Chapter XII: Imperial Titles and Pretensions

The era of the Hohenstaufen is perhaps the fittest point at which to turn aside from the narrative history of the Empire to speak shortly of the legal position which it professed to hold to the rest of Europe, as well as of certain duties and observances which throw a light upon the system it embodied. This is not indeed the era of its greatest power. That was already past. Nor is it conspicuously the era when its ideal dignity stood highest: for that remained scarcely impaired till three centuries had passed away. But it was under the Hohenstaufen, owing partly to the splendid abilities of the princes of that famous line, partly to the suddenly-gained ascendancy of the Roman law, that the actual power and the theoretical influence of the Empire most fully coincided. There can therefore be no better opportunity for noticing the titles and claims by which it announced itself the representative of Rome’s universal dominion, and for collecting the various instances in which they were (either before or after Frederick’s time) more or less admitted by the other states of Europe.

The territories over which Frederick would have declared his jurisdiction to extend may be classed under four heads:—

First, the German lands, in which, and in which alone, the Emperor was, up till the death of Frederick the Second (ad 1250), effective ruler.

Second, the non-German districts of the Holy Empire, where the Emperor was acknowledged as sole monarch, but in practice little regarded.

Third, certain outlying countries, owing allegiance to the Empire, but governed by kings of their own.

Fourth, the other states of Europe, whose rulers, while admitting the superior rank of the Emperor, were virtually independent of him.

Thus within the actual boundaries of the Holy Empire were included only districts coming under the first and second of the above classes, i.e. Germany, Northern Italy, and the kingdom of Burgundy or Arles—that is to say, Provence, Dauphiné, the Free County of Burgundy (Franche Comté), and what is now Western Switzerland. Lorraine, Alsace, the rest of Switzerland and the Low Countries were of course parts of Germany. To the north-east, Bohemia and the Slavic principalities in Mecklenburg and Pomerania were as yet not integral parts of its body, but rather dependent outliers. Beyond the Mark of Brandenburg, from the Oder to the Vistula, dwelt pagan Lithuanians or Prussians, free till the establishment among them of the Teutonic Knights, which took place with the approval of Frederick II in 1228-40.

Hungary had owed a doubtful allegiance since the days of Otto I. Gregory VII had claimed it as a fief of the Holy See; Frederick wished to reduce it completely to subjection, but could not overcome the reluctance of his nobles. After Frederick II, by whom it was recovered from the Mongol hordes, no imperial claims were made for so many years that at last they became obsolete, and were confessed to be so by the Constitution of Augsburg, ad 1566.

Under Duke Misico, Poland had submitted to Otto the Great, and continued, with occasional revolts, to obey the Empire, till the beginning of the Great Interregnum (as it is called) in 1254. Its duke was present at the election of Richard, ad 1257. Thereafter, in 1295, Duke Primislas had himself crowned king in token of emancipation (for the title of king which Otto III had granted to Boleslas I had become disused) and the country became independent, though some of its provinces were long afterwards reunited to the German state. Silesia, originally Polish, was attached to Bohemia by Charles IV, and so became part of the Empire; Posen and Galicia were seized by Prussia and Austria respectively, ad 1772. Down to her partition in that year, the constitution of Poland remained in some points a copy of that which had existed in the German kingdom of the twelfth century.

Lewis the Pious had received the homage of the Danish king Harold, on his baptism at Mentz, ad 826; Otto the Great’s victories over Harold Blue Tooth made the country subject, and added the Mark of Schleswig to the Empire: but the boundary soon receded to the Eyder, on whose banks might be seen the inscription,—

King Peter attended at the Diet held at Merseburg shortly after Frederick I’s coronation, and received from the Emperor, who as suzerain had been required to decide a disputed question of succession to the Danish throne, his own crown; he did homage, and bore the sword before the Emperor. Since the Great Interregnum Denmark has been always free.

Otto the Great was the last Emperor whose suzerainty the West Frankish kings had admitted; nor were Henry VI and Otto IV successful in their attempts to enforce it. Boniface VIII, in his quarrel with Philip the Fair, offered the French throne, which he had pronounced vacant, to Albert I; but the wary Hapsburg declined the dangerous prize. The superiority, however, which the Germans continued to assert, irritated Gallic pride, and led to more than one contest. Charles V of France gave the Emperor Charles IV black horses on which to ride into Paris, when the latter paid him a visit there, himself riding a white horse, because the custom of the Emperors had been, so says the chronicler, to enter their cities on a white charger. French jurists steadily insisted that their king held from God alone. Blondel denies the Empire any claim to the Roman name; and in ad 1648 the French envoys at Münster refused for some time to admit that precedence of the imperial envoys which no other European state disputed. Till recent times the title of the Archbishop of Treves, ‘Archicancellarius per Galliam atque regnum Arelatense,’ preserved the memory of an obsolete supremacy which the constant aggressions of France might seem to have reversed.

No reliance can be placed on the author who tells us that Sweden was granted by Frederick I to Waldemar the Dane; the fact is improbable, and we do not hear that such pretensions were ever put forth before or after. Norway, too, seems to have been left untouched—the Emperors had no fleets—and Iceland, which had remained undiscovered till long after the days of Charles the Great, was down to the year 1262 the only absolutely free Republic in the world. It is a curious illustration of mediaeval habits of thought that the envoys of the king of Norway, when seeking to persuade the Icelandic people to accept his supremacy, argued that monarchy was the form of government divinely ordained, and existed in every part of the European continent.

Nor does it appear that authority was ever exercised by any Emperor, after the first Carolingians, in Spain. Nevertheless the choice of Alfonso X by some of the German electors, in ad 1258, seems to imply that the Spanish kings were members of the Empire. And when, ad 1053, Ferdinand the Great of Castile had, in the pride of his victories over the Moors, assumed the title of ‘Hispaniae Imperator,’ the remonstrance of Henry III declared the rights of Rome over the Western provinces indelible, and the Spaniard, though protesting his independence, was forced to resign the usurped dignity.

No act of sovereignty is recorded to have been done by any of the Emperors in England, though as heirs of Rome they might be thought to have better rights over it than over Poland or Denmark. There was, however, a vague notion that the English, like other kingdoms, must depend on the Empire: a notion which appears in Conrad III’s letter to John of Constantinople; and which was countenanced by the submissive tone in which Frederick I was addressed by the Plantagenet Henry II. English independence was still more compromised in the next reign, when Richard I, according to Hoveden, ‘by the advice of his mother Eleanor stripped himself of the kingdom of England, and delivered it over to the Emperor as Lord of the World.’ But as Richard was at the same time invested with the kingdom of Arles by Henry VI, his homage may have been for that fief only; and it was probably in that capacity that he voted (by his eight deputies), as a prince of the Empire, at the election of Frederick II. The case finds a parallel in the claims of England over the Scottish king, doubtful, to say the least, as regards the domestic realm of the latter, certain as regards Cumbria, which he had long held from the Southern crown. But Germany had no Edward I. Henry VI is said at his death to have released Richard from his submission (this too may be compared with Richard’s release to the Scottish king William the Lion), and Edward II declared the kingdom of England to be wholly free from all subjection to the Empire. Yet the notion survived: the Emperor Lewis the Bavarian, when he named Edward III his vicar in the great war between France and England, demanded, though in vain, that the English monarch should kiss his feet, and the election of Edward as Emperor after the death of Lewis carried with it an implication that England was still in a certain sense a part of the Empire. The Emperor Sigismund, visiting Henry V at London, at the time of the meeting of the council of Constance, was met by the Duke of Gloucester, who, riding into the water to the ship where the Emperor sat, required him, at the sword’s point, to declare that he did not come purposing to infringe on the king’s authority in the realm of England. One curious pretension of the imperial crown called forth many protests. It was declared by civilians and canonists that no notary public could have any standing, or attach any legality to the documents he drew or attested, unless he had received his diploma either from the Emperor or from the Pope. A strenuous denial of a doctrine so injurious was issued by the parliament of Scotland under James III.

No Roman soldier ever trod the soil of Ireland, nor did any mediaeval emperor ever exercise any authority there. But even in Ireland the influence of the imperial idea was felt. In that isle, before the Anglo-Norman invasion of the twelfth century, a chieftain or magnate whose wealth consisted in cattle, was accustomed to give them out among his dependants to be pastured; and thus the expression ‘to receive stock’ from any one came to denote the holding of a subordinate or vassal position, similar to that of the feudal tenant who receives land as a beneficium from his lord. Now the Brehon law, after shewing how the inferior princes may receive stock from the King of Erin—the Ard Righ or supreme king of the whole island (who, however, even when he existed, had little more than a titular authority)—goes on to say, ‘When the King of Erin is without opposition (i.e. when he holds Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, the three chief ports which were often in the hands of Norsemen or Danes), he receives stock from the King of the Romans,’ i.e. the Emperor. And one commentator (probably a cleric) adds that sometimes it is the Successor of Patrick (i.e. the Archbishop of Armagh) who gives stock to the King of Erin, thereby setting the Primate of Ireland in the position above the Emperor which the theory of high Papalists in continental Europe assigned to the Pope.

The kingdom of Naples and Sicily, although of course claimed as a part of the Empire, was under the Norman dynasty (ad 1060-1189) not merely independent, but the most dangerous enemy of the German power in Italy. Henry VI, the son and successor of Barbarossa, obtained possession of it by marrying Constance the heiress of the Norman kings. But both he and Frederick II treated it as a separate patrimonial state, instead of incorporating it with their more northerly dominions. After the death of Conradin, the last of the Hohenstaufen, it passed away to an Angevin, then to an Aragonese dynasty, continuing under both to maintain itself independent of the Empire, nor ever again, except under the Emperor Charles V, held by the occupant of the Germanic throne.

One spot in Italy there was whose singular felicity of situation enabled her through long centuries of obscurity and weakness, slowly ripening into strength, to maintain her freedom unstained by any submission to the Frankish and German Emperors. Venice glories in deducing her origin from the fugitives who escaped from Aquileia when that city was destroyed by Attila: it is at least probable that her population received no sensible admixture of Teutonic settlers, and they continued during the ages of Lombard and Frankish rule in Italy to regard the East Roman sovereign as the representative of their ancient masters. Charles the Great acknowledged by treaty their dependence on the East; and in the tenth century, when summoned to submit to Otto II, they had said, ‘We wish to be the servants of the Emperors of the Romans’ (the Constantinopolitan). Their fleet, joined with a force of Frankish Crusaders, overthrew this very throne in ad 1204, but the pretext of allegiance to the East had served its turn, and had aided them in defying or evading the demands of obedience made by the Teutonic princes. Alone of all the Italian republics, Venice never, down to her extinction by France and Austria in ad 1797, recognized within her bounds any secular Western authority save her own.

The kings of Cyprus and Armenia sent to Henry VI to confess themselves his vassals and ask his help. Over remote Eastern lands, where Frankish foot had never trode, Frederick Barbarossa asserted the indestructible rights of Rome, mistress of the world. A letter to Saladin, amusing from its absolute identification of his own Empire with that which had sent Crassus to perish in Parthia, and had blushed to see Mark Antony ‘consulem nostrum’ at the feet of Cleopatra, is preserved by Hoveden: it bids the Soldan withdraw at once from the dominions of Rome, else will she, with her new Teutonic defenders, of whom a pompous list follows, drive him from them with all her ancient might.

Unwilling as were the great kingdoms of Western Europe to admit the territorial supremacy of the Emperor, the proudest among them never refused, until the end of the Middle Ages, to recognize his precedence and address him in a tone of respectful deference. Very different was the attitude of the East Roman princes, who denied his claim to be an Emperor at all. The separate existence of the Eastern Church and Empire was always, as has been said above, a blemish in the title of the Teutonic sovereigns. But it was even more. It was a continuing protest against the whole system of an Empire Church of Christendom, centring in Rome, ruled by the successor of Peter and the successor of Augustus. Instead of the one Pope and one Emperor whom mediaeval theory presented as the sole earthly representatives of the invisible Head of the Church, the world saw itself distracted by the interminable feud of rivals, each of whom had much to allege on his behalf. It was easy for the Latins to call the Easterns schismatics and their Emperor an usurper, but practically it was impossible to dethrone him or reduce them to obedience—indeed the Teutonic sovereigns never made a serious claim to the provinces in which Greek was spoken—nor could the Eastern Church be treated, even in controversy, with the contempt that any Western schismatics would have incurred. But as the East Roman Empire is treated of in a separate chapter, it is sufficient here to indicate this one conspicuous exception to the general recognition of imperial supremacy.

Though Otto the Great and his successors had dropped all titles save the highest, they did not therefore endeavour to unite their several kingdoms, but continued to go through four distinct coronations at the four capitals of their Empire. These are concisely given in the verses of Godfrey of Viterbo, a notary of Frederick’s household:—

By the crowning at Aachen, the old Frankish capital, the monarch became ‘king’; formerly ‘king of the Franks,’ or ‘king of the Eastern Franks’; now, since Henry II’s time, ‘king of the Romans, always Augustus.’ At Monza (or, more rarely, at Milan) in later times, at Pavia in earlier times, he became king of Italy, or of the Lombards; at Rome he received the double crown of the Roman Empire, ‘double,’ says Godfrey, as ‘urbis et orbis’:—

though others hold that, uniting the mitre to the crown, it typifies spiritual as well as secular authority. The crown of Burgundy or the kingdom of Arles, first gained by Conrad II, was a much less splendid matter, and carried with it little effective power. Most Emperors never assumed it at all, Frederick I not till late in life, when an interval of leisure left him nothing better to do. These four crowns furnish matter of endless discussion to the old writers; they tell us that the Roman was golden, the German silver, the Italian iron, the metal corresponding to the dignity of each realm. Others say that that of Aachen is iron, and the Italian silver, and give elaborate reasons why it should be so. There seems to be no doubt that the allegory created the fact, and that all three crowns were of gold (or gilded silver), though in that of Italy there was and is inserted a piece of iron, a nail, it was believed, of the true Cross.

Why, it may well be asked, seeing that the Roman crown made the Emperor ruler of the whole habitable globe, was it thought necessary for him to add to it minor dignities which might be supposed to have been already included in this supreme one? The reason seems to be that the imperial office was conceived of as something different in kind from the regal, and as carrying with it not the immediate government of any particular kingdom, but a general suzerainty over and right of controlling all. Of this a pertinent illustration is afforded by an anecdote told of Frederick Barbarossa. Happening once to inquire of the famous jurists who surrounded him whether it was really true that he was ‘lord of the world’ (dominus mundi), one of them simply assented, another, Bulgarus, answered, ‘Not as respects ownership’ (non quantum ad dominium). In this dictum, which is evidently conformable to the philosophical theory of the Empire, we have a pointed distinction drawn between feudal sovereignty, which supposes the prince original owner of the soil of his whole kingdom, and imperial sovereignty, which is irrespective of place and exercised not over things but over men, as God’s rational creatures. But the Emperor, as has been said already, was also the East Frankish king, uniting in himself, to use the legal phrase, two wholly distinct ‘persons,’ and hence he might acquire more direct and practically useful rights over a portion of his dominions by being crowned king of that portion, just as a feudal monarch often came to be count of lordships whereof he was already feudal superior; or, to take a better illustration, just as a bishop may hold livings in his own diocese. That the Emperors, while continuing to be crowned at Milan and Aachen, did not in practice call themselves kings of the Lombards and of the Franks, was probably merely because these titles seemed insignificant compared to that of Roman Emperor.

In this supreme title, as has been said, all lesser honours were blent and lost, but custom or prejudice forbade the German king to assume it till actually crowned at Rome by the Pope. Matters of phrase and title are never unimportant, least of all in an age not only uncritical but also superstitiously attached to forms and precedents: and this restriction had the most important consequences. The reverence for Rome as the ancient seat of power, and the sense of the close relation between the temporal and the spiritual sovereign, created an association which soon became indissoluble between the office and title of Emperor, and the crowning in the City by the Pope. ‘Rome,’ says the biographer of St. Adalbert, ‘seeing that she both is and is called the head of the world and the mistress of cities, is alone able to give to kings imperial power, and since she cherishes in her bosom the body of the Prince of the Apostles, she ought of right to appoint the Prince of the whole earth.’ The crown was therefore too sacred to be conferred by any one but the supreme Pontiff, or in any city less august than the ancient capital. Had it become hereditary in any family, Lothar I’s, for instance, or Otto’s, this feeling might have worn off; as it was, each successive transfer to a new family or dynasty, to Guido, to Otto I, to Henry II, to Conrad the Salic, strengthened it. The force of custom, tradition, precedent, is immense, when checked neither by written rules nor by free discussion. What sheer assertion will do is shewn by the success of a forgery so gross as the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, accepted at first because it occurred to no one, nor was it obviously any one’s interest, to contest their genuineness, accepted afterwards, when their tendency was perceived, because they had by this time found general currency, recognized ultimately as valid because they had passed into authorized collections. No arguments are needed to discredit the alleged decree of Pope Benedict VIII, which forbade the German prince to take the name or office of Emperor till approved and consecrated by the Pontiff, but a doctrine so favourable to papal pretensions was sure not to want advocacy; Hadrian IV proclaims it in the broadest terms, and through the efforts of the clergy and the spell of reverence in the Teutonic princes, it passed into an unquestioned belief. That none ventured to use the title till the Pope conferred it, made it seem to depend on his will, enabled him to exact conditions from every candidate, and gave colour to his pretended suzerainty. Since by feudal theory every honour and estate is held from some superior, and since the divine commission has been without doubt issued directly to the Pope, must not the whole earth be his fief, and he the lord paramount, to whom even the Emperor is a vassal? This argument, which drew plausibility from the rivalry between the Emperor and other monarchs, as compared with the undisputed authority of the Pope, was a favourite with the high sacerdotal party: first distinctly advanced by Hadrian IV, when he set up the picture representing the homage of Lothar II, which had so irritated the followers of Barbarossa, though it had already been hinted at in Gregory VII’s gift of the crown to Rudolf of Swabia, with the line—

Nor was it only by putting him at the Pontiff’s mercy that this dependence of the imperial name on a coronation in the city injured the German sovereign. With strange inconsistency it was not pretended that the Emperor’s rights were any narrower before he received the rite: he could summon synods, confirm papal elections, exercise jurisdiction over the citizens: his right to receive the crown itself was not, at least till the days of Gregory VII, seriously denied. No one thought of contesting the claim of the German nation to the Empire, or the authority of the German electors, strangers though they were, to give Rome and Italy a master. The republican followers of Arnold of Brescia might murmur, but they could not dispute the truth of the proud lines in which the poet who sang the glories of Barbarossa describes the result of the conquest of Charles the Great:—

But the real strength of the Teutonic kingdom was wasted in the pursuit of a glittering toy: once at least in his reign each Emperor undertook a long and dangerous expedition, and dissipated in a costly and ever to be repeated strife the forces that might have achieved conquest elsewhere, or made him feared and obeyed at home.

At this epoch appears another title, of which more must be said. To the accustomed ‘Roman Empire’ Frederick I adds the epithet of ‘Holy.’ Of its earlier origin, under Conrad II (the Salic), which some have supposed, there is no documentary trace. So far as is known it occurs first in the summons or circular letter issued by Frederick in ad 1157, requiring the magnates of the Empire to give him their aid in his expedition against the recalcitrant cities of Lombardy: ‘Quia urbis et orbis gubernacula tenemus iuxta diversos eventus rerum et successiones temporum sacro imperio et divae reipublicae consulere debemus,’ where the second phrase is a synonym repeating the idea of the first. It occurs also afterwards in other documents of his reign, as for example in a letter to the East Roman Emperor Isaac Angelus. Used occasionally by Henry VI and Frederick II, it is more frequent under their successors, William, Richard, Rudolf, till after Charles IV’s time it becomes habitual, and during the last few centuries the familiar description in current speech of the Germanic State.

The adoption of the title did not mark or coincide with any constitutional or political change, for the Empire, as has already been shewn, was in its wider form essentially and substantially the creation of Charles, in its narrower form, as practically consisting of Germany and Northern Italy (of course also with a vague unenforceable claim to universal sovereignty), the creation of Otto the Great. Nor are its original meaning and the motives which led Frederick and his first successors to employ it, altogether clear. Some have regarded it as a perpetuation of the court style of Rome and Constantinople which attached sanctity to the person of the monarch: thus David Blondel, contending for the honour of France, calls it a mere epithet of the Emperor, applied by confusion to his government. Others saw in it a religious meaning, referring to Daniel’s prophecy, or to the fact that the Empire was contemporary with Christianity, or to Christ’s birth under it. Strong churchmen derived it from the dependence of the imperial crown on the Pope. There were not wanting those who maintained that it meant nothing more than great or splendid. There need not, however, be any great doubt as to its true sense and purport. The ascription of sacredness to the person, the palace, the letters, and so forth, of the sovereign, so common in the later ages of ancient Rome, had been partly retained in the German court. Liudprand calls Otto ‘imperator sanctissimus.’ Still this sanctity, which the Easterns above all others lavished on their princes, is something personal, is nothing more than the divinity that in all countries doth hedge a king. Far more intimate and peculiar was the relation of the revived Roman Empire to the Church and religion. As has been said already, it was neither more nor less than the Visible Church, seen on its secular side, the Christian society organized as a state under a form divinely appointed, and therefore the name ‘Holy Roman Empire’ was the needful and rightful counterpart to that of ‘Holy Catholic Church.’ Such had long been the belief, and so the title might have had its origin as far back as the tenth or ninth century, might even have emanated from Charles himself. Alcuin in one of his letters uses the phrase ‘imperium Christianum.’ But there was a further reason for its introduction under the second Hohenstaufen, immediately after his contest with Pope Hadrian IV. Ever since Hildebrand had claimed for the priesthood exclusive sanctity and supreme jurisdiction, extreme papalists had been wont to speak of the civil power as being, compared with that of their own chief, merely secular and earthly. It may be conjectured that to meet this reproach, no less injurious than insulting, Frederick or his advisers began to use in public documents the expression ‘Holy Empire’; thereby wishing to assert the divine institution and religious duties of his office. Previous Emperors had called themselves ‘Catholici,’ ‘Christiani,’ ‘ecclesiae defensores’; now their State itself is consecrated an earthly theocracy. ‘Romanum imperium . . . ad remedium tam perniciosi morbi (sc. schismatis) divina providit clementia,’ writes Frederick to the English Henry II. The theory was one which the best and strongest Emperors had most striven to carry out; it continued to be zealously upheld long after it had ceased to be practicable. In the proclamations of mediaeval kings there is a constant dwelling on their divine commission. Power in an age of violence sought to justify while it enforced its commands, to make brute force less brutal by appeals to a higher sanction. This is seen nowhere more than in the style of the German sovereigns: they delight in the phrases ‘maiestas sacrosancta,’ ‘imperator divina ordinante providentia,’ ‘divina pietate,’ ‘per misericordiam Dei’; many of which were preserved till, like those used now by other European kings, like our own ‘Defender of the Faith,’ they had become at last more grotesque than solemn. The freethinking Emperor Joseph II, at the end of the eighteenth century, was ‘Advocate of the Christian Church,’ ‘Vicar of Christ,’ ‘Imperial head of the faithful,’ ‘Leader of the Christian army,’ ‘Protector of Palestine, of general councils, of the Catholic faith.’

The title, if it added little to the power, yet certainly seems to have increased the dignity of the Empire, and by consequence the jealousy of other states, of France especially. This did not, however, go so far as to prevent its recognition by the Popes and the French kings, and after the sixteenth century it would have been a breach of diplomatic courtesy to omit it. Nor have imitations been wanting: witness such phrases as ‘Holy Russia,’ and such titles as ‘Most Christian king (France),’ ‘Catholic king (Spain),’ ‘Defender of the Faith (England).’