Chapter XXII: Summary and Reflections

After what has been already said in examining each of the phases through which the Holy Empire passed, only a few concluding pages are needed to describe its character and to sum up the results of its long-continued life. A general character can hardly help being either vague or misleading, for the aspects which the Empire took are as many and as various as the ages and conditions of society during which it continued to exist. Among the peoples around the Mediterranean, whose national feeling had died out, whose national faiths were extinct or had turned to superstition, whose thought and art had lost their force and freshness, there arose a gigantic military power, the power first of a city, then of an administrative system culminating in an irresponsible monarch, which pressing with equal weight on all its subjects, gave them a new imperial nationality, and became to them a religion as well as a government. When this system, weakened by internal decay, was at length beginning to dissolve, the tribes of the North came down, too rude to maintain the elaborate institutions they found subsisting, too few and scattered to introduce their own simpler institutions, and in the weltering confusion that followed, the idea of a civilized commonwealth would have perished, had not the association of a young and vigorous faith with the name and the authority of Rome formed the foundation for a new unity, politically weak, but morally close and durable. Then the strong hand of the first Frankish Emperor raised the fallen image and bade the nations bow down to it once more. Under him it was for some brief space a sort of military theocracy; under his German successors the first of feudal kingdoms, the centre of European chivalry. As feudalism wanes, the imperial office, as well as the imperial idea, was again transformed, and after promising for a time to become an hereditary Hapsburg monarchy, it sank at last into the presidency, not more dignified than powerless, of an international league.

To the modern world, penetrated by a critical and practical spirit, a perpetuation under conditions so diverse of the same name and the same pretensions appears at first sight absurd, a phantom too vain to impress the most superstitious mind. Closer examination corrects such a notion. No power was ever based on foundations more sure and deep than those which Rome laid during three centuries of conquest and four of undisturbed dominion. If her empire had been an hereditary or local kingdom, it might have fallen with the extinction of the royal line, the overthrow of the tribe, the destruction of the city, to which it was attached. But it was not so limited. It was imperishable because it was universal; and when its power had ceased, it was remembered with awe and love by the races whose separate existence it had destroyed, because it had spared the weak while it smote down the strong; because it had granted equal rights to all, and closed against none of its subjects the path of honourable ambition. When the military power of the conquering city had departed, her sway over the world of thought began. By her the Greek theory of a commonwealth of mankind had been reduced to practice; the magic of her name remained, and she held a sway over the imagination which the passing of century after century scarcely reduced. She had gathered up and embodied in her literature and institutions all the ideas and all the practical results of ancient thought. Embracing and organizing and propagating the new religion, she made it seem her own. Her language, her theology, her laws, her architecture, made their way where the eagles of war had never winged their flight, and with the spread of civilization have found new homes on the Ganges and the Mississippi.

Nor is such a claim of government prolonged under changed conditions by any means a singular phenomenon. Titles sum up the political history of nations, and are as often causes as effects: if significant to-day, how much more so in ages of ignorance when tradition was stronger than reason. Even in our time various pretensions have been put forward to represent the Empire of Rome, all of them without historical foundation, none of them without practical import. Austria clings to a name which seems to perpetuate the primacy held by Charles the Fifth in Europe, and was wont, while she held Lombardy, to justify her position there by invoking the feudal rights of the Franconian and Swabian sovereigns. With no more legal right than a prince of Reuss or a grand duke of Mecklenburg might pretend to, she continued after the disappearance of the old Empire to use its arms and devices, and being almost the youngest of European monarchies, she became respected as the oldest and most conservative. Bonapartean France, as the self-appointed heir of the Carolingians, grasped for a time the sceptre of the West, and under the ruler who fell in 1870 aspired to hold the balance of European politics, and be recognized as the leader and patron of the so-called ‘Latin races’ on both sides of the Atlantic. Professing the creed of Constantinople, Russia claims the crown of the Eastern Caesars, and looks forward to the day when the capital which prophecy has promised for a thousand years will echo to the tramp of her armies. The doctrine of Panslavism, under an imperial head of the Orthodox Eastern Church, has become a formidable engine of aggression in the hands of a mighty despotism and a growing race, naturally drawn to expand its frontiers toward the south. Another testimony to the enduring influence of old political combinations is supplied by the eagerness with which modern Hellas embraced the notion of gathering the peoples of South-eastern Europe and Asia Minor that profess the Orthodox creed into a revived Empire of the East, with its capital on the Bosphorus. Nay, the intruding Ottoman himself, different in faith as well as in blood, long ago declared himself the representative of the Eastern Caesars, whose dominion he extinguished. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent assumed the name of Emperor, and refused it to Charles the Fifth; his successors were once preceded through the streets of Constantinople by twelve officers, bearing straws aloft, a faint semblance of the consular fasces that had escorted a Quinctius or a Fabius through the Roman forum. Yet in no one of these cases was there that apparent legality of title which the shouts of the people and the benediction of the pontiff conveyed to Charles and Otto.

These examples, however, are minor parallels: the complement and illustration of the history of the Empire is to be found in that of the Holy See. The Papacy, whose spiritual power was itself the offspring of Rome’s temporal dominion, evoked the phantom of her parent, used it, obeyed it, rebelled and overthrew it, in its old age once more drew it to her bosom, till in its downfall she heard the knell of the old order and saw the end of her own temporal power approaching.

Both Papacy and Empire rose in an age when the human spirit was prostrated before authority and tradition, when the exercise of private judgement was impossible to most and sinful to all. Those who believed the miracles recorded in the Acta Sanctorum, and did not question the Pseudo-Isidorian decretals, might well recognize as ordained of God the twofold authority of Rome, founded, as it seemed to be, on so many texts of Scripture, and confirmed by five centuries of undisputed possession.

Both sanctioned and satisfied the passion of the Middle Ages for Unity. Ferocity, violence, disorder, were the conspicuous evils of that time: hence all the aspirations of the good were for something which, breaking the force of passion and increasing the force of sympathy, should teach the stubborn wills to sacrifice themselves in the view of a common purpose. To those men, moreover, unable to rise above the sensuous, seeing with eyes unlike ours both the connection and the difference of the spiritual and the secular elements in life, the idea of the Visible Church was full of awful meaning. Solitary thought was helpless, and strove to lose itself in the aggregate, since it could not create for itself that which was universal. The schism that severed a man from the congregation of the faithful on earth was hardly less dreadful than the heresy which excluded him from the company of the blessed in heaven. He who kept not his appointed place in the ranks of the Church militant had no right to swell the rejoicing anthems of the Church triumphant. Here, as in so many other cases, the continued use of traditional language prevents men from seeing how great is the difference between their own times and those in which the phrases they repeat were first used, and used in full sincerity. Whether the world is better or worse for the change which has passed upon its feelings in these matters is another question: all that is necessary to note here is that the change is a profound and pervading one. Obedience, almost the first of mediaeval virtues, is now often spoken of as if it were fit only for slaves or fools. Instead of praising, men are wont to condemn the submission of the individual will, the surrender of the individual belief, to the will or the belief of the community. Some persons declare variety of opinion to be a positive good. The great mass have little longing for a perfect unity of faith. They have no horror of schism. They cannot understand the fascination which the idea of one all-embracing, all-pervading Church exercised upon their mediaeval forefathers. A life in the Church, for the Church, through the Church; a life which she blessed in mass at morning and sent to peaceful rest by the vesper hymn; a life which she supported by the constantly recurring stimulus of the sacraments, relieving it by confession, purifying it by penance, admonishing it by the presentation of visible objects for contemplation and worship—this was the life which they of the Middle Ages conceived of as the rightful life for man; it was the actual life of many, the ideal of all. The unseen world was so unceasingly pointed to, and its dependence on the seen so intensely felt, that the barrier between the two seemed to disappear. The Church was not merely the portal to heaven; it was heaven anticipated; it was already self-gathered and complete. In one sentence from a singular mediaeval document may be found a key to much which seems strangest to us in the feelings of the Middle Ages: ‘The Church is dearer to God than heaven. For the Church does not exist for the sake of heaven, but conversely, heaven for the sake of the Church.’

Again, both Empire and Papacy rested on opinion rather than on material force, and when the struggle which began in the eleventh century came, the Empire succumbed, because its rival’s hold over the souls of men was firmer, more direct, enforced by penalties more terrible than the death of the body. The ecclesiastical host which Alexander III and Innocent IV led was animated by a loftier spirit and more wholly devoted to a single aim than the knights and nobles who followed the banner of the Swabian Caesars. Its allegiance was undivided; it comprehended the principles for which it fought. They trembled at even while they resisted the spiritual power.

Both sprang from what might seem to be the accident of name. The power of the great Latin patriarchate was a Form: the ghost, it has been said, of the older Empire, favoured in its growth by circumstances, but really vital because capable of wonderful adaptation to the character and wants of the time. So too, though far less perfectly, was the Empire. Its Form was the tradition of the universal rule of Rome; it met the needs of successive centuries by civilizing barbarous peoples, by maintaining unity in confusion and disorganization, by controlling brute violence through the sanctions of a higher power, by being made the keystone of a gigantic feudal arch, by becoming in its old age the centre of a European states-system. And its history, as it shews the power of ancient names and forms, shews also how hopeless is the attempt to preserve in life a system which arose out of ideas and under conditions that have passed away, how unreal such a perpetuation may be, and how it may deceive men, by preserving the shadow while it loses the substance. This perpetuation itself, what is it but the expression of the belief of mankind, a belief incessantly corrected yet never weakened, that their old institutions can continue to subsist unchanged, that what has served their fathers will do well enough for them, that it is possible to make a system once for all perfect and abide in it for ever thereafter? Of all political instincts this is perhaps the strongest; often useful, often abused, but never more natural or more fitting than when it led men who felt skill and knowledge slipping from their grasp to seek to save what they could from the wreck of an older and higher civilization. It was thus that both Papacy and Empire were maintained by generations who had no type of greatness and wisdom save that which they associated with the name of Rome. Though it never could have existed save as a prolongation, though it was and remained through the Middle Ages an anachronism, the Empire of the tenth century had changed profoundly from the Empire of the second. Much more was the Papacy, though it too hankered after the forms and titles of antiquity, a truly new creation. And in the same proportion as it was new, and represented the spirit not of a past age but of its own, was it a power stronger and more enduring than the Empire. More enduring, because more lately born, and so in fuller harmony with the ruling spirit and cogent needs of the time, stronger, because at the head of the great ecclesiastical body, in and through which, rather than through secular life, the intelligence and political activity of the Middle Ages sought their expression. The famous simile of Gregory the Seventh is that which best describes the Empire and the Popedom. They were indeed the ‘two lights in the firmament of the militant Church,’ the lights which illumined and ruled the world all through the Middle Ages. And as moonlight is to sunlight, so was the Empire to the Papacy. The rays of the one were borrowed, feeble, often interrupted: the other shone with an unquenchable brilliance that was all her own.

If we analyze the Papacy and the Empire, we shall find that each is old, and each is new. The remark is true in a sense of all institutions, but it applies in a special sense to these two. The Papacy was new in the doctrines and the spirit which it drew from Scripture and Christian tradition. It was old in the form of its government, for this was modelled on the heathen autocracy, old also in the application of compulsive power to matters of opinion and belief, than which nothing could be more opposed to the teachings of Christ. The Empire was new in so far as it was a German kingdom, built up on feudal principles; new also in all that it had imbibed from Christianity—in the sense of its religious mission, and of faith as a bond to unite mankind in one world-embracing state. It was old not only in its name but in the effort to base its universal dominion upon the imprescriptible rights of Rome, and in the autocratic character which its adoption of the ancient Roman law as its own had made it, at least in outward semblance, assume.

This distinction between its component elements may help to supply an answer to the question which the student of its history often puts to himself—‘Was it Roman in anything but name? and was that name anything better than a piece of fantastic antiquarianism?’ A comparison might be drawn between the Antonines of the second century and the Ottos of the tenth which should shew nothing but unlikeness. What the Empire was in the second century every student of the ancient classics knows. In the tenth it was a feudal monarchy, resting on a strong territorial oligarchy. Its chiefs were barbarians, the sons of those who had destroyed Varus and baffled Germanicus, sometimes unable even to use the tongue of Rome. Its powers, nominally wide, were limited by custom and the strength of the great vassals. It could scarcely be said to have a governmental organization, whether judicial or administrative. It was consecrated to the defence, nay, it existed by virtue of the religion, which Trajan and Marcus had persecuted. Nevertheless, however strongly the contrast be stated points of resemblance will remain. The Roman idea of universal denationalization survived as an idea, and drew with it that of a certain equality among all free subjects. The world’s highest dignity was for many centuries the only civil office to which any free-born Christian was legally eligible. So too there survived the Roman conception of Law, written, settled, scientific law, as the foundation of social order, as the regulator of the relations of members of the community, as the form through which the state must act.

It may be added that there was among the Teutonic Emperors, when one compares them as a whole either with the East Roman monarchs or with the Muslim dynasties, a loftiness of spirit and a sense of duty to the realm they ruled which recalls the old Roman type. Trajan and Marcus might have found their true successors among the woods of Germany rather than in the palaces of Constantinople, where every office and name and custom had floated down from the court of Theodosius in a stream of unbroken legitimacy. The ceremonies of Henry the Seventh’s coronation would have been strange indeed to Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus Augustus; yet they were better than the purple buskins of Byzantium: they had more Roman dignity and force than the fantastic forms with which a Palaeologus was installed! Of the Germanic Empire in later centuries the same cannot be said. It had lived on, when honour and nature bade it die: it had become what the Empire of the Moguls had then become, and that of the Ottomans still later became, a curious relic of antiquity, on which the philosopher might muse, but from which the vigour of life and all power for good had long since departed. Institutions, however, should, like men, be judged by their prime.

The word ‘Imperialism’ has within our own time been used in varying senses and has evoked diverse feelings of attraction and repulsion. From the time when the first Bonaparte took the title of Emperor in France until the fall of Louis Napoleon in 1870, it was used to denote a system intended to imitate that which Julius Caesar and his subtle nephew erected upon the ruins of the republican constitution of Rome. The sacrifice of the individual to the mass, the concentration of all legislative and judicial powers in the person of the sovereign, the centralization of the administrative system, the maintenance of order by a large military force, the substitution of the influence of public opinion for the control of representative assemblies, were commonly taken, whether rightly or wrongly, to characterize that system: and the glory which surrounded the name of Rome, the peace and order which the sway of the Roman Caesars had, in its best days, secured for the world, were used to recommend Napoleonic rule in France and to justify French predominance in Europe. That system has passed away, those memories are no longer invoked. Neither with Bonapartean imperialism nor with other more recent sense given to the term had the doctrines on which the mediaeval Empire rested anything in common. There was, nevertheless, a thing which may be called mediaeval imperialism, a theory of the nature of the state and the best form of government, of which, since it has been already described, it is enough to say here, that from three leading principles all its properties may be derived. The first and not the most essential was the existence of the state as a monarchy. The second was the exact coincidence of the Holy State’s limits, and the perfect harmony of its workings with the limits and the workings of Holy Church. The third was its universality. These three were vital. Forms of political organization, the presence or absence of constitutional checks, the degree of liberty enjoyed by the subject, the rights conceded to local authorities, all these were matters of secondary importance. But although there brooded over all the shadow of an autocracy, it was an autocracy not of the sword but of law, itself subject to that Law of Nature which mediaeval thinkers recognized as the expression of the will of a righteous God; an autocracy not chilling and blighting, but one which, in Germany at least, looked with favour on municipal freedom, and everywhere did its best for learning, for religion, for intelligence; an autocracy not hereditary, but one which maintained in theory the principle that he should rule who was found the fittest. To praise or to decry the Empire as a despotic power is to misunderstand it altogether. We need not, because an unbounded prerogative was useful in ages of turbulence, advocate it now; nor need we, with Sismondi, blame the Frankish conqueror because he granted no ‘constitutional charter’ to all the nations that obeyed him. Like the Papacy, the Empire expressed the political ideas of a time, and not of all time: like the temporal power of the Papacy, it decayed when those ideas changed; when men became more capable of rational liberty, when thought grew stronger, and the spiritual nature shook itself more free from the bonds of sense.

The influence of the Empire upon Germany may in some aspects appear altogether unfortunate. For many generations the flower of Teutonic chivalry crossed the Alps to perish by the sword of the Lombards, or the deadlier fevers of Rome. Italy terribly avenged the wrongs she suffered. Those who destroyed the national existence of another people forfeited their own. The German kingdom, crushed beneath the weight of the Roman Empire, could never recover strength enough to form a compact and united monarchy, such as arose elsewhere in Europe. The race whom their neighbours had feared and obeyed till the middle of the thirteenth century saw themselves, down even to our own day, the prey of intestine feuds and their country the battlefield of Europe. Spoiled and insulted by a neighbour restlessly active and long superior in the arts of success, they were for a time accustomed to regard France as the downtrodden Slavonic tribes regarded them. The want of national union and political liberty from which Germany used to suffer need not be attributed to the differences of her races; for, conspicuous as that difference was in the days of Otto the Great, it was less conspicuous than in France, where intruding Franks, Goths, Burgundians, and Northmen were mingled with primitive Celts and Basques; less conspicuous than in Spain, or Italy, or Britain. Rather was it due to that decline of the central government which was induced by its strife with the Popedom, by its endless Italian wars, by the passion for universal dominion which made it the assailant of all the neighbouring countries. The absence or the weakness of the embarrassed monarch enabled his feudal vassals to establish petty despotisms, debarring the nation from united political action, and greatly retarding the emancipation of the commons. Thus, while the princes became shamelessly selfish, justifying their resistance to the throne as the defence of their own liberty—a liberty which included the oppression of their subjects—and ready on the least occasion to throw themselves into the arms of France, the body of the people were deprived of all political training, and found the lack of such experience impede their efforts down to our own time.

For such misfortunes, however, as the Empire entailed upon the nation there was not wanting some compensation. The inheritance of the Roman Empire made the Germans the ruling race of Europe, and the brilliance of that glorious dawn could never fade entirely from their name. Even in those later days when they lived as a peaceful people, acquiescent in paternal government, and given to the quiet enjoyments of art, music, and meditation, they delighted themselves with memories of the time when their conquering chivalry was the terror of the Gaul and the Slave, the Lombard and the Saracen. The national life received a keen stimulus from the sense of exaltation which victory brought, and from the intercourse with countries where the old civilization had not wholly perished. It was this connection with Italy that raised the German lands out of barbarism, and did for them the work which Roman conquest had performed in Gaul, Spain, and Britain. From the Empire flowed the richness of their mediaeval life and literature: it first awoke in them a consciousness of national existence; its history inspired and served as material to their poetry; to many ardent patriots the splendours of the past became the beacon of the future. There was a bright side even to that long political disunion, which lasted down till the days when in achieving their national unity they became at the same time a mighty military power. When they complained that they were not a nation, and sighed for the harmony of feeling and singleness of aim which their great rival seemed to display, the example of a wonderful ancient people which never achieved political unity might have brought them some comfort. To the variety of conditions and aptitudes which the existence of so many small governments helped to produce may be partly attributed the breadth of developement in German thought and literature, by virtue of which, in the first half of the nineteenth century, it transcended the French hardly less than the Greek surpassed the Roman. Paris no doubt was great, but a country may lose as well as gain by the predominance of a single city; and Germany had in those days no cause to lament that she alone among modern states had never possessed a capital.

In the years before 1866 when Austria and Prussia were disputing the headship of Germany, the merits of the old Empire were the subject of a brisk controversy among several German professors of history. The spokesmen of the Austrian or Roman Catholic party, a party which was then not less powerful in some of the minor German States than in Vienna, claimed for the Hapsburg monarchy the honour of being the legitimate representative of the mediaeval Empire, and declared that only by again accepting Hapsburg leadership could Germany win back the glory and the strength that once were hers. The North German liberals ironically applauded the comparison. ‘Yes,’ they replied, ‘your Austrian Empire, as it calls itself, is the true daughter of the old despotism: not less tyrannical, not less aggressive, not less retrograde; like its progenitor, the friend of priests, the enemy of free thought, the trampler upon the national feeling of the peoples that obey it. It is you whose selfish and anti-national policy blasts the hope of German unity now, as Otto and Frederick blasted it long ago by their schemes of foreign conquest. The dream of Empire has been our bane from first to last.’

To an impartial eye, neither of these contending schools seemed entitled to press history into the service of partizan politics. Austria might indeed in those days, when she was ruling over a disaffected Venetia, a disaffected Hungary, a disaffected Galicia, seem to be only too faithfully reproducing the policy of the Saxon and Swabian Caesars. Yet the differences were manifest. If they oppressed the Italian cities they did it in the defence of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. If they lusted after a dominion over the races on their borders, that dominion was to them a means of spreading civilization and religion in savage countries, not of pampering upon their revenues an alien court and aristocracy. They strove to maintain a strong government at home, but they did it when a strong government was the first of political blessings. They gathered and maintained vast armies; but those armies were composed of knights and barons who lived for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuating their own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another nationality. If Otto and Frederick erred in pursuing the glittering lure of universal dominion, they were the victims of a belief which all the world shared, and they erred in the twilight of a half-barbarous age, not in the noonday blaze of modern civilization. The enthusiasm for mediaeval faith and simplicity which was so fervid in the first half of the nineteenth century has run its course, and is not likely soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the grandest of them, were in some respects little better than savages. But when he approaches more recent times, and sees how, during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with their subjects and with each other, he will forget the ferocity of the Middle Ages, in disgust at the heartlessness, the perfidy, the injustice all the more odious because it sometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the annals of the military monarchies of Europe. And as the Holy Empire of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries cannot fairly be represented as having set a precedent for the later misdeeds of Austria, so neither did its traditions furnish a sufficient basis for the claims she then made to the leadership of the German nation. The day of imperial greatness was already past when Rudolf the first Hapsburg reached the throne; while during the later part of the Austrian period, from Ferdinand II to Francis II, the Holy Empire was to Germany a mere clog and incumbrance, which the unhappy nation bore because she knew not how to rid herself of it.

We are not yet far enough removed from the Empire to estimate all its influence on European progress, just as he must travel far from the foot of a mountain who would take in at a glance its peaks and slopes and buttresses, appreciate the nobility of its lines, and perceive its relation to the valleys and ranges that fill the landscape on either side of it. But as the revival of the imperial name under Charles and Otto was mainly due to the continuing power of the Roman Law and the Roman Church, we may take note of the relation which it bore to these two great factors in modern civilization. From it came nearly everything in the political and legal institutions of the Middle Ages that was not feudal: and feudalism itself was modified by the notions which the Empire embodied. The conception of royalty which grew up in the thirteenth century and held its ground till recent times, and in particular the singular doctrine of the ‘divine right’ of a sovereign, belonged originally and properly to the Emperor, and was extended from his office to that of other monarchs. So the existence of the Empire greatly contributed to the prevalence of Roman law as a practical system through Europe, down to our own days. For while in Southern France and Central Italy, where the subject population greatly outnumbered their conquerors, the old system might have in any case survived, it may be conjectured that in other parts of the European continent there would have grown up (as happened in England) bodies of local customary law lacking that symmetry and scientific quality which characterize the law of Rome. The fact that there was still a Roman Emperor, and that the study of the law promulgated by his remote predecessors was renewed under his auspices in countries recognizing his supremacy, gave a life and reality to the ancient texts they could never have possessed, but for the notion that since the German monarch was the legitimate successor of Justinian, the Corpus Iuris must be binding on all his subjects. This strange idea was received with a faith so unhesitating that even the aristocracy, who naturally disliked a system which the Emperors and the cities favoured, must admit its validity, and by the middle of the sixteenth century Roman law prevailed through Germany. When it is considered how great are the services which German writers have rendered and continue to render to the study of scientific jurisprudence this result will appear far from insignificant. But another of still wider import followed. When by the Peace of Westphalia a crowd of petty principalities were recognized as practically independent states, the need of a body of rules to regulate their relations and intercourse became pressing. Such a code (if one may call it by that name) Grotius and his successors compiled out of the principles which they found in the Roman law, then the private law of the Germanic countries, thus laying the foundation whereon the system of international jurisprudence has been built up during the last three centuries. That system could hardly have arisen in any country where the law of Rome had not been the fountain of legal ideas and the groundwork of positive enactments. In Germany, too, was it first carried out in practice, and with a success which is perhaps the best title of the later Empire to the grateful remembrance of mankind. Under its protecting shade small princedoms and free cities lived, down to Napoleon’s day, unmolested beside states like Saxony and Bavaria; each member of the Germanic body feeling that the rights of the weakest of his brethren were also his own.

The most important chapter in the history of the Empire is that which describes its relation to the Church and the Apostolic See. Of the ecclesiastical power it was alternately the champion and the enemy. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Emperors extended the dominion of Peter’s chair: in the tenth and eleventh they rescued it from an abyss of guilt and shame to be the instrument of their own downfall. The struggle which began under Gregory the Seventh, although it belonged to the political rather than to the religious sphere, awoke in the Teutonic nations a suspicion of the papal court, and a disposition to resist its pretensions. That struggle ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the victory of the priesthood—a victory whose abuse by the arrogant and rapacious pontiffs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made it more ruinous than a defeat. The anger which had long smouldered in the breasts of the Northern peoples burst out in the sixteenth with a violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto supported, and made the Emperors once more the allies of the Popedom, and the partners of its declining fortunes. But the nature of that alliance and of the hostility which had preceded it must not be misunderstood. It is a natural, but not the less a serious error to suppose, as some modern writers have done, that the pretensions of the Empire and the Popedom were mutually exclusive; that each claimed all the rights, spiritual and secular, of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the case, that we find mediaeval writers and statesmen, even Emperors and Popes themselves, expressly recognizing a divinely appointed duality of government—two potentates, each supreme in the sphere of his own activity, Peter in things eternal, Caesar in things temporal. The relative position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo a signal alteration. In the age of Charles, the barbarous age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but be governed chiefly by physical force, the Emperor was practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent III, when the power of ideas had grown stronger in the world, and was able to resist, or to bend to its service, the arms and the wealth of men, we see the balance inclined the other way. Spiritual authority is conceived of as being of a nature so high and holy that it is entitled to inspire and guide the civil administration. But there was not yet a purpose to supplant that administration or to degrade its head. The great struggle of the eleventh and two following centuries does not aim at the annihilation of one or other power, but turns upon the character of their connection. Hildebrand, the typical representative of the Popedom, requires the obedience of the Emperor on the ground of his own personal responsibility for the souls of their common subjects: he demands, not that the functions of temporal government shall be directly committed to himself, but that they shall be exercised in conformity with the will of God, whereof he is the exponent. The imperialist party, since they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, nor the transcendent importance of eternal salvation, could do no more than protest that the Emperor, being also divinely appointed, was directly answerable to God, and remind the Pope that his kingdom was not of this world. There was in truth no way out of the difficulty, for it was caused by the attempt to sever things which, distinguishable in thought, hardly admit of severance in practice, life in the soul and life in the world, life for the future and life in the present. Then the Papacy, embittered by strife and intoxicated by victory, began to advance pretensions so extravagant as to provoke reaction. Frederick II claimed ecclesiastical authority: Lewis IV deposed a reigning Pope and crowned a friar as his successor. Each power had grievously wounded the other; the decline of both had begun, for each was losing its hold upon opinion. Yet for a while neither combatant had pushed his theory to extremities, since he felt that his adversary’s title rested on the same foundations as his own. The strife which had been keenest at the time when the world believed fervently in both powers, suddenly died away; and an alliance came when faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the other. From the Reformation onwards Empire and Popedom fought no longer against one another for supremacy, but side by side for existence.

Nor was that which may be called the inner life of the Empire less momentous in its influence upon the minds of men than were its outward dealings with the Roman Church upon the various phases of her fortunes. In the Middle Ages, men conceived of the communion of the saints as the formal unity of an organized body of worshippers, and found the concrete realization of that conception in their universal religious state, which was in one aspect the Church, in another, the Empire. Into the meaning and worth of the conception, into the nature of the connection which subsists or ought to subsist between the Church and the State, this is not the place to inquire. That the form which that connection took in the Middle Ages was always imperfect and became eventually rigid and unprogressive was sufficiently proved by the event. But by it the European peoples were saved from the isolation, and narrowness, and jealous exclusiveness which had checked the growth of the earlier civilizations of the world, and which we see now lying like a weight upon the kingdoms of the East: by it they were brought into that mutual knowledge and co-operation which is the condition if it be not the source of all true culture and progress. For as by the Roman Empire of old the nations were first forced to own a common sway, so by the Empire of the Middle Ages was preserved the feeling of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor distinction.

As despotic monarchs claiming the world for their realm, the Teutonic Emperors strove from the first against three principles, over all of which their forerunners of the elder Rome had triumphed—those of Nationality, Aristocracy, and Popular Freedom. Their early struggles were against the first of these principles, and ended with its victory in the emancipation, one after another, of France, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Burgundy, and Italy. The second, in the form of feudalism, menaced even when seeming to exalt and obey them, and succeeded, during and after the Great Interregnum, in destroying their effective strength in Germany. Aggression and inheritance turned the numerous independent principalities thus formed out of the greater fiefs, into a few military monarchies, resting neither on reciprocal loyalty, like feudal kingdoms, nor on religious duty and tradition, like the Empire, but on material force, more or less disguised by legal forms. That the hostility to the Empire of the impulse towards free self-government was accidental rather than necessary is seen by this, that the very same monarchs who sought to crush the Lombard and Tuscan cities favoured the growth of the free towns of Germany and sometimes favoured the free rural communities of what afterwards became Switzerland. The theoretical autocracy of Caesar could in practice reconcile itself with civic or cantonal autonomy just as easily as it did with the rights of the feudal vassal in the days when the vassal was content to keep his place. Nevertheless the principles whereon the Holy Empire rested, were in so far incompatible with freedom of judgement, of speech, and of action, that when the German and Swiss Reformers asserted the rights of the individual in the sphere of religion, they weakened the Empire by denying the necessity of external unity in matters spiritual. The extension of such doctrines to the secular world would have in like manner struck at the doctrine of imperial absolutism had it not found a nearer and deadlier foe in the actual tyranny of the princes. It is more than a coincidence, that as the proclamation of the liberty of thought had shaken, so the proclamation of liberty of action made by the revolutionary movement, whose beginning the world saw and only half understood in 1789, should have indirectly become the cause which overthrew the Holy Empire.

Its fall in the midst of the great convulsion that changed the face of Europe marks an era in history, an era whose character the events of the sixty years that followed went on unfolding: an era of the destruction of old forms and systems and the building up of new. The latest instances are the most memorable. Under our eyes, the work which Theodorich and Lewis the Second, Guido and Ardoin and the second Frederick, essayed in vain, was achieved by the steadfast will of the Italian people. The fairest province of the Empire, for which Franconian and Swabian battled so long, became at last a single monarchy under the Burgundian count, whom Sigismund created imperial vicar in Italy, and who, now that he holds the ancient capital, many call himself ‘king of the Romans’ more truly than did ever Greek or Frank or Saxon or Austrian since Constantine forsook the Tiber for the Bosphorus. No longer the prey of the stranger, Italy could forget the past, and sympathize, as indeed, since the fortunate alliance of 1866, she began to sympathize, with the efforts after national unity of her ancient enemy—efforts confronted by so many obstacles that for many years they seemed all but hopeless.

On the new shapes that may emerge before the reconstruction of Europe is complete it would be idle to speculate. Yet one prediction may be ventured. No universal monarchy is likely to arise. More frequent intercourse, more rapid communications, the expansion of trade and the progress of thought, though they have effaced some prejudices and given nations a fuller knowledge of one another, have not lessened the strength of national feeling. The racial or commercial antagonisms of democracies are as fertile in menaces to peace as were ever the dynastic interests of princes. No one who reads the history of the last three hundred years, no one, above all, who studies attentively the career of Napoleon, can believe it possible for any state, however great her energy and material resources, to repeat in modern Europe the part of ancient Rome: to gather into one vast political body races whose national individuality has grown more and more marked in each successive age. Nevertheless, it is in great measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages that the bonds of national union are on the whole both stronger and nobler than they were ever before. The greatest historian of republican Rome, after summing up the results to the world of his hero’s career, closes his treatise with these words: ‘There was in the world as Caesar found it the rich and noble heritage of past centuries, and an endless abundance of splendour and glory, but little soul, still less taste, and, least of all, joy in and through life. Truly it was an old world, and even the patriotic genius of Caesar could not make it young again. The blush of dawn returns not until the night has fully descended. Yet with him there came to the much-tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening after a sultry day: and when, after long historical night, the new day broke once more upon the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-guided movement began their course towards new and higher aims, many were found among them in whom the seed of Caesar had sprung up, many who owed him, and who owe him still, their national individuality.’ If this be the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the Empire, so is it also the glory of Charles, the second founder, and of more than one amongst his Teutonic successors. The work of the mediaeval Empire was self-destructive; and it fostered, while seeming to oppose, the nationalities that were destined to replace it. It tamed the barbarous races of the North, and forced them within the pale of civilization. It preserved the memory of ancient order and culture. In times of violence and oppression, it set before its subjects the duty of rational obedience to an authority whose watchwords were peace and religion. It kept alive, in the face of national prejudices, the notion of a great European commonwealth. And by doing all this, it was in effect abolishing the need for an all-absorbing autocratic power like itself: it was making men capable of using national independence aright: it was enabling them to rise to the conception of a spontaneous activity, and of a freedom which is above law but not against it, to which national independence itself, if it is to be a blessing, ought to be a means.

In the beginning of the fourteenth century the thoughts and hopes of the purest and most earnest minds were directed to the ideal of a Universal Christian State, by which universal peace should be secured; a lofty ideal, and one never to be forgotten by mankind. In the centuries that followed, other aims, other ideals, inspired the men who led the movement of the world, and five hundred years after Dante’s time noble lives were being consecrated to the deliverance of every people from alien rule, and the establishment of each as a free self-governing community. This too was a high ideal, and a precious one, for it meant the extinction of many tyrannies and the drying up of many springs of race hatred. No wonder that the principle of nationalities was then advocated with honest devotion as the perfect form of political developement. Yet finality cannot be claimed for this ideal, any more than for those that went before. If all other history did not bid us beware the habit of taking the problems and the conditions of our own age for those of all time, the warning which the history of the Empire gives might alone be warning enough. From the days of Augustus down to those of Charles the Fifth the whole civilized world believed in its existence as a part of the eternal fitness of things, and Christian theologians were not behind heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the world would perish with it. Yet the Empire vanished, and the world remained, and hardly noted the change.

The highest themes which can occupy the mind are, as Dante has said, those which most transcend the resources of human language. So in parting from a great subject the feeling arises that words fail to convey the ideas it suggests, and that however much may have been said, much must remain unsaid, because incapable of expression. Here one is baffled partly by the magnitude of the subject, for it is a vast one, which needs to be studied as a whole, as an institution which through forty generations of men preserves its name and its claims while its relations to the world around it are constantly changing. But another difficulty lies still deeper. It lies in grasping the essence and spirit of the Holy Empire as it appeared to the saints and poets of the Middle Ages, and in realizing all that it meant to them. Formulas help us little: it is rather through imagination than by logic or analysis that we may succeed in apprehending the true significance of this strange creation of reverent tradition and mystical faith which filled the sky and scarcely touched the earth. A like difficulty meets us when we think of that other still more wonderful child of Rome and of tradition, the Papacy. The Protestants of the seventeenth century, who saw in it nothing but a gigantic upas-tree of fraud and superstition, planted and reared by the enemy of mankind, were hardly further from entering into the mystery of its being than the complacent philosophers of the eighteenth century, who explained in neat phrases the process of its growth, analyzed it as a clever piece of mechanism, enumerating and measuring the interests it appealed to. As there is a sense in which the Papacy is above explanation, because it appeals to emotion, not to reason, to faith, and not to sight, so of the Empire also may this be said, not that it is impossible to discover the beliefs which created and sustained it, but that the power and fascination of those beliefs cannot be adequately apprehended by men whose minds have been differently trained, and whose imaginations are fired by different ideals. Something we should know of it if we knew what were the thoughts of Julius Caesar when he laid the foundations on which Augustus built; of Charles the Great, when he reared anew the majestic pile; of Henry the Third, when he consecrated the strength of his crown to the purification of the Church; of Frederick ‘the Wonder of the World,’ when he strove to avert the surely coming ruin. Something more succeeding generations will know, who may judge the Middle Ages more fairly than we, still influenced by a reaction against all that is mediaeval, can hope to do, and to whom it will be given to see and understand new forms of political life, whose nature we cannot conjecture. Seeing more than we do, they will also see some things less distinctly. The Empire which to us still looms largely on the horizon of the past, will to them sink lower and lower as they journey onwards into the future. But its importance in universal history it can never lose. For into it all the life of the ancient world was gathered: out of it all the life of the modern world arose.