAPTER IV.
RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts
and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were
constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the
exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we
may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the
Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in the
furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought within
the pale of civilization, a line of chieftains devoted to the service
of the Holy See, and among them one whose power, good fortune, and
heroic character pointed him out as worthy of a dignity to which
doctrine and tradition had attached a sanctity almost divine.
[Sidenote: The Franks.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 486.]
Of the new monarchies that had risen on the ruins of Rome, that of the
Franks was by far the greatest. In the third century they appear, with
Saxons, Alemanni, and Thuringians, as one of the greatest German tribe
leagues. The Sicambri (for it seems probable that this famous race was
a chief source of the Frankish nation) had now laid aside their former
hostility to Rome, and her future representatives 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) 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
Theodorich 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 principalities, held together by the
predominance of a single nation 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 Charles Martel, mayors of the palace to the
last feeble Merovingians, the Austrasian Franks in the lower Rhineland
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
proceeded 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 orthodox 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 Burgundian and
Visigothic enemies, and made it comparatively 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 Boniface in
his mission to the heathen of Germany[39]; 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.
[Sidenote: Italy: the Lombards.]
[Sidenote: The Popes.]
Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under 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 resistance from a population unused to arms, and without the
spirit to use them in self-defence. More cruel and repulsive, if we
may believe the evidence of their enemies, than any other of the
Northern tribes, the Lombards were certainly singular in their
aversion to the clergy, never admitting them to the national councils.
Tormented by their repeated attacks, Rome sought help in vain from
Byzantium, whose forces, scarce able to repel from their walls the
Avars and Saracens, could give no support to the distant exarch of
Ravenna. The Popes were the Emperor's subjects; they awaited his
confirmation, like other bishops; they had more than once been the
victims of his anger[40]. 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[41].
[Sidenote: Iconoclastic controversy.]
[Sidenote: The Popes appeal to the Franks.]
[Sidenote: Pipin patrician of the Romans, A.D. 754.]
The Emperor Leo, born among the Isaurian mountains, 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 obscuring the more spiritual part of Christianity. An attempt
sufficient to cause tumults among the submissive Greeks, excited in
Italy a fiercer commotion. The populace rose with one heart in defence
of what had become to them more than a symbol: the exarch was slain:
the Pope, though unwilling to sever himself from the lawful head and
protector of the Church, must yet excommunicate the prince whom he
could not reclaim from so hateful a heresy. Liudprand, king of the
Lombards, improved his opportunity: falling on the exarchate as the
champion of images, on Rome as the minister of the Greek Emperor, he
overran the one, and all but succeeded in capturing the other. The
Pope escaped for the moment, but saw his peril; placed between a
heretic and a robber, he turned his gaze beyond the Alps, to a
Catholic chief who had just achieved a signal deliverance for
Christendom on the field of Poitiers. Gregory II had already opened
communications with Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual
ruler of the Frankish realm[42]. As the crisis 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[43].
Some accounts add that Charles was offered, in the name of the Roman
people, the office of consul and patrician. It is at least certain
that here begins the connection of the old imperial seat with the
rising German power: here first the pontiff leads a political
movement, and shakes off the ties that bound him to his legitimate
sovereign. Charles died before he could obey the call; but his son
Pipin (surnamed the Short) made good use of the new friendship 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 deposition 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 compact between the chair of
Peter and the Teutonic throne was hardly sealed, when the latter was
summoned to discharge 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[44]. Aistulf could make no 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[45].
[Sidenote: Import of this title.]
As a foreshadowing of the higher dignity that was to follow, this
title requires a passing notice. Introduced by Constantine at a time
when its original meaning had been long forgotten, it was designed to
be, and for awhile remained, the name not of an office but of a rank,
the highest after those of emperor and consul. As such, it was usually
conferred upon provincial governors of the first class, and in time
also upon barbarian potentates whose vanity the Roman court might wish
to flatter. Thus Odoacer, Theodoric, the Burgundian king Sigismund,
Clovis himself, had all received it from the Eastern emperor; so too
in still later times it was given to Saracenic and Bulgarian
princes[46]. In the sixth and seventh centuries an invariable practice
seems to have attached it to the Byzantine viceroys of Italy, and
thus, as we may conjecture, a natural confusion of ideas had made men
take it to be, in some sense, an official title, conveying an
extensive though undefined authority, and implying in particular 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_.' And since 'defence' implies a corresponding measure of
obedience 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 extinguish the supremacy of the
Emperor.
[Sidenote: Extinction of the Lombard kingdom by Charles king of the
Franks.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 774.]
So long indeed as the Franks were separated by a hostile kingdom from
their new allies, this control remained little better than nominal.
But when on Pipin's death the restless Lombards again took up arms and
menaced the possessions of the Church, Pipin's son Charles or
Charlemagne swept down like a whirlwind from the Alps at the call of
Pope Hadrian, seized king Desiderius in his capital, assumed himself
the Lombard crown, and made northern Italy thenceforward an integral
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 distinguished 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 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.
[Sidenote: Charles and Hadrian.]
It is with a strange sense, half of sadness, half of amusement, that
in watching the progress of this grand historical drama, we recognise
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 succeeding 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 unselfish in its ends, must in pursuing them fix
upon everything 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 devolved on the bishop to
provide. Yet the pursuit was one which could not fail to pervert the
purposes of the Popes and give a sinister character to all they did.
It was this fear for the lands of the Church far more than for
religion or the safety of the city--neither of which were really
endangered by the Lombard attacks--that had prompted their passionate
appeals to Charles Martel and Pipin; it was now the well-grounded hope
of having these possessions confirmed and extended by Pipin's greater
son that made the Roman ecclesiastics so forward in his cause. And it
was the same lust after worldly wealth and pomp, mingled with the
dawning prospect of an independent principality, that now began to
seduce them into a long course of guile and intrigue. For this is
probably the very time, although the exact date cannot be established,
to which must be assigned the extraordinary 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.
[Sidenote: Accession of Pope Leo III, A.D. 796.]
For the next twenty-four years Italy remained quiet. The government of
Rome was carried on in the name of the Patrician Charles, although it
does not appear that he sent thither any official representative;
while at the same time both the city and the exarchate continued to
admit the nominal supremacy of the Eastern Emperor, employing the
years of his reign to date documents. In A.D. 796, Leo the Third
succeeded Pope Hadrian, and signalized his devotion to the Frankish
throne by sending to Charles the banner of the city and the keys of
the holiest of all Rome's shrines, the confession of St. Peter, asking
that some officer should be deputed to the city to receive from the
people their oath of allegiance to the Patrician. He had soon need to
seek the Patrician's help for himself. In A.D. 798 a sedition broke
out: the Pope, going in solemn procession from the Lateran to the
church of S. Lorenzo in Lucina, was attacked by a band of armed men,
headed by two officials of his court, nephews of his predecessor; was
wounded and left for dead, and with difficulty succeeded in escaping
to Spoleto, whence he fled northward into the Frankish lands. Charles
had led his army against the revolted Saxons: thither Leo following
overtook him at Paderborn 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.
[Sidenote: Belief in the Roman Empire not extinct.]
[Sidenote: Motives of the Pope.]
Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Cæsar 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 necessary part of the world's order had not vanished: it had been
admitted by those who seemed to be destroying it; it had been
cherished by the Church; was still recalled by laws and customs; was
dear to the subject populations, 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, Burgundians, and Franks sought the title of
consul or patrician, as the Lombard kings when they renounced their
Arianism styled themselves Flavii, so even in distant England the
fierce Saxon and Anglian conquerors used the names of Roman dignities,
and before long began to call themselves _imperatores_ and _basileis_
of Britain. Within the last century and a half the rise of
Mohammedanism[47] 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 faithful: the Christian commonwealth
needed more than ever an efficient head and centre. Such leadership it
could nowise find in the Court of the Bosphorus, growing 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 Quirites[48]:' 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, who
while insulting his weakness had given him no help against the savage
Lombards, and who for nearly seventy years[49] 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 appointment of the intruding
Frank to the patriciate, an office which it belonged to the Emperor to
confer, was of itself an act of rebellion. Nevertheless their rights
subsisted: they were still, and while they retained 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 a Catholic and Apostolic Church[50]. For, as will be shewn
more fully hereafter, men could not separate in fact what was
indissoluble in thought: Christianity must stand or fall along with
the great Christian state: they were but two names for the same thing.
Thus urged, the Pope took a step which some among his predecessors are
said to have already contemplated[51], and towards which the events of
the last fifty years had pointed. The moment was opportune. The
widowed empress Irene, equally famous for her beauty, her talents, and
her crimes, had deposed and blinded her son Constantine VI: a woman,
an usurper, almost a parricide, sullied the throne of the world. By
what right, it might well be asked, did the factions of Byzantium
impose a master on the original seat of empire? It was time to provide
better for the most august of human offices: an election at Rome was
as valid as at Constantinople--the possessor of the real power should
also be clothed with the outward dignity. Nor could it be doubted
where that possessor was to be found. The Frank had been always
faithful to Rome: his baptism was the enlistment of a new barbarian
auxiliary. His services against Arian heretics and Lombard marauders,
against the Saracen of Spain and the Avar of Pannonia, had earned him
the title of Champion of the Faith and Defender of the Holy See. He
was now unquestioned lord of Western Europe, whose subject nations,
Keltic and Teutonic, were eager to be called by his name and to
imitate his customs[52]. 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[53], erected on the ruins of that whose mingled iron and
clay seemed crumbling to nothingness behind the impregnable bulwarks
of Constantinople.
[Sidenote: Coronation of Charles at Rome, A.D. 800.]
At length the Frankish host entered Rome. The Pope's cause was heard;
his innocence, already vindicated by a miracle, was pronounced by the
Patrician in full synod; his accusers condemned in his stead. Charles
remained in the city for some weeks; and on Christmas-day, A.D.
800[54], he heard mass in the basilica of St. Peter. On the spot where
now the gigantic dome of Bramante and Michael Angelo towers over the
buildings of the modern city, the spot which tradition had hallowed as
that of the Apostle's martyrdom, Constantine the Great had erected the
oldest and stateliest temple of Christian Rome. Nothing could be less
like than was this basilica to those northern cathedrals, shadowy,
fantastic, irregular, crowded with pillars, fringed all round by
clustering shrines and chapels, which are to most of us the types of
mediæval architecture. In its plan and decorations, in the spacious
sunny hall, the roof plain as that of a Greek temple, the long rows of
Corinthian columns, the vivid mosaics on its walls, in its brightness,
its sternness, its simplicity, it had preserved every feature of Roman
art, and had remained a perfect expression of the Roman character[55].
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[56], itself the curule chair of some forgotten
magistrate[57]. 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[58]--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 Cæsars, 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[59].' 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
civilization of the South with the fresh energy of the North, and from
that moment modern history begins.
FOOTNOTES:
[39] 'Denique gens Francorum multos et fœcundissimos fructus Domino
attulit, non solum credendo, sed et alios salutifere convertendo,'
says the emperor Lewis II in A.D. 871.
[40] Martin, as in earlier times Sylverius.
[41] A singular account of the origin of the separation of the Greeks
and Latins occurs in the treatise of Radulfus de Columna (Ralph
Colonna, or, as some think, de Coloumelle), _De translatione Imperii
Romani_ (circ. 1300). 'The tyranny of Heraclius,' says he, 'provoked a
revolt of the Eastern nations. They could not be reduced, because the
Greeks at the same time began to disobey the Roman Pontiff, receding,
like Jeroboam, from the true faith. Others among these schismatics
(apparently with the view of strengthening their political revolt)
carried their heresy further and founded Mohammedanism.' 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 of the West from Constantine to Augustulus: the very
existence of this Western line seems to have been even in the eighth
or ninth century altogether forgotten.
[42] Anastasius, _Vitæ Pontificum Romanorum_ i. _ap._ Muratori.
[43] Letter in _Codex Carolinus_, in Muratori's _Scriptores Rerum
Italicarum_, vol. iii. (part 2nd), addressed 'Subregulo Carolo.'
[44] Letter in _Cod. Carol._ (Mur. _R. S. I._ iii. [2.] p. 96), a
strange mixture of earnest adjurations, dexterous appeals to Frankish
pride, and long scriptural quotations: 'Declaratum quippe est quod
super omnes gentes vestra Francorum gens prona mihi Apostolo Dei Petro
exstitit, et ideo ecclesiam quam mihi Dominus tradidit vobis per manus
Vicarii mei commendavi.'
[45] 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 _Chronicon Casinense_
(Mur. iv. 273) says it was first given to Pipin. Gibbon can hardly be
right in attributing it to Charles Martel, although one or two
documents may be quoted in which it is used of him. As one of these is
a letter of Pope Gregory II's, the explanation may be that the title
was offered or intended to be offered to him, although never accepted
by him.
[46] The title of Patrician appears even in the remote West: it stands
in a charter of Ina the West Saxon king, and in one given by Richard
of Normandy in A.D. 1015. Ducange, _s.v._
[47] After the _translatio ad Francos_ of A.D. 800, the two Empires
corresponded exactly to the two Khalifates of Bagdad and Cordova.
[48]
'Plaudentem cerne senatum
Et Byzantinos proceres, Graiosque Quirites.'
_In Eutrop._ ii. 135.
[49] Several Emperors during this period had been patrons of images,
as was Irene at the moment of which I write: the stain nevertheless
adhered to their government as a whole.
[50] I should not have thought it necessary to explain that the
sentence in the text is meant simply to state what were (so far as can
be made out) the sentiments and notions of the ninth century, if a
writer in the _Tablet_ (reviewing a former edition) had not understood
it as an expression of the author's own belief.
To a modern eye there is of course no necessary connection between the
Roman Empire and a catholic 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 different times entertained wholly different
notions respecting the relation to one another of the same ideas or
the same institutions.
[51] Monachus Sangallensis, _De Gestis Karoli_; in Pertz, _Monumenta
Germaniæ Historica_.
[52] Monachus Sangallensis; _ut supra_. So Pope Gregory the Great two
centuries earlier: 'Quanto cæteros homines regia dignitas antecedit,
tanto cæterarum gentium regna regni Francorum culmen excellit.' Ep. v.
6.
[53] Alciatus, _De Formula imperii Romani_.
[54] Or rather, according to the then prevailing practice of beginning
the year from Christmas-day, A.D. 801.
[55] An elaborate description of old St. Peter's may be found in
Bunsen's and Platner's _Beschreibung der Stadt Rom_; with which
compare Bunsen's work on the Basilicas of Rome.
[56] The primitive custom was for the bishop to sit in the centre of
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;
nowhere better than in the churches of Ravenna, particularly the
beautiful one of Sant' Apollinare in Classe, and in the cathedral of
Torcello, near Venice.
[57] On this chair were represented the labours of Hercules and the
signs of the zodiac. It is believed at Rome to be the veritable chair
of the Apostle himself, and whatever may be thought of such an
antiquity as this, it can be satisfactorily 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
now enclosed in a gorgeous casing of gilded wood (some say, 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 sarcophagus 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.
[58] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_.
[59] The coronation scene is described in all the annals of the time,
to which it is therefore needless to refer more particularly.
CHAPTER V.
EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle
Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them
singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of
the world would have been different. In one sense indeed it has
scarcely a parallel. The assassins of Julius Cæsar 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 elsewhere.
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 consequences for good and for evil that
followed could not have been. Why this was so may be seen by examining
the history of the next two centuries. In that day, as through all the
Dark and Middle Ages, two forces were striving for the mastery. The
one was the instinct of separation, disorder, anarchy, caused by the
ungoverned impulses and barbarous ignorance of the great bulk of
mankind; the other was that passionate longing of the 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 government,
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 attached themselves to
the name of Charles the Emperor, a hero of whom any exploit was
credible[60], in the devout admiration wherewith his German successors
looked back to, and strove in all things to imitate, their all but
superhuman prototype.
[Sidenote: Import of the coronation.]
As the event of A.D. 800 made an unparalleled impression 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 interminable 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 England, 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
misunderstood 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 arguments[61]. 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 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 received 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[62].
[Sidenote: Contemporary accounts.]
The best way of shewing the thoughts and motives of those concerned in
the transaction is to transcribe the narratives of three contemporary,
or almost contemporary annalists, two of them German and one Italian.
The Annals of Lauresheim say:--
'And because the name of Emperor had now ceased among the Greeks, and
their Empire was possessed by a woman, it then seemed both to Leo the
Pope himself, and to all the holy fathers who were present in the
selfsame council, as well as to the rest of the Christian people, that
they ought to take to be Emperor Charles king of the Franks, who held
Rome herself, where the Cæsars had always been wont to sit, and all
the other regions which he ruled through Italy and Gaul and Germany;
and inasmuch as God had given all these lands into his hand, it seemed
right that with the help of God and at the prayer of the whole
Christian people he should have the name of Emperor also. Whose
petition king Charles willed not to refuse, but submitting himself
with all humility to God, and at the prayer of the priests and of the
whole Christian people, on the day of the nativity of our Lord Jesus
Christ he took on himself the name of Emperor, being consecrated by
the lord Pope Leo[63].'
Very similar in substance is the account of the Chronicle of Moissac
(ad ann. 801):--
'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 Pope after the manner of the emperors of
old. For this also was done by the will of God. For while the said
Emperor 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 assembly 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, that they should name Charles king of the Franks to be
Emperor, seeing that he held Rome the mother of empire where the
Cæsars 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[64].'
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 _Vitæ 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 together 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 peacegiving 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[65].'
[Sidenote: Impression which they convey.]
[Sidenote: Later theories respecting the coronation.]
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
essentially 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 the 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 instrument of
God's providence, which has unmistakeably 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 recognise 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 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 difficulties and
conflicts which were to arise out of what seemed then so simple. And
it was just because everything was thus 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 regarding 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, appealing 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
imposed the crown, and argued that as God'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 contain the whole truth. Charles did not conquer, nor the
Pope give, nor the people elect. As the act was unprecedented so was
it illegal; it was a revolt of the ancient 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 world by the sanction
of Christ's representative, but founded upon no law, nor competent to
create any for the future.
[Sidenote: Was the coronation a surprise?]
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 recognise his dignity, if they should believe it to be not
of his own seeking. Yet it is hard to suppose the whole affair a
surprise; 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 summoning thither his son Pipin from the war against the
Lombards of Benevento, had shewn that he expected some 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
imperialis potentiæ.' This has commonly been taken for conclusive
evidence that the plan had been settled beforehand, and such it would
be were there not some reasons for giving the letter an earlier date,
and looking upon the word 'imperialis' as a mere magniloquent
flourish[66]. 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 conclusion be adopted, it would seem to be
that Charles, although he had probably given a more or less vague
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 Frankish and Roman
spectators the air of a surprise. For there were no preparations
apparent in the church; the king was not, like his Teutonic successors
in 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.'
[Sidenote: Theories of the motives of Charles.]
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 suggested by a recent historian[67], 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 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 negotiations 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, irritating 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
Theophanes[68], 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 opposition of her minister Ætius, was rendered
impossible by her subsequent dethronement and exile, he did not
abandon the policy of conciliation until a surly acquiescence in
rather than admission of his dignity had been won from the Byzantine
sovereigns Michael and Nicephorus[69].
[Sidenote: Defect in the title of the Teutonic Emperors.]
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 must
be made to the events of A.D. 476. Both the extinction 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
confuse 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 Leo 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 Constantine the Sixth; the people
of the imperial city exercising 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 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 Constantinople 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 all the 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.
[Sidenote: Government of Charles as Emperor.]
[Sidenote: His authority in matters ecclesiastical.]
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 Frankish Emperor--as the
recognised head of Christendom--received from the patriarch of
Jerusalem the keys of the Holy Sepulchre and the banner of Calvary;
the gift of the Sepulchre itself, says Eginhard, from Aaron king of
the Persians[70]. 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
Nicæa, which had been approved by Pope Hadrian, 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 subjugation of pagans
and the establishment of sound doctrine throughout the Church. Nay,
subsequent Popes themselves[71] admitted and applauded the despotic
superintendence of matters spiritual which he was wont to exercise,
and which led some one to give him playfully a title that had once
been applied to the Pope himself, 'Episcopus episcoporum.'
[Sidenote: The imperial office in its ecclesiastical relations.]
[Sidenote: Capitulary of A.D. 802.]
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 coronation 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 office to have received from it. In a great 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[72]. 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 Cæsar; 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 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 intermingled 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 under
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 _missi_. The
monarch tries often to restrict the clergy, as persons, to spiritual
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 priesthood 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.
[Sidenote: Influence of the imperial title in Germany and Gaul.]
[Sidenote: Action of Charles on Europe.]
In civil affairs 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[73]. 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 the 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 from faith 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 successor 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 surrounded him; for all, even the Saxon and
the Slave, had heard of Rome's glories, and revered the name of Cæsar.
And in his effort to weld discordant elements into one body, to
introduce regular gradations of authority, to control 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 thenceforward 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 untamed barbarism to the North and East. Ruling the world by
the gift of God, and the transmitted rights of the Romans and their
Cæsar whom God had chosen to conquer it, he renews the original
aggressive movement of the Empire: the civilized world has subdued her
invader[74], 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
Irminsûl[75], in the first Saxon campaign[76], 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.
[Sidenote: His position as Frankish king.]
This, however, is not the only side from which Charles's policy and
character may be regarded. If the unity of the Church and the shadow
of imperial prerogative was one pillar of his power, the other was the
Frankish nation. The Empire was still military, though in a sense
strangely different from that of Julius or Severus. The warlike Franks
had permeated Western 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[77]: 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 his successors had afterwards recourse. As it was by Frankish
arms that this predominance in Europe which the imperial title 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 action
and that of his great officers, that he strove to administer 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 after
such cruel warfare, conditions so favourable that in the next century
their dukes hold the foremost place in Germany, shew how little he
desired to make the Franks a dominant caste.
[Sidenote: General results of his Empire.]
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
ecclesiastical, especially the Papal power, apparently subject to the
temporal, but with a strong and undefined prerogative which only
waited the occasion to trample on what it had helped to raise. The
Pope might take away the crown he had bestowed, and turn against the
Emperor 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 withdrawn, 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 all 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 continued for many
generations to build.
[Sidenote: Personal habits and sympathies.]
No claim can be more groundless 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 strictly adhered to the customs of his country, and
was beloved by his people as the very ideal of their own character and
habits[78]. Of strength and stature almost superhuman, in swimming and
hunting unsurpassed, 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 width of view, otherwise a Teuton. The centre
of his realm was the Rhine; his capitals Aachen[79] and
Engilenheim[80]; his army Frankish; his sympathies as they are shewn
in the gathering of the old hero-lays[81], 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
Austrasia, the true Frankish fatherland, over Neustria and Aquitaine,
spread a second Germanic wave over the conquered countries.
[Sidenote: His Empire and character generally.]
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
perfection, whose very completeness shall exclude the hope of further
progress. And the bond, too, by which the 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 centralized, 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 unity of the Church.
Into a general view of the government and policy of Charles it is not
possible here to enter. Yet his legislation, his assemblies, his
administrative system, his magnificent works, recalling the projects
of Alexander and Cæsar[82], 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 position 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 barbarian warrior any
more than he was an astute diplomatist; 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 profound a politician as Cæsar, as skilful a
commander as Napoleon[83]. 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 wondrous activity that
made him the conqueror of Europe, so was it by the variety of his
culture that he became her civilizer. From him, in whose wide deep
mind the whole mediæval theory of the world and human life mirrored
itself, did mediæval 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
atque Orthodoxus Imperator_[84].' Poets, fostered by his own zeal,
sang of him who had given to the Franks the sway of Romulus[85]. The
gorgeous drapery of romance gradually wreathed itself 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 dedicated to St. Charlemagne.
Between Sanctus Carolus and Divus Julius how strange an analogy and
how strange a contrast!
FOOTNOTES:
[60] Before the end of the tenth century we find the monk Benedict of
Soracte ascribing to Charles an expedition to Palestine, and other
marvellous exploits. The romance which passes under the name of
Archbishop Turpin is well known. All the best stories about
Charles--and some of them are very good--may be found in the book of
the Monk of St. Gall. Many refer to his dealings with the bishops,
towards whom he is described as acting like a good-humoured
schoolmaster.
[61] Baronius, _Ann._, ad ann. 800; Bellarminus, _De translatione
imperii Romani adversus Illyricum_; Spanhemius, _De ficta translatione
imperii_; Conringius, _De imperio Romano Germanico_.
[62] See especially Greenwood, _Cathedra Petri_, vol. iii. p. 109.
[63] _Ann. Lauresb. ap._ Pertz, _M. G. H._ i.
[64] _Apud_ Pertz, _M. G. H._ i.
[65] _Vitæ Pontif._ in Mur. _S. R. I._ Anastasius in reporting the
shout of the people omits the word 'Romanorum,' which the other
annalists insert after 'imperatori.' The balance of probability is
certainly in his favour.
[66] Lorentz, _Leben Alcuins_. And cf. Döllinger, _Das Kaiserthum
Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger_.
[67] See a very learned and interesting tract entitled _Das Kaiserthum
Karls des Grossen und seiner Nachfolger_, recently published by Dr. v.
Döllinger of Munich.
[68] Ἀποκρισιάριοι παρὰ Καρούλλου καὶ Λέοντος αἰτούμενοι ζευχθῆναι
αὐτὴν τῷ Καρούλλῳ πρὸς γάμον καὶ ἑνῶσαι τὰ Ἑωὰ καὶ τὰ
Ἑσπερία.--Theoph. _Chron._ in _Corp. Scriptt. Hist. Byz._
[69] Their ambassadors at last saluted him by the desired title
'Laudes ei dixerunt imperatorem eum et basileum appellantes.' Eginh.
_Ann._, ad ann. 812.
[70] Harun er Rashid; Eginh. _Vita Karoli_, c. 16.
[71] So Pope John VIII in a document quoted by Waitz, _Deutsche
Verfassungs-geschichte_, iii.
[72] Pertz, _M. G. H._ iii. (legg. I.)
[73] Pütter, _Historical Development of the German Constitution_; so
too Conring, and esp. David Blondel, _Adv. Chiffletium_.
[74] 'Græcia capta ferum victorem cepit,' is repeated in this conquest
of the Teuton by the Roman.
[75] The notion that once prevailed that the Irminsûl was the 'pillar
of Hermann,' set up on the spot of the defeat of Varus, is now
generally discredited. Some German antiquaries take the pillar to be a
rude figure of the native god Irmin; but nothing seems to be known of
this alleged deity: and it is more probable that the name Irmin is
after all merely an altered form of the Keltic word which appears in
Welsh as Hir Vaen, the long stone (_Maen_, a stone). Thus the pillar,
so far from being the monument of the great Teutonic victory, would
commemorate a pre-Teutonic race, whose name for it the invading tribes
adopted. The Rev. Dr. Scott, of Westminster, to whose kindness I am
indebted for this explanation, informs me that a rude ditty recording
the destruction of the pillar by Charles was current on the spot a few
years ago. It ran thus:--
'Irmin slad Irmin
Sla Pfeifen sla Trommen
Der Kaiser wird kommen
Mit Hammer und Stangen
Wird Irmin uphangen.'
[76] Eginhard, _Ann_.
[77] Most probably the Scots of Ireland--Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap.
16.
[78] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 23.
[79] Aix-la-Chapelle. See the lines in Pertz (_M. G. H._ ii.),
beginning,--
'Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis,
Sedes regni principalis,
Prima regum curia.'
This city is commonly called Aken in English books of the seventeenth
century, and probably that ought to be taken as its proper English
name. That name has, however, fallen so entirely into disuse that I do
not venture to use it; and as the employment of the French name
Aix-la-Chapelle seems inevitably to produce the belief that the place
is and was, even in Charles's time, a French town, there is nothing
for it but to fall back upon the comparatively unfamiliar German name.
[80] Engilenheim, or Ingelheim, lies near the left shore of the Rhine
between Mentz and Bingen.
[81] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 29.
[82] Eginhard, _Vita Karoli_, cap. 17.
[83] 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
foreigners, and two foreign conquerors.
[84] This basilica was built upon the model 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 completed under Justinian. Probably San Vitale
was used as a pattern 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 central dome (to which the
Gothic choir we now see was added some centuries later), there hangs a
huge chandelier, the gift of Frederick Barbarossa.
[85] 'Romuleum Francis præstitit imperium.'--Elegy of Ermoldus
Nigellus, in Pertz; _M. G. H._, t. i. So too Florus 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.'
CHAPTER VI.
CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
[Sidenote: Lewis the Pious.]
[Sidenote: Partition of Verdun, A.D. 843.]
Lewis the Pious[86], 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 deny 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 on all sides. Charles had wished the Empire to
continue 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 reigning 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 without
power, a tool in the hands of contending factions. 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 nationalities. Their difference
of feeling, shewn already in the support of Lewis the Pious by the
Germans against the Gallo-Franks and the Church[87], took now a
permanent shape: modern Germany proclaims the era of A.D. 843 the
beginning of her national existence, and celebrated its thousandth
anniversary twenty-seven years ago. To Charles the Bald was given
Francia Occidentalis, 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 kingdom, the German) received all east of the
Rhine, Franks, Saxons, Bavarians, Austria, Carinthia, with possible
supremacies over Czechs and Moravians beyond. Throughout these regions
German was spoken; through Charles's kingdom a corrupt tongue, equally
removed from Latin and from modern French. Lothar's, being mixed and
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.
[Sidenote: End of the Carolingian Empire of the West, A.D. 888.]
On the tangled history of the period that follows it is not possible
to do more than touch. After passing from one branch of the
Carolingian line to another[88], 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 894. 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 civilization. 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 Norseman swept the
Atlantic and the North Sea, pierced France and Germany by their
rivers, burning, slaying, carrying off into captivity: pouring through
the Straits 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 Hungarian 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 authority, 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 increasing localization of all powers: it might seem to have been
but a passing gleam from an older and better world.
[Sidenote: The German Kingdom.]
[Sidenote: Henry the Fowler.]
In Germany, the greatness of the evil worked at last its cure. When
the male line of the eastern branch of the Carolingians had ended in
Lewis (surnamed the Child), son of Arnulf, the chieftains chose and
the people accepted Conrad the Franconian, and after him Henry the
Saxon duke, both representing the female line of Charles. Henry laid
the foundations of a firm monarchy, driving back the Magyars and
Wends, recovering Lotharingia, 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.
[Sidenote: Otto the Great.]
The Holy Roman Empire, taking the name in the sense which it commonly
bore in later centuries, as denoting the sovereignty of Germany and
Italy vested in a Germanic prince, is the creation of Otto the Great.
Substantially, it is true, as well as technically, it was a
prolongation of the Empire of Charles; and it rested (as will be shewn
in the sequel) upon ideas essentially the same as those which brought
about the coronation of A.D. 800. But a revival is always more or less
a revolution: the one hundred and fifty years that had passed since
the death of Charles had brought with them changes which made Otto's
position in Germany and Europe less commanding and less autocratic
than his predecessor's. With narrower geographical limits, his Empire
had a less plausible claim to be the heir of Rome's universal
dominion; and there were also differences in its inner character and
structure sufficient to justify us in considering Otto (as he is
usually considered by his countrymen) 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 circumstances had again made
possible the plan of Theodoric, permitted it to become an independent
kingdom, and attached the imperial title to its sovereign.
[Sidenote: Italian Emperors.]
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 imperii_,' whereof Tacitus speaks,
'_posse principem alibi quam Romæ fieri_[89],' had long before become
_alium quam Romanum_; and now, the names of Roman and Christian having
grown co-extensive, a barbarian chieftain was, as a Roman citizen,
eligible to the office of Roman Emperor. Treating him as such, the
people and pontiff of the capital had in the vacancy of the Eastern
throne asserted their ancient rights of election, and while attempting
to reverse the act of Constantine, had re-established the division of
Valentinian. The dignity was therefore in strictness personal to
Charles; in point of fact, and by consent, hereditarily transmissible,
just as it had formerly become in the families of Constantine and
Theodosius. To the Frankish crown or nation it was by no means legally
attached, though they might think it so; it had passed to their king
only because he was the greatest European potentate, and might equally
well pass to some stronger race, if any such appeared. Hence, when the
line of Carolingian Emperors ended in Charles the Fat, the rights of
Rome and Italy might be taken to revive, and there was nothing to
prevent the citizens from choosing whom they would. At that memorable
era (A.D. 888) the four kingdoms which this prince had united fell
asunder; West France, where Odo or Eudes then began to reign, was
never again united to Germany; East France (Germany) chose Arnulf;
Burgundy[90] split up into two principalities, in one of which
(Transjurane) Rudolf proclaimed himself king, while the other
(Cisjurane with Provence) submitted to Boso[91]; while Italy 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. Arnulf'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. Berengar was made king of Italy,
and afterwards Emperor. Lewis of Burgundy, son of Boso, renounced his
fealty to Arnulf, and procured the imperial dignity, whose vain title
he retained through years of misery and exile, till A.D. 928[92]. None
of these Emperors were strong enough to rule well even in Italy;
beyond it they were not so much as recognized. 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 demoralization and confusion of Italy, the
shameless profligacy of Rome and her pontiffs 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 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 should 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.
[Sidenote: Adelheid Queen of Italy.]
[Sidenote: Otto's first expedition into Italy, A.D. 951.]
[Sidenote: Invitation sent by the Pope to Otto.]
[Sidenote: Motives for reviving the Empire.]
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[93], who had
renewed her never quite extinct republican institutions, and in the
degradation of the papacy was almost absolute in the city. Lothar
dying, his widow Adelheid[94] was sought in marriage by Adalbert son
of Berengar II, the new Italian monarch. A gleam of romance is shed on
the Empire's revival by her beauty and her adventures. Rejecting the
odious alliance, she was seized by Berengar, escaped with difficulty
from the loathsome prison where his barbarity had confined her, and
appealed 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 Frankish crown. That prince was turbulent and
faithless; new complaints reached ere long his liege lord, and envoys
from the Pope offered Otto the imperial title if he would re-visit and
pacify Italy. The proposal was well-timed. Men still thought, as they
had thought in the centuries before the Carolingians, that the Empire
was suspended, not extinct; and the desire to see its effective power
restored, the belief that without it the world could never be right,
might seem better grounded than it had been before the coronation of
Charles. Then the imperial name had recalled only the faint memories
of Roman majesty and order; now it was also associated with the golden
age of the first Frankish Emperor, when a single firm and just hand
had guided the state, reformed the church, repressed the excesses of
local power: when Christianity had advanced against heathendom,
civilizing as she went, fearing neither Hun nor Paynim. One annalist
tells us that Charles was elected 'lest the pagans should insult the
Christians, if the name of Emperor should have ceased among the
Christians[95].' 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
but so many cries for the restoration of the Roman Empire[96]. These
were the feelings that on the field of Merseburg broke forth in the
shout of 'Henry the Emperor:' 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 Patriæ[97].'
[Sidenote: Condition of Italy.]
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 office.
The rule of Alberic had been succeeded by the wildest confusion, and
demands were raised for the renewal of that imperial authority which
all admitted in theory[98], 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 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 magnates 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 offer
opened up less welcome to his people. Aachen, their capital, was the
ancestral home of the house of Pipin: their sovereign, although
himself a Saxon by race, titled himself king of the Franks, in
opposition to the Frankish rulers of the Western branch, whose
Teutonic character was disappearing among the Romans of Gaul; they
held themselves in every way the true representatives of the
Carolingian power, and accounted the period since Arnulf's 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[99].' The recovery of Italy was therefore to German 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.
[Sidenote: Descent of Otto the Great into Italy.]
[Sidenote: His coronation at Rome, A.D. 962.]
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
Pavia[100]; 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 unfortunately still more scanty than in
the case of his great predecessor. Most of our authorities represent
the act as of the Pope's favour[101], yet it is plain that the 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[86] Usage has established this translation of 'Hludowicus Pius,' but
'gentle' or 'kind-hearted' would better express the meaning of the
epithet.
[87] Von Ranke discovers in this early traces of the aversion of the
Germans to the pretensions of the spiritual power.--_History of
Germany during the Reformation_: Introduction.
[88] Singularly enough, when one thinks of modern claims, the dynasty
of France (Francia occidentalis) had the least share of it. Charles
the Bald was the only West Frankish Emperor, and reigned a very short
time.
[89] Tac. _Hist._ i. 4.
[90] For an account of the various applications of the name Burgundy,
see Appendix, Note A.
[91] The accession of Boso took place in A.D. 877, eleven years before
Charles the Fat's death. But the new kingdom could not be considered
legally settled until the latter date, and its establishment is at any
rate a part of that general break-up of the great Carolingian empire
whereof A.D. 888 marks the crisis. See Appendix A at the end.
It is a curious mark of the reverence paid to the Carolingian blood,
that Boso, a powerful and ambitious 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 proles imperialis.'
[92] Lewis had been surprised by Berengar at Verona, blinded, and
forced to take refuge in his own kingdom of Provence.
[93] Alberic is called variously senator, consul, patrician, and
prince of the Romans.
[94] Adelheid was daughter of Rudolf, king of Trans-Jurane Burgundy.
She was at this time in her nineteenth year.
[95] _Chron. Moiss._, in Pertz; _M. G. H._ i. 305.
[96] See especially the poem of Florus the Deacon (printed in the
Benedictine collection and in Migne), a bitter lament over the
dissolution of the Carolingian Empire. It is too long for quotation. I
give four lines here:--
'Quid faciant populi quos ingens alluit Hister,
Quos Rhenus Rhodanusque rigant, Ligerisve, Padusve,
Quos omnes dudum tenuit concordia nexos,
Foedere nunc rupto divortia moesta fatigant.'
[97] Witukind, _Annales_, in Pertz. It may, however, be doubted
whether the annalist is not here giving a very free rendering of the
triumphant cries of the German army.
[98] Cf. esp. the '_Libellus de imperatoria potestate in urbe Roma_,'
in Pertz.
[99] 'Licet videamus Romanorum regnum in maxima parte jam destructum,
tamen quamdiu reges Francorum duraverint qui Romanum imperium tenere
debent, dignitas Romani imperii ex toto non peribit, quia stabit in
regibus suis.'--_Liber de Antichristo_, addressed by Adso, abbot of
Moutier-en-Der, to queen Gerberga (circa A.D. 950).
[100] From the money which Otto struck in Italy, it seems probable
that he did occasionally use the title of king of Italy or of the
Lombards. That he was crowned can hardly be considered quite certain.
[101] 'A papa imperator ordinatur,' says Hermannus Contractus.
'Dominum Ottonem, ad hoc usque vocatum regem, non solum Romano sed et
pœne totius Europæ populo acclamante imperatorem consecravit
Augustum.'--_Annal. Quedlinb._, ad ann. 962. 'Benedictionem a domno
apostolico Iohanne, cuius rogatione huc venit, cum sua coniuge promeruit
imperialem ac patronus Romanæ effectus est ecclesiæ.'--Thietmar.
'Acclamatione totius Romani populi ab apostolico Iohanne, filio
Alberici, imperator et Augustus vocatur et ordinatur.'--Continuator
Reginonis. And similarly the other annalists.
CHAPTER VII.
THEORY OF THE MEDIÆVAL EMPIRE.
[Sidenote: Why the revival of the Empire was desired.]
These were the events and circumstances of the time: let us now look
at the causes. The restoration of the Empire by Charles may seem to be
sufficiently accounted for by the width of his conquests, by the
peculiar connection which already subsisted between him and the Roman
Church, by his commanding personal character, by the temporary vacancy
of the Byzantine throne. The causes of its revival under Otto must be
sought deeper. Making every allowance for the favouring incidents
which have already been dwelt upon, there must have been some further
influence at work to draw him and his successors, Saxon and Frankish
kings, so far from home in pursuit of a barren crown, to lead the
Italians to accept the dominion of a stranger and a barbarian, to make
the Empire itself appear through the whole Middle Age not what it
seems now, a gorgeous anachroni
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