Chapter 19

See theBiographical Notice of Ebenezer Emmons, by J. Marcou;Amer. Geologist, vol. vii. (Jan., 1891), p. 1 (with portrait and list of publications).

EMMONS, NATHANAEL(1745-1840), American theologian, was born at East Haddam, Connecticut, on the 20th of April 1745. He graduated at Yale in 1767, studied theology under the Rev. John Smalley (1734-1820) at Berlin, Connecticut, and was licensed to preach in 1769. After preaching four years in New York and New Hampshire, he became, in April 1773, pastor of the Second church at Franklin (until 1778 a part of Wrentham, Massachusetts), of which he remained in charge until May 1827, when failing health compelled his relinquishment of active ministerial cares. He lived, however, for many years thereafter, dying of old age at Franklin on the 23rd of September 1840. It was as a theologian that Dr Emmons was best known, and for half a century probably no clergyman in New England exerted so wide an influence. He developed an original system of divinity, somewhat on the structural plan of that of Samuel Hopkins, and, in Emmons’s own belief, contained in and evolved from Hopkinsianism. While by no means abandoning the tenets of the old Calvinistic faith, he came to be looked upon as the chief representative of what was then known as the “new school” of theologians. His system declared that holiness and sin are free voluntary exercises; that men act freely under the divine agency; that the slightest transgression deserves eternal punishment; that it is through God’s mere grace that the penitent believer is pardoned and justified; that, in spite of total depravity, sinners ought to repent; and that regeneration is active, not passive, with the believer. Emmonsism was spread and perpetuated by more than a hundred clergymen, whom he personally trained. Politically, he was an ardent patriot during the War of Independence, and a strong Federalist afterwards, several of his political discourses attracting wide attention. He was a founder and the first president of the Massachusetts Missionary Society, and was influential in the establishment of Andover Theological Seminary. More than two hundred of his sermons and addresses were published during his lifetime. HisWorkswere published in 6 vols. (Boston, 1842; new edition, 1861).

See also theMemoir, by Dr E.A. Park (Andover, 1861).

EMPEDOCLES(c.490-430B.C.), Greek philosopher and statesman, was Born at Agrigentum (Acragas, Girgenti) in Sicily of a distinguished family, then at the height of its glory. His grandfather Empedocles was victorious in the Olympian chariot race in 496; in 470 his father Meto was largely instrumental in the overthrow of the tyrant Thrasydaeus. We know almost nothing of his life. The numerous legends which have grown up round his name yield very little that can fairly be regarded as authentic. It seems that he carried on the democratic tradition of his house by helping to overthrow an oligarchic government which succeeded the tyranny in Agrigentum, and was invited by the citizens to become their king. That he refused the honour may have been due to a real enthusiasm for free institutions or to the prudential recognition of the peril which in those turbulent times surrounded the royal dignity. Ultimately a change in the balance of parties compelled him to leave the city, and he died in the Peloponnese of the results of an accident in 430.

Of his poem on nature (φύσις) there are left about 400 lines in unequal fragments out of the original 5000; of the hymns of purification (καθαρμοί) less than 100 verses remain; of theother works, improbably assigned to him, nothing is known. His grand but obscure hexameters, after the example of Parmenides, delighted Lucretius. Aristotle, it is said, called him the father of rhetoric. But it was as at once statesman, prophet, physicist, physician and reformer that he most impressed the popular imagination. To his contemporaries, as to himself, he seemed more than a mere man. The Sicilians honoured his august aspect as he moved amongst them with purple robes and golden girdle, with long hair bound by a Delphic garland, and brazen sandals on his feet, and with a retinue of slaves behind him. Stories were told of the ingenuity and generosity by which he had made the marshes round Selinus salubrious, of the grotesque device by which he laid the winds that ruined the harvests of Agrigentum, and of the almost miraculous restoration to life of a woman who had long lain in a death-like trance. Legends stranger still told of his disappearance from among men. Empedocles, according to one story, was one midnight, after a feast held in his honour, called away in a blaze of glory to the gods; according to another, he had only thrown himself into the crater of Etna, in the hope that men, finding no traces of his end, would suppose him translated to heaven. But his hopes were cheated by the volcano, which cast forth his brazen sandals and betrayed his secret (Diog. Laërt. viii. 67). The people of Agrigentum have never ceased to honour his name, and even in modern times he has been celebrated by followers of Mazzini as the democrat of antiquitypar excellence.

As his history is uncertain, so his doctrines are hard to put together. He does not belong to any one definite school. While, on one hand, he combines much that had been suggested by Parmenides, Pythagoras and the Ionic schools, he has germs of truth that Plato and Aristotle afterwards developed; he is at once a firm believer in Orphic mysteries, and a scientific thinker, precursor of the physical scientists. There are, according to Empedocles, four ultimate elements, four primal divinities, of which are made all structures in the world—fire, air, water, earth. These four elements are eternally brought into union, and eternally parted from each other, by two divine beings or powers, love and hatred—an attractive and a repulsive force which the ordinary eye can see working amongst men, but which really pervade the whole world. According to the different proportions in which these four indestructible and unchangeable matters are combined with each other is the difference of the organic structure produced;e.g.flesh and blood are made of equal (in weight but not in volume) parts of all four elements, whereas bones are one-half fire, one-fourth earth, and one-fourth water. It is in the aggregation and segregation of elements thus arising that Empedocles, like the atomists, finds the real process which corresponds to what is popularly termed growth, increase or decrease. Nothing new comes or can come into being; the only change that can occur is a change in the juxtaposition of element with element.

Empedocles apparently regarded love (φιλότης) and discord (νεῖκος) as alternately holding the empire over things,—neither, however, being ever quite absent. As the best and original state, he seems to have conceived a period when love was predominant, and all the elements formed one great sphere or globe. Since that period discord had gained more sway; and the actual world was full of contrasts and oppositions, due to the combined action of both principles. His theory attempted to explain the separation of elements, the formation of earth and sea, of sun and moon, of atmosphere. But the most interesting and most matured part of his views dealt with the first origin of plants and animals, and with the physiology of man. As the elements (his deities) entered into combinations, there appeared quaint results—heads without necks, arms without shoulders. Then as these fragmentary structures met, there were seen horned heads on human bodies, bodies of oxen with men’s heads, and figures of double sex. But most of these products of natural forces disappeared as suddenly as they arose; only in those rare cases where the several parts were found adapted to each other, and casual member fitted into casual member, did the complex structures thus formed last. Thus from spontaneous aggregations of casual aggregates, which suited each other as if this had been intended, did the organic universe originally spring. Soon various influences reduced the creatures of double sex to a male and a female, and the world was replenished with organic life. It is impossible not to see in this theory a crude anticipation of the “survival of the fittest” theory of modern evolutionists.

As man, animal and plant are composed of the same elements in different proportions, there is an identity of nature in them all. They all have sense and understanding; in man, however, and especially in the blood at his heart, mind has its peculiar seat. But mind is always dependent upon the body, and varies with its changing constitution. Hence the precepts of morality are with Empedocles largely dietetic.

Knowledge is explained by the principle that the several elements in the things outside us are perceived by the corresponding elements in ourselves. We know only in so far as we have within us a nature cognate to the object of knowledge. Like is known by like. The whole body is full of pores, and hence respiration takes place over the whole frame. But in the organs of sense these pores are specially adapted to receive the effluxes which are continually rising from bodies around us; and in this way perception is somewhat obscurely explained. The theory, however unsatisfactory as an explanation, has one great merit, that it recognizes between the eye, for instance, and the object seen an intermediate something. Certain particles go forth from the eye to meet similar particles given forth from the object, and the resultant contact constitutes vision. This idea contains within it the germ of the modern idea of the subjectivity of sense-given data; perception is not merely a passive reflection of external objects.

It is not easy to harmonize these quasi-scientific theories with the theory of transmigration of souls which Empedocles seems to expound. Probably the doctrine that the divinity (δαίμων) passes from element to element, nowhere finding a home, is a mystical way of teaching the continued identity of the principles which are at the bottom of every phase of development from inorganic nature to man. At the top of the scale are the prophet and the physician, those who have best learned the secret of life; they are next to the divine. One law, an identity of elements, pervades all nature; existence is one from end to end; the plant and the animal are links in a chain where man is a link too; and even the distinction between male and female is transcended. The beasts are kindred with man; he who eats their flesh is not much better than a cannibal.

Looking at the opposition between these and the ordinary opinions, we are not surprised that Empedocles notes the limitation and narrowness of human perceptions. We see, he says, but a part, and fancy that we have grasped the whole. But the senses cannot lead to truth; thought and reflection must look at the thing on every side. It is the business of a philosopher, while he lays bare the fundamental difference of elements, to display the identity that subsists between what seem unconnected parts of the universe.

See Diog. Laërt. viii. 51-77; Sext. Empiric.Adv. math.vii. 123; Simplicius,Phys.f. 24, f. 76. For text Simon Karsten, “Empedoclis Agrigenti carminum reliquiae,” inReliq. phil. vet.(Amsterdam, 1838); F.W.A. Mullach,Fragmenta philosophorum Graecorum, vol. i.; H. Stein,Empedoclis Agrigenti fragmenta(Bonn, 1882); H. Ritter and L. Preller,Historia philosophiae(4th ed., Gotha, 1869), chap. iii. ad fin.; A. Fairbanks,The First Philosophers of Greece(1898). Verse translation, W.E. Leonard (1908). For criticism E. Zeller,Phil. der Griechen(Eng. trans. S.F. Alleyne, 2 vols., London, 1881); A.W. Benn,Greek Philosophers(1882); J.A. Symonds,Studies of the Greek Poets(3rd ed., 1893), vol. i. chap. 7; C.B. Renouvier,Manuel de philosophie ancienne(Paris, 1844); T. Gomperz,Greek Thinkers, vol. i. (Eng. trans. L. Magnus, 1901); W. Windelband,Hist. of Phil.(Eng. trans. 1895); many articles in periodicals (see Baldwin’sDict. of Philos.vol. iii. p. 190).

(W. W.; X.)

EMPEROR(Fr.empereur, from the Lat.imperator), a title formerly borne by the sovereigns of the Roman empire (seeEmpire), and since their time, partly by derivation, partly by imitation, used by a variety of other sovereigns. Under the Republic, the termimperatorapplied in theory to any magistratevested withimperium; but in practice it was only used of a magistrate who was acting abroad (militiae) and was thus in command of troops. The termimperatorwas the natural and regular designation employed by his troops in addressing such a magistrate; but it was more particularly and specially employed by them to salute him after a victory; and when he had been thus saluted he could use the title of imperator in public till the day of his triumph at Rome, after which it would lapse along with hisimperium. The senate itself might, in the later Republic, invite a victorious general to assume the title; and in these two customs—the salutation of the troops, and the invitation of the senate—we see in the germ the two methods by which under the Empire theprincepswas designated; while in the military connotation attaching to the name even under the Republic we can detect in advance the military character by which the emperor and the Empire were afterwards distinguished. Julius Caesar was the first who used the title continuously (from 58B.C.to his death in 44B.C.), as welldomiasmilitiae; and his nephew Augustus took a further step when he made the term imperator apraenomen, a practice which after the time of Nero becomes regular. But apart from this amalgamation of the term with his regular name, and the private right to its use which that bestowed, every emperor had an additional and double right to the title on public grounds, possessed as he was of animperium infinitum majus, and commanding as he did all the troops of the Empire. From the latter point of view—asgeneralissimoof the forces of Rome, he had the right to the insignia of the commander (the laurel wreath and the fasces), and to the protection of a bodyguard, thepraetoriani. This public title of imperator was normally conferred by the senate; and an emperor normally dates his reign from the day of his salutation by the senate. But the troops were also regarded as still retaining the right of saluting animperator; and there were emperors who regarded themselves as created by such salutation and dated their reigns accordingly. The military associations of the term thus resulted, only too often, in making the emperor the nominee of a turbulent soldiery.

Augustus had been designated (not indeed officially, but none the less regularly) asprinceps—the first citizen or foremost man of the state. The designation suited the early years of the Empire, in which a dyarchy ofprincepsand senate had been maintained. But by the 2nd century the dyarchy is passing into a monarchy: the title of princeps recedes, and the title of imperator comes into prominence to designate not merely the possessor of a certainimperium, or the general of troops, but the simple monarch in the fulness of his power as head of the state. From the days of Diocletian one finds occasionally two emperors, but not, at any rate in theory, two Empires; the two emperors are the dual sovereigns of a single realm. But from the time of Arcadius and Honorius (A.D.395) there are in reality (though not in theory) two Empires as well as two emperors, one of the East and one of the West. When Greek became the sole language of the East Roman Empire,imperatorwas rendered sometimes byβασιλεύςand sometimes byαὐτοκράτωρ, the former word being the usual designation of a sovereign, the latter specially denoting that despotic power which theimperatorheld, and being in fact the official translation ofimperator. Justinian usesαὐτοκράτωρas his formal title, andβασιλεύςas the popular term.

On the revival of the Roman empire in the West by Charlemagne in 800, the title (at first in the formimperator, orimperatorAugustus, afterwardsRomanorum imperator Augustus) was taken by him and by his Frankish, Italian and German successors, heads of the Holy Roman Empire, down to the abdication of the emperor Francis II. in 1806. The doctrine had, however, grown up in the earlier middle ages (about the time of the emperor Henry II., 1002-1024) that although the emperor was chosen in Germany (at first by the nation, afterwards by a small body of electors), and entitled from the moment of his election to be crowned in Rome by the pope, he could not use the title of emperor until that coronation had actually taken place. The German sovereign, therefore, though he exercised, as soon as chosen, full imperial powers both in Germany and Italy, called himself merely “king of the Romans” (Romanorum rex semper Augustus) until he had received the sacred crown in the sacred city. In 1508 Maximilian I., being refused a passage to Rome by the Venetians, obtained from Pope Julius II. a bull permitting him to style himself emperor elect (imperator electus, erwählter Kaiser). This title was taken by Ferdinand I. (1558) and all succeeding emperors, immediately upon their coronation in Germany; and it was until 1806 their strict legal designation, and was always employed by them in proclamations and other official documents. The term “elect” was, however, omitted even in formal documents when the sovereign was addressed or was spoken of in the third person.

In medieval times the emperor, conceived as vicegerent of God and co-regent with the pope in government of the Christian people committed to his charge, might almost be regarded as an ecclesiastical officer. Not only was his function regarded as consisting in the defence and extension of true religion; he was himself arrayed in ecclesiastical vestments at his coronation; he was ordained a subdeacon; and assisting the pope in the celebration of the Eucharist, he communicated in both kinds as a clerk. The same sort of ecclesiastical character came also to be attached to the tsars1of Russia, who—especially in their relations with the Orthodox Eastern Church—may vindicate for themselves (though the sultans of Turkey have disputed the claim) the succession to the East Roman emperors (see Empire). But the title of emperor was also used in the middle ages, and is still used, in a loose and vague sense, without any ecclesiastical connotation or hint of connexion with Rome (the two attributes which should properly distinguish an emperor), and merely in order to designate a non-European ruler with a large extent of territory. It was thus applied, and is still applied, to the rulers of China and Japan; it was attributed to the Mogul sovereigns of India; and since 1876 it has been used by British monarchs in their capacity of sovereigns of India (Kaiser-i-Hind).2

Since the French Revolution and during the course of the 19th century the term emperor has had an eventful history. In 1804 Napoleon took the title of “Emperor of the French,” and posed as the reviver of the Empire of Charlemagne. Afraid that Napoleon would next proceed to deprive him of his title of Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II. first took the step, in 1804, of investing himself with a new title, that of “Hereditary Emperor of Austria,” and then, in 1806, proceeded to the further step of abdicating his old historical title and dissolving the Holy Roman Empire. Thus the old and true sense of the term emperor—the sense in which it was connected with the church in the present and with Rome in the past—finally perished; and the term became partly an apanage of Bonapartism (Louis Napoleon resuscitated it as Napoleon III. in 1853), and partly a personal title of the Habsburgs as rulers of their various family territories. In 1870, however, a new and most important use of the title was begun, when the union of Germany was achieved, and the Prussian king, who became the head of united Germany, received in that capacity the title of German Emperor. Here the title of emperor designates the president of a federal state; and here the Holy Roman emperor of the 17th and 18th centuries, the president of a loose confederation of German states, may be said to have found his successor. But the term has been widely andloosely used in the course of the 19th century. It was the style from 1821 to 1889 of the princes of the house of Braganza who ruled in Brazil; it has been assumed by usurpers in Haiti, and in Mexico it was borne by Augustin Iturbide in 1822 and 1823, and by the ill-fated Archduke Maximilian of Austria from 1864 to 1867. It can hardly, therefore, be said to have any definite descriptive force at the present time, such as it had in the middle ages. So far as it has any such force in Europe, it may be said partly to be connected with Bonapartism, and to denote a popular but military dictatorship, partly to be connected with the federal idea, and to denote a precedence over other kings possessed by a ruler standing at the head of a composite state which may embrace kings among its members. It is in this latter sense that it is used of Germany, and of Britain in respect of India; it is in something approaching this latter sense that it may be said to be used of Austria.

See J. Selden,Titles of Honour(1672); J. Bryce,Holy Roman Empire(London, 1904); and Sir E. Colebrooke, “On Imperial and Other Titles” in theJournal of the Royal Asiatic Society(1877). See also the articles on “Imperator” and “Princeps” in Smith’sDictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities(1890).

(E. Br.)

1The wordTsar, like the GermanKaiser, is derived from Caesar (seeTsar). Peter the Great introduced the use of the style “Imperator,” and the official designation is now “Emperor of all the Russias, Tsar of Poland, and Grand Duke of Finland,” though the term tsar is still popularly used in Russia.2For the titles ofβασιλεύς,imperator Augustus, &c., applied in the 10th century to the Anglo-Saxon kings, seeEmpire(note). The claim to the style of emperor, as a badge of equal rank, played a considerable part in the diplomatic relations between the Sultan and certain European sovereigns. Thus, at a time when this style (Padishah) was refused by the Sultan to the tsars of Russia, and even to the Holy Roman Emperor himself, it was allowed to the French kings, who in diplomatic correspondence and treaties with Turkey called themselves “emperor of France” (empereur de France).—[Ed.].

2For the titles ofβασιλεύς,imperator Augustus, &c., applied in the 10th century to the Anglo-Saxon kings, seeEmpire(note). The claim to the style of emperor, as a badge of equal rank, played a considerable part in the diplomatic relations between the Sultan and certain European sovereigns. Thus, at a time when this style (Padishah) was refused by the Sultan to the tsars of Russia, and even to the Holy Roman Emperor himself, it was allowed to the French kings, who in diplomatic correspondence and treaties with Turkey called themselves “emperor of France” (empereur de France).—[Ed.].

EMPHYSEMA(Gr.ἐμφυσᾶνto inflate) is a word vaguely meaning the abnormal presence of air in certain parts of the body. At the present day, however, there are two conditions to which it refers, “pulmonary emphysema” (and the word pulmonary is often omitted) and “surgical emphysema.” Of pulmonary emphysema there are two forms, true vesicular and interstitial (or interlobular). Vesicular emphysema signifies that there is an enlargement of air-vesicles, resulting either from their excessive distension, from destruction of the septa, or from both causes combined (seeRespiratory System). In interstitial emphysema the air is infiltrated into the connective tissue beneath the pleura and between the pulmonary air-cells.

The former variety is by far the more common, and appears to be capable of being produced by various causes, the chief of which are the following:—

1. Where a portion of the lung has become wasted, or its vesicular structure permanently obliterated by disease, without corresponding falling in of the chest wall, the neighbouring air-vesicles or some of them undergo dilatation to fill the vacuum (vicarious emphysema).

2. In some cases of bronchitis, where numbers of the smaller bronchial tubes become obstructed, the air in the pulmonary vesicles remains imprisoned, the force of expiration being insufficient to expel it; while, on the other hand, the stronger force of inspiration being adequate to overcome the resistance, the air-cells tend to become more and more distended, and permanent alterations in their structure, including emphysema, are the result (inspiratory theory).

3. Emphysema also arises from exertion involving violent expiratory efforts, during which the glottis is constricted, as in paroxysms of coughing, in straining, and in lifting heavy weights (expiratory theory). Whooping-cough is well known as the exciting cause of emphysema in many persons.

4. Another view, known as the nutritive theory, maintains that emphysema depends essentially on a primary nutritive change in the walls of the air-vesicles. Thus these are impaired in their resisting power, and are far more likely to become distended by any force acting on them from within.

5. Again in certain cases the cartilages of the chest become hypertrophied and rigid, thus causing a primary chronic enlargement, and the lungs become emphysematous in order to fill up the increased space (Freund’s theory).

In whatever manner produced, this disease gives rise to important morbid changes in the affected portions of the lungs, especially the loss of the natural elasticity of the air-cells, and likewise the destruction of many of the pulmonary capillary blood-vessels, and the diminution of aerating surface for the blood. As a consequence an increased strain is thrown on the right ventricle with a consequent dilatation leading on to heart failure and all its attendant troubles. The chief symptom in this complaint is shortness of breath, more or less constant but greatly aggravated by exertion, and by attacks of bronchitis, to which persons suffering from emphysema appear to be specially liable. The respiration is of similar character to that already described in the case of asthma. In severe forms of the disease the patient comes to acquire a peculiar puffy or bloated appearance, and the configuration of the chest is altered, assuming the character known as thebarrel-shapedoremphysematouschest.

The main element in the treatment of emphysema consists in attention to the general condition of the health, and in the avoidance of all causes likely to aggravate the disease or induce its complications. Compressed air baths and expiration into rarefied air may be useful. During attacks of urgent dyspnoea and lividity, with engorgement of veins, the patient should be repeatedly bled until relief is obtained. Interstitial emphysema arising from the rupture of air-cells in the immediate neighbourhood of the pleura may occur as a complication of the vesicular form, or separately as the result of some sudden expulsive effort, such as a fit of coughing, or, as has frequently happened, in parturition. Gangrene or post-mortem decomposition may lead to the presence of air in the interstitial tissue of the lung. Occasionally the air infiltrates the cellular tissue of the posterior mediastinum, and thence comes to distend the integument of the whole surface of the body (surgical emphysema). Surgical emphysema signifies the effusion of air into the general connective tissues of the body. The commonest causes are a wound of some air-passage, or a penetrating wound of the chest wall without injury to the lung. It may, however, occur in any situation of the body and in many other ways. Its severity varies from very slight cases where only a little crepitation may be felt under the skin, to extreme cases where the whole body is blown up and death is imminent from impeded respiration and failure of the action of the heart. In the milder cases no treatment is necessary as the air gradually becomes absorbed, but in the more severe cases incisions must be made in the swollen cellular tissues to allow the air to escape.

EMPIRE,a term now used to denote a state of large size and also (as a rule) of composite character, often, but not necessarily, ruled by an emperor—a state which may be a federation, like the German empire, or a unitary state, like the Russian, or even, like the British empire, a loose commonwealth of free states united to a number of subordinate dependencies. For many centuries the writers of the Church, basing themselves on the Apocalyptic writings, conceived of a cycle of four empires, generally explained—though there was no absolute unanimity with regard to the members of the cycle—as the Assyrian, the Persian, the Macedonian and the Roman. But in reality the conception of Empire, like the term itself (Lat.imperium), is of Roman origin. The empire of Alexander had indeed in some ways anticipated the empire of Rome. “In his later years,” Professor Bury writes, “Alexander formed the notion of an empire, both European and Asiatic, in which the Asiatics should not be dominated by the European invaders, but Europeans and Asiatics alike should be ruled on an equality by a monarch, indifferent to the distinction of Greek and barbarian, and looked upon as their own king by Persians as well as by Macedonians.” The contemporary Cynic philosophy of cosmopolitanism harmonized with this notion, as Stoicism did later with the practice of the Roman empire; and Alexander, like Diocletian and Constantine, accustomed a Western people to the forms of an Oriental court, while, like the earlier Caesars, he claimed and received the recognition of his own divinity. But when he died in 323, his empire, which had barely lasted ten years, died with him; and it was divided among Diadochi who, if in some other respects (for instance, the Hellenization of the East) they were heirs of their master’s policy, were destitute of the imperial conception. The work of Alexander was rather that of the forerunner than the founder. He prepared the way for the world-empire of Rome; he made possible the rise of a universal religion. And these are the two factors which, throughout the middle ages, went together to make the thing which men called Empire.

At Rome the termimperiumsignified generally, in its earlier use, the sovereignty of the state over the individual, a sovereignty which the Romans had disengaged with singular clearness from all other kinds of authority. Each ofThe Roman empire.the higher magistrates of the Roman people was vested, by alex curiata(for power was distinctly conceived as resident in, and delegated by, the community), with animperiumboth civil and military, which varied in degree with the magnitude of his office. In the later days of the Republic such imperium was enjoyed, partly in Rome by the resident consuls and praetors, partly in the provinces by the various proconsuls or propraetors. There was thus a certainmorcellementofimperium, delegated as it was by the people to a number of magistrates: the coming of the Empire meant the reintegration of thisimperium, and its unification, by a gradual process, in the hands of theprinceps, or emperor. The means by which this process was achieved had already been anticipated under the Republic. Already in the days of Pompey it had been found convenient to grant to an extraordinary officer animperium aequumormajusover a large area, and that officer thus received powers, within that area, equal to, or greater than, the powers of the provincial governors. This precedent was followed by Augustus in the year 27B.C., when he acquired for himself soleimperiumin a certain number of provinces (the imperial provinces), and aninfinitum imperium majusin the remaining provinces (which were termed senatorial). As a result, Augustus enjoyed animperiumcoextensive indeed with the whole of the Roman world, but concurrent, in part of that world, with theimperiumof the senatorial proconsuls; and the early Empire may thus be described as a dyarchy. But the distinction between imperial and senatorial provinces finally disappeared; by the time of Constantine the emperor enjoyed soleimperium, and an absolute monarchy had been established. We shall not, however, fully understand the significance of the Roman empire, unless we realize the importance of its military aspect. All the soldiers of Rome had from the first to swearin verba Caesaris Augusti; and thus the whole of the Roman army was his army, regiments of which he might indeed lend, but of which he was soleImperator(see underEmperor). Thus regarded as a permanent commander-in-chief, the emperor enjoyed the privileges, and suffered from the weaknesses, of his position. He had the power of the sword behind him; but he became more and more liable to be deposed, and to be replaced by a new commander, at the will of those who bore the sword in his service.

The period which is marked by the reigns of Diocletian and Constantine (A.D.284-337) marks a great transformation in the character of the Empire. The old dyarchy, under which the emperor might still be regarded as an officialDevelopment under Diocletian and Constantine.of the respublica Romana, passed into a new monarchy, in which all political power became, as it were, the private property of the monarch. There was now no distinction of provinces; and the old publicaerariumbecame merely a municipal treasury, while thefiscusof the emperor became the exchequer of the Empire. The officers of the imperial praetorium, or bodyguard, are now the great officers of state; his private council becomes the public consistory, or supreme court of appeal; and thecomitesof his court are the administrators of his empire. “All is in him, and all comes from him,” as our own year-books say of the medieval king; his household, for instance, is not only a household, but also an administration. On the other hand, this unification seems to be accompanied by a new bifurcation. The exigencies of frontier defence had long been drawing the Empire towards the troubled East; and this tendency reached its culmination when a new Rome arose by the Bosporus, and Constantinople became the centre of whatDivision of the Empire.seemed a second Empire in the East (A.D.324). Particularly after the division of the Empire between Arcadius and Honorius in 395 does this bifurcation appear to be marked; and one naturally speaks of the two Empires of the West and the East. Yet it cannot be too much emphasized that in reality such language is utterly inexact. The Roman empire was, and always continued to be, ideally one and indivisible. There were two emperors, but one Empire—two persons, but one power. The point is of great importance for the understanding of the whole of the middle ages: there only is, and can be, one Empire, which may indeed, for convenience, be ruled conjointly by two emperors, resident, again for convenience, in two separate capitals. And, as a matter of fact, not only did the residence of an emperor in the East not spell bifurcation, it actually fostered the tendency towards unification. It helped forward the transformation of the Empire into an absolute and quasi-Asiatic monarchy, under which all its subjects fell into a single level of loyal submission: it helped to give the emperor a gorgeous court, marked by all the ceremony and the servility of the East.1The deification of the emperor himself dates from the days of Augustus; by the time of Constantine it has infected the court and the government. Each emperor, again, had from the first enjoyed the sacrosanct position which was attached to the tribunate; but now his palace, his chamber, his charities, his letters, are all “sacred,” and one might almost speak in advance of a “Holy Roman Empire.”

But there is one factor, the greatest of all, which still remains to be added, before we have counted the sum of the forces that made the world think in terms of empire for centuries to come; and that is the reception of Christianity intoInfluence of Christianity.the Roman empire by Constantine. That reception added a new sanction to the existence of the Empire and the position of the emperor. The Empire, already one and indivisible in its aspect of a political society, was welded still more firmly together when it was informed and permeated by a common Christianity, and unified by the force of a spiritual bond. The Empire was now the Church; it was now indeed indestructible, for, if it perished as an empire, it would live as a church. But the Church made it certain that it would not perish, even as an empire, for many centuries to come. On the one hand the Church thought in terms of empire and taught the millions of its disciples (including the barbarians themselves) to think in the same terms. No other political conception—no conception of aπόλιςor of a nation—was any longer possible. When the Church gained its hold of the Roman world, the Empire, as it has been well said, was already “not only a government, but a fashion of conceiving the world”: it had stood for three centuries, and no man could think of any other form of political association. Moreover, the gospel of St Paul—that there isoneChurch, whereof Christ is the Head, and we are all members—could not but reinforce for the Christian the conception of a necessary political unity of all the world under a single head.Una Chiesa in uno Stato—such, then, was the theory of the Church. But not only did the Church perpetuate the conception of empire by making it a part of its own theory of the world: it perpetuated that conception equally by materializing it in its own organization of itself. Growing up under the shadow of the Empire, the Church too became an empire, as the Empire had become a church. As it took over something of the old pagan ceremonial, so it took over much of the old secular organization. The pope borrowed his title ofpontifex maximusfrom the emperor: what is far more, he made himself gradually, and in the course of centuries, the Caesar and Imperator of the Church. The offices and the dioceses of the Church are parallel to the offices and dioceses of the Diocletian empire: the whole spirit of orderly hierarchy and regular organization, which breathes in the Roman Church, is the heritage of ancient Rome. The Donation of Constantine is a forgery; but it expresses a great truth when it represents Constantine as giving to the pope the imperial palace and insignia, and to the clergy the ornaments of the imperial army (seeDonation of Constantine).

Upon this world, informed by these ideas, there finally descended, in the 5th century, the avalanche of barbaric invasion. Its impact seemed to split the Empire into fragmentary kingdoms; yet it left the universal Church intact,Barbarian invasions.and with it the conception of empire. With that conception, indeed, the barbarians had already been for centuries familiar: service in Roman armies, and settlement in Roman territories, had made the Roman empire for them, as much as for the civilized provincial, part of the order of the world. One of the barbarian invaders, Odoacer (Odovakar), might seem, in 476, to have swept away the Empire from the West, when he commanded the abdication of Romulus Augustulus; and the date 476 has indeed been generally emphasized as marking “the fall of the Western empire.” Other invaders, again, men like the Frank Clovis or the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, might seem, in succeeding years, to have completed the work of Odoacer, and to have shattered the sorry scheme of the later Empire, by remoulding it into national kingdoms.De facto, there is some truth in such a view:de jure, there is none.2All that Odoacer did was to abolish one of the two joint rulers of the indivisible Empire, and to make the remaining ruler at Constantinople sole emperor from the Bosporus to the pillars of Hercules. He abolished the dual sovereignty which had been inaugurated by Diocletian, and returned to the unity of the Empire in the days of Marcus Aurelius. He did not abolish the Roman empire in the West: he only abolished its separate ruler, and, leaving the Empire itself subsisting, under the sway (nominal, it is true, but none the less acknowledged) of the emperor resident at Constantinople, he claimed to act as his vicar, under the name of patrician, in the administration of the Italian provinces.3As Odoacer thus fitted himself into the scheme of empire, so did both Clovis and Theodoric. They do not claim to be emperors (that was reserved for Charlemagne): they claim to be the vicars and lieutenants of the Empire. Theodoric spoke of himself to Zeno asimperio vestro famulans; he left justice and administration in Roman hands, and maintained two annual consuls in Rome. Clovis received the title of consul from Anastasius; the Visigothic kings of Spain (like the kings of the savage Lombards) styled themselves Flavii, and permitted the cities of their eastern coast to send tribute to Constantinople. Yet it must be admitted that, as a matter of fact, this adhesion of the new barbaric kings to the Empire was little more than a form. The Empire maintained its ideal unity by treating them as its vicars; but they themselves were forming separate and independent kingdoms within its borders. The Italy of the Ostrogoths cannot have belonged, in any real sense, to the Empire; otherwise Justinian would never have needed to attempt its reconquest. And in the 7th and 8th centuries the form of adhesion itself decayed: the emperor was retiring upon the Greek world of the East, and the German conquerors, settled within their kingdoms, lost the width of outlook of their old migratory days.

It is here that the action of the Church becomes of supreme importance. The Church had not ceased to believe in the continuous life of the Empire. The Fathers had taught that when the cycle of empires was finallyThe Church and the Empire.ended by the disappearance of the empire of Rome, the days of Antichrist would dawn; and, since Antichrist was not yet come, the Church believed that the Empire still lived, and would continue to live till his coming. Meanwhile the Eastern emperor, ever since Justinian’s reconquest of Italy, had been able to maintain his hold on the centre of Italy; and Rome itself, the seat of the head of the Church, still ranked as one of the cities under his sway. The imperialist theory of the Church found its satisfaction in this connexion of its head with Constantinople; and as long as this connexion continued to satisfy the Church, there was little prospect of any change. For many years after their invasion of 568, the pressure which the Lombards maintained on central Italy, from their kingdom in the valley of the Po, kept the popes steadily faithful to the emperor of the East and his representative in Italy, the exarch of Ravenna. But it was not in the nature of things that suchGrowing divergence between East and West.The popes.fidelity should continue unimpaired. The development of the East and the West could not but proceed along constantly diverging lines, until the point was reached when their connexion must snap. On the one hand, the development of the West set towards the increase of the powers of the bishop of Rome until he reached a height at which subjection to the emperor at Constantinople became impossible. Residence in Rome, the old seat of empire, had in itself given him a great prestige; and to this prestige St Gregory (pope from 590 to 604) had added in a number of ways. He was one of the Fathers of the Church, and turned its theology into the channels in which it was to flow for centuries; he had acquired for his church the great spiritual colony of England by the mission of St Augustine; he had been the protector of Italy against the Lombards. As the popes thus became more and more spiritual emperors of the West, they found themselves less and less able to remain the subjects of the lay emperor of the East. Meanwhile the emperors of the East were led to interfere in ecclesiastical affairs in a manner which the popes and the Western Church refused to tolerate. Brought into contact with the pure monotheism of Mahommedanism, Leo the Isaurian (718-741) was stimulated into a crusade against image-worship, in order to remove from the Christian Church the charge of idolatry. The West clung to its images: the popes revolted against his decrees; and the breach rapidly became irreparable. As the hold of the Eastern emperor on central Italy began to be shaken, the popes may have begun to cherish the hope of becoming their successors and of founding a temporal dominion; and that hope can only have contributed to the final dissolution of their connexion with the Eastern empire.

Thus, in the course of the 8th century, the Empire,as represented by the emperors at Constantinople, had begun to fade utterly out of the West. It had been forgotten by lay sovereigns; it was being abandoned by the pope, who had been its chosen apostle. But it did not follow that, because the Eastern emperor ceased to be the representative of the Empire for the West, the conception of Empire itself therefore perished. The popes only abandoned the representative; they did not abandon the conception. If they had abandoned the conception, they would have abandoned the idea that there was an order of the world; they would have committed themselves to a belief in the coming of Antichrist. The conception of the world as a single Empire-Church remained: what had to be discovered was a new representative of one of the two sides of that conception. For a brief time, it would seem, the pope himself cherished the idea of becoming, in his own person, the successor of the ancient Caesars in their own old capital. By the aid of the Frankish kings, he had been able to stop the Lombards from acquiring the succession to the derelict territories of the Eastern emperor in Italy (from which their last exarch had fled overseas in 752), and he had become the temporal sovereign of those territories. Successor to the Eastern emperor in central Italy, why should he not also become his successor as representative of the Empire—all the more, since he was the head of the Church, which was coextensive with the Empire? Some such hope seems to inspire the Donation of Constantine, a document forged between 754 and 774, in which Constantine is represented as having conferred on Silvester I. the imperial palace and insignia, and therewithomnes Italiae seu occidentalium regionum provincias loca et civitates. But the hope, if it ever was cherished,proved to be futile. The popes had not the material force at their command which would have made them adequate to the position. The strong arm of the Frankish kings had aloneCoronation of Charlemagne as emperor of the West.delivered them from the Lombards: the same strong arm, they found, was needed to deliver them from the wild nobility of their own city. So they turned to the power which was strong enough to undertake the task which they could not themselves attempt, and they invited the Frankish king to become the representative of the imperial conception they cherished.4In the year 800 central Italy ceased to date its documents by the regnal years of the Eastern emperors; for Charlemagne was crowned emperor in their stead.

The king of the Franks was well fitted for the position which he was chosen to fill. He was king of a stock which had been from the first Athanasian, and had never been tainted, like most of the Germanic tribes, by the adoption of Arian tenets. His grandfather, Charles Martel, had saved Europe from the danger of a Mahommedan conquest by his victory at Poitiers (732); his father, Pippin the Short, had helped the English missionary Boniface to achieve the conversion of Germany. The popes themselves had turned to the Frankish kings for support again and again in the course of the 8th century. Gregory III., involved in bitter hostilities with the iconoclastic reformers of the East, appealed to Charles Martel for aid, and even offered the king, it is said, the titles of consul and patrician. Zacharias pronounced the deposition of the last of the Merovingians, and gave to Pippin the title of king (751); while his successor, Stephen II., hard pressed by the Lombards, who were eager to replace the Eastern emperors in the possession of central Italy, not only asked and received the aid of the new king, but also acquired, in virtue of Pippin’s donation (754), the disputed exarchate itself. Thus was laid the foundation of the States of the Church; and the grateful pope rewarded the donation by the gift of the title ofpatricius Romanorum, which conferred on its recipient the duty and the privilege of protecting the Roman Church, along with some undefined measure of authority in Rome itself.5Finally, in 773, Pope Adrian I. had to appeal to Charles, the successor of Pippin, against the aggressions of the last of the Lombard kings; and in 774 Charles conquered the Lombard kingdom, and himself assumed its iron crown. Thus by the end of the 8th century the Frankish king stood on the very steps of the imperial throne. He ruled a realm which extended from the Pyrenees to the Harz, and from Hamburg to Rome—a realm which might be regarded as in itself ade factoempire. He bore the title ofpatricius, and he had shown that he did not bear it in vain by his vigorous defence of the papacy in 774. Here there stood, ready to hand, a natural representative of the conception of Empire; and Leo III., finding that he needed the aid of Charlemagne to maintain himself against his own Romans, finally took the decisive step of crowning him emperor, as he knelt in prayer at St Peter’s, on Christmas Day, 800.

The coronation of Charlemagne in 800 marks the coalescence into a single unity of two facts, or rather, more strictly speaking, of a fact and a theory. The fact is German and secular: it is the widede factoempire, which the Frankish sword had conquered, and Frankish policy had organized as a single whole. The theory is Latin and ecclesiastical: it is a theory of the necessary political unity of the world, and its necessary representation in the person of an emperor—a theory half springingTheory of the Carolingian empire.from the unity of the old Roman empire, and half derived from the unity of the Christian Church as conceived in the New Testament. If we seek for the force which caused this fact and this theory to coalesce in the Carolingian empire, we can only answer—the papacy. The idea of Empire was in the Church; and the head of the Church translated this idea into fact. If, however, we seek to conceive the event of 800 from a political or legal point of view, and to determine the residence of the right of constituting an emperor, we at once drift into the fogs of centuries of controversy. Three answers are possible from three points of view; and all have their truth, according to the point of view. From the ecclesiastical point of view, the right resides with the pope. This theory was not promulgated (indeed no theory was promulgated) until the struggles of Papacy and Empire in the course of the middle ages; but by the time of Innocent III. it is becoming an established doctrine that atranslatio Imperiitook place in 800, whereby the pope transferred the Roman empire from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of the magnificent Charles.6One can only say that, as a matter of fact, the popes ceased to recognize the Eastern emperors, and recognized Charles instead, in the year 800; that, again, this recognition alone made Charles emperor, as nothing else could have done; but that no question arose, at the time, of any right of the pope to give the Empire to Charlemagne, for the simple reason that neither of the actors was acting or thinking in a legal spirit. If we now turn to study the point of view of the civil lawyer, animated by such a spirit, and basing himself on the code of Justinian, we shall find that an emperor must derive his institution and power from alex regiapassed by thepopulus Romanus; and such a view, strictly interpreted, will lead us to the conclusion that the citizens of Rome had given the crown to Charlemagne in 800, and continued to bestow it on successive emperors afterwards. There is indeed some speech, in the contemporary accounts of Charlemagne’s coronation, of the presence of “ancients among the Romans” and of “the faithful people”; but they are merely present to witness or applaud, and the conception of the Roman people as the source of Empire is one that was only championed, at a far later date, by antiquarian idealists like Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi. Thefaex Romuli, a population of lodging-house keepers, living upon pilgrims to the papal court, could hardly be conceived, except by an ardent imagination, as heir to theQuiritesof the past. Finally, from the point of view of the German tribesman, we must admit that the Empire was something which, once received by his king (no matter how), descended in the royal family as an heirloom; or to which (when the kingship became elective) a title was conferred, along with the kingship, by the vote of electors.7

But apart from these questions of origin, two difficulties have still to be faced with regard to the nature and position of the Carolingian empire. Did Charlemagne and his successors enter into a new relation with their subjects, in virtue of their coronation? And what was the nature of the relation between the new emperor now established in the West and the old emperor still reigning in the East? It is true that Charlemagne exacted a new oath of allegiance from his subjects after his coronation, and again that he had a revision of all the laws of his dominions made in 802. But the revision did not amount to much in bulk: what there was contained little that was Roman; and, on the whole, it hardly seems probable that Charlemagne entered into any new relation with his subjects. The relation of his empire to the empire in the East is a more difficult and important problem. In 797 the empress Irene had deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI., and usurped his throne. Now it would seem that Charlemagne, whose thoughtswere already set on Empire, hoped to depose and succeed Irene, and thus to become sole representative of the conceptionRelations of the Carolingian to the Eastern empire.of Empire, both for the East and for the West. Suddenly there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor, an act apparently unpremeditated at the moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from Einhard’sVita Karoli, and interrupting his plans. It left him representative of the Empire for the West only, confronting another representative in the East. Such a position he did not desire: there had been a single Empire vested in a single person since 476, and he desired that there should still continue to be a single Empire, vested only in his own person. He now sought to achieve this unity by a proposal of marriage to Irene. The proposal failed, and he had to content himself with a recognition of his imperial title by the two successors of the empress. This did not, however, mean (at any rate in the issue) that henceforth there were to be two conjoint rulers, amicably ruling as colleagues a single Empire, in the manner of Arcadius and Honorius. The dual government of a single Empire established by Diocletian had finally vanished in 476; and the unity of the Empire was now conceived, as it had been conceived before the days of Diocletian, to demand a single representative. Henceforth there were two rulers, one at Aix-la-Chapelle and one at Constantinople, each claiming, whatever temporary concessions he might make, to be the sole ruler and representative of the Roman empire. On the one hand, the Western emperors held that, upon the deposition of Constantine VI., Charlemagne had succeeded him, after a slight interval, in the government of the whole Empire, both in the East and in the West; on the other hand, the Eastern emperors, in spite of their grudging recognition of Charlemagne at the moment, regarded themselves as the only lawful successors of Constantine VI., and viewed the Carolings and their later successors as upstarts and usurpers, with no right to their imperial pretensions. Henceforth two halves confronted one another, each claiming to be the whole; two finite bodies touched, and each yet claimed to be infinite.

If, as has been suggested, Charlemagne did not enter into any fundamentally new relations with his subjects after his coronation, it follows that the results of his coronation, in the sphere of policy and administration, cannotCharacter of the Carolingian empire.have been considerable. The Empire added a new sanction to a policy and administration already developed. Charlemagne had already showed himselfepiscopus episcoporum, anxious not only to suppress heresy and supervise the clergy within his borders, but also to extend true Christianity without them even before the year when his imperial coronation gave him a new title to supreme governorship in all cases ecclesiastical. He had already organized his empire on a new uniform system of counties, and themissi dominiciwere already at work to superintend the action of the counts, even before therenovatio imperii Romanicame to suggest such uniformity and centralization. Charlemagne had a new title; but his subjects still obeyed the king of the Franks, and lived by Frankish law, in the old fashion. In their eyes, and in the eyes of Charlemagne’s own descendants, the Empire was something appendant to the kingship of the Franks, which made that kingship unique among others, but did not radically alter its character. True, the kingship might be divided among brothers by the old Germanic custom of partition, while the Empire must inhere in one person; but that was the one difference, and the one difficulty, which might easily be solved by attaching the name of emperor to the eldest brother. Such was the conception of the Carolings: such was not, however, the conception of the Church. To the popes the Empire was a solemn office, to which the kings of the Franks might most naturally be called, in view of their power and the traditions of their house, but which by no means remained in their hands as a personal property. By thus seeking to dissociate the Empire from any indissoluble connexion with the Carolingian house, the popes were able to save it. Civil wars raged among the descendants of Charlemagne: partitions recurred: the Empire was finally dissolved, in the sense that the old realm of Charlemagne fell asunder, in 888.Break-up of the Carolingian empire.But the Empire, as an office, did not perish. During the 9th century the popes had insisted, as each emperor died, that the new emperor needed coronation at their hands; and they had thus kept alive the conception of the Empire as an office to which they invited, if they did not appoint, each successive emperor. The quarrels of the Carolingian house helped them to make good their claim. John VIII. was able to select Charles the Bald in preference to other claimants in 875; and before the end of hisAttitude of the papacy.pontificate he could write that “he who is to be ordained by us to the Empire must be by us first and foremost invited and elected.” Thus was the unity of the Empire preserved, and the conception of a united Empire continued, in spite of the eventual dissolution of the realm of Charlemagne. When the Carolingian emperors disappeared, Benedict IV. could crown Louis of Provence (901) and John X. could invite to the vacant throne an Italian potentate like Berengar of Friuli (915); and even when Berengar died in 924, and the Empire was vacant of an emperor, they could hold, and hold with truth, that the Empire was not dead, but only suspended, until such time as they should invite a new ruler to assume the office.

Various causes had contributed to the dissolution of the realm of Charlemagne. Partitions had split it; feudalism had begun to honeycomb it; incessant wars had destroyed its core, the fighting Franks of Austrasia. But, above all, the rise of divisions within the realm, which, whether animated by the spirit of nationality or no, were ultimately destined to develop into nations, had silently undermined the structure of Pippin and Charlemagne. Already in 842 the oath of Strassburg shows us one Caroling king swearing in French and another in German: already in 870 the partition of Mersen shows us the kings of France and Germany dividing the middle kingdom which lay between the two countries by the linguistic frontier of the Meuse and Moselle. The year 888 is the birth-year of modern Europe. France, Germany, Italy, stood distinct as three separate units, with Burgundy and Lorraine as debatable lands, as they were destined to remain for centuries to come. If the conception of Empire was still to survive, the pope must ultimately invite theThe German kingdom and the empire.ruler of the strongest of these three units to assume the imperial crown; and this was what happened when in 962 Pope John XII. invited Otto I. of Germany to renew once more the Roman Empire. As the imperial strength of the whole Frankish tribe had given them the Empire in 800, so did the national strength of the East Frankish kingdom, now resting indeed on a Saxon rather than a Frankish basis, bring the Empire to its ruler in 962. The centre of political gravity had already been shifting to the east of the Rhine in the course of the 9th century. While the Northmen had carried their arms along the rivers and into the heart of France, Louis the German had consolidated his kingdom in a long reign of sixty years (817-876); and at the end of the 9th century two kings of Germany had already worn the imperial crown. Early in the 10th century the kingship of Germany had come to the vigorous Saxon dukes (919); and strong in their Saxon basis Henry I. and his son Otto had built a realm which, disunited as it was, was far more compact than that which the Carolings of the West ruled from Laon. Henry I. had thought in his later years of going to Rome for the imperial crown: under Otto I. the imperial idea becomes manifest. On the one hand, he established a semi-imperial position in the West: by 946 Louis IV. d’Outremer is his protégé, and it is his arms which maintain the young Conrad of Burgundy on his throne. On the other hand, he showed, by his policy towards the German Church, that he was the true heir of the Carolingian traditions. He made churchmen his ministers; he established missionary bishoprics on the Elbe which should spread Christianity among the Wends; and his dearest project was a new archbishopric of Magdeburg. The one thing needful was that he should, like Charlemagne, acquire the throne of Italy; and the dissolute condition of that country during the first half of theThe Holy Roman Empire.10th century made its acquisition not only possible, but almost imperative. Begun in 952, the acquisition was completed ten years later; and all the conditions were now present for Otto’s assumption of the imperial throne. He was crowned by John XII. on Candlemas Day 962, and thus was begun the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted henceforth with a continuous life until 1806.8

The same ideas underlay the new empire which had underlain that of Charlemagne, strengthened and reinforced by the fact that they had already found a visible expression before in that earlier empire. Historically, there was the tradition of the old Roman empire, preserved by the Church as an idea, and preserved in the Church, and its imperial organization, as an actual fact. Ecclesiastically, there was the Pauline conception of a single Christian Church, one in subjection to Christ as its Head, and needing (so men still thought) a secular counterpart of its indivisible unity.9To these two sanctions philosophy later added a third; and the doctrine of Realism, that the one universal is the true abiding substance—the doctrine which pervades theDe monarchiaof Dante,—reinforced the feeling which demanded that Europe should be conceived as a single political unity. But if the Holy Roman empire of the German nation has the old foundations, it is none the less a thingsui generis. Externally, it meant far less than the empire of Charlemagne; it meant simply a union of Germany and northern Italy (to which, after 1032, one must also add Burgundy, though the addition is in reality nominal) under a single rule. Historians of the 19th century, during the years in which the modern German empire was in travail, disputed sorely on the advantages of this union; but whatever its advantages or disadvantages, the fact remains that the union of Teutonic Germany and Latin Italy was, from an external point of view, the essential fact in the structure of the medieval Empire. Internally, again, the Empire of the Ottos and their successors was new and unprecedented. If Latin imperialism had been combined with Frankish tribalismThe Empire and feudalism.in the Empire of Charlemagne, it now met and blended with feudalism. The Holy Roman emperor of the middle ages, as Frederick I. proudly told the Roman envoys, found his senate in the diet of the German baronage, hisequitesin the ranks of the German knights. Feudalism, indeed, came in time to invade the very conception of Empire itself. The emperors began to believe that their position of emperor made them feudal overlords of other kings and princes; and they came to be regarded as the topmost summit of the feudal pyramid, from whom kings held their kingdoms, while they themselves held directly of God. In this way the old conception of the world as a single political society entered upon a new phase: but the translation of that conception into feudal terms, which might have made Diocletian gasp, only gave it the greater hold on the feudal society of the middle ages. Yet in one way the feudal conception was a source of weakness to the Empire; for the popes, from the middle of the 12th century onwards, began to claim for themselves a feudal overlordship of the world, and to regard the emperor as the chief of their vassals. The theory of theTranslatiobuttressed their claim to be overlords of the Empire; and the emperors found that their very duty to defend the Papacy turned them into its vassals—for was not theadvocatuswho defended the lands of an abbey or church its tenant by feudal service, and might not analogy extend the feudal relation to the imperial advocate himself?

The relation of the Empire to the Papacy is indeed the cardinal fact in its history for the three centuries which followed the coronation of Otto I. (962-1250). For a century (962-1076) the relation was one of amity. The popeThe Empire and the Papacy.and the emperor stood as co-ordinate sovereigns, ruling together the commonwealth of Europe.10If either stood before the other, the emperor stood before the pope. The Romans had sworn to Otto I. that they would never elect or ordain a pope without his consent; and the rights over papal elections conceived to belong to the office ofpatricius, which they generally held, enabled the emperors, upon occasion, to nominate the pope of their choice. The partnership of Otto III., son of a Byzantine princess, and his nominee Silvester II. (already distinguished as Gerbert,scholasticusof the chapter school of Reims) forms a remarkable page in the annals of Empire and Papacy. Otto, once the pupil of Silvester in classical studies, and taught by his mother the traditions of the Byzantine empire, dreamed of renewing the Empire of Constantine, with Rome itself for its centre; and this antiquarian idealism (which Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi were afterwards, though with some difference of aim, to share) was encouraged in his pupil by the pope. Tradition afterwards ascribed to the two the first project of a crusade, and the institution of the seven electors: in truth their faces were turned to the past rather than to the future, and they sought not to create, but to renovate. The dream of restoring the age of Constantine passed with the premature death of Otto; and after the death of Silvester II. the papacy was degraded into an appendage of the Tusculan family. From that degradation the Church was rescued by Henry III. (the second emperor of the new Salian house, which reigned from 1024 to 1125), when in 1046 he caused the deposition of three competing popes, and afterwards filled the papal chair with his own nominees; but it was rescued more effectually by itself, when in 1059 the celebrated bullIn nomine Dominiof Nicholas II. reserved the right of electing the popes to the college of cardinals (seeConclave). A new era of the Papacy begins with the decree, and that era found its exponent in Hildebrand. If under Henry III. the Empire stands in many respects at its zenith, and the emperor nominates to the Papacy, it sinks, under Henry IV., almost to the nadir of its fortunes, and a pope attempts, with no little success, to fight and defeat an emperor.

The rise of the Papacy, which the action of Henry III. in 1046 had helped to begin, and the bull of 1059 had greatly promoted, was ultimately due to an ecclesiastical revival, which goes by the name of the Cluniac movement. The aimThe Investiture contest.of that movement was to separate the Church from the world, and thus to make it independent of the laity and the lay power; and it sought to realize its aim first by the prohibition of clerical marriage and simony, and ultimately by the prohibition of lay investiture. A decree of Gregory VII. in 1075 forbade emperor, king or prince to “presume to give investiture of bishoprics,” under pain of excommunication; and Henry IV., contravening the decree, fell under the penalty, and the War of Investitures began (1076-1122). Whether or no Henry humiliated himself at Canossa (and the opinion of German historians now inclines to regard the traditional account as exaggerated) the Empire certainly suffered in his reign agreat loss of prestige. The emperor lost his hold over Germany, where the aid of the pope strengthened the hands of the discontented nobility: he lost his hold over Italy, where the Lombard towns gradually acquired municipal independence, and the donation of the Countess Matilda gave the popes the germ of a new and strongerdominium temporale. The First Crusade came, and the emperor, its natural leader, could not lead it; while the centre of learning and civilization, in the course of the fifty years’ War of Investitures, gradually shifted to France. The struggle was finally ended by a compromise—the Concordat of Worms—in 1122; but the Papacy, which had fought the long War of Investitures and inspired the First Crusade, was a far greater power than it had been at the beginning of the struggle, and the emperor, shaken in his hold on Germany and Italy, had lost both power and prestige (seeInvestiture). It is significant that a theory of the feudal subjection of the emperor to the pope, foreshadowed in the pontificate of Innocent II., and definitely enounced by the envoys of Adrian IV. at the diet of Besançon in 1157, now begins to arise. The popes, who had called the emperors to be heads of the European commonwealth in 800 and again in 962, begin to vindicate that headship for themselves. Gregory VII. had already claimed that the pope stood to the emperor, as the sun to the moon; and gradually the old co-ordination disappeared in a new subordination of the Empire to the papalplenitudo potestatis. The claim of ecclesiastical independence of the middle of the 11th century was rapidly becoming a claim of ecclesiastical supremacy in the middle of the 12th: the imperial claim to nominate popes, which had lasted till 1059, was turning into the papal claim to nominate emperors. Yet at this very time a new period of splendour dawned for the Empire; and the rule of the three Hohenstaufen emperors, Frederick I., Henry VI. and Frederick II. (1152-1250), marks the period of its history which attracts most sympathy and admiration.

Frederick I. regained a new strength in Germany, partly because he united in his veins the blood of the two great contending families, the Welfs and the Waiblingens; partly because he had acquired large patrimonial possessionsThe Hohenstaufen emperors.in Swabia, which took the place of the last Saxon demesne; partly because he had a greater control over the German episcopate than his predecessors had enjoyed for many years past. At the same time the revival of interest in the study of Roman law gave the emperor, as source and centre of that law, a new dignity and prestige, particularly in Italy, the home and hearth of the revival. Confident in this new strength, he attempted to vindicate his claims on Italy, and sought, by uniting the two under his sway, to inspire with new life the old Ottonian Empire. He failed to crush Lombard municipal independence: defeated at Legnano in 1176, he had to recognize his defeat at the treaty of Constance in 1183. He failed to acquire control over the Papacy: a new struggle of Empire and Papacy, begun in the pontificate of Adrian IV. on the question of control over Rome, and continued in the pontificate of Alexander III., because Frederick recognized an anti-pope, ended in the emperor’s recognition of his defeat at Venice in 1177. The one success was the acquisition of the Norman kingdom for Henry VI., who was married to its heiress, Constance. But the one success of Frederick’s Italian policy proved the ruin of his house in the reign of his grandson Frederick II. On the one hand, the possession of Sicily induced Frederick II. to neglect Germany; and by two documents, one of 1220 and one of 1231, he practically abdicated his sovereign powers to the German princes in order to conciliate their support for his Italian policy. On the other hand, the possession of Sicily involved him in the third great struggle of Empire and Papacy. Strong in his Sicilian kingdom in the south, and seeking, like his grandfather, to establish his power in Lombardy, Frederick practically aimed at the unification of Italy, a policy which threatened to engulf the States of the Church and to reduce the Papacy to impotence. The popes excommunicated the emperor: they aided the Lombard towns to maintain their independence; finally, after Frederick’s death (1250), they summoned Charles of Anjou intoOverthrow of the Empire in Italy.Sicily to exterminate his house. By 1268 he had done his work, and the medieval Empire was practically at an end. When Rudolph of Habsburg succeeded in 1273, he was only the head of a federation of princes in Germany, while in Italy he abandoned all claims over the centre and south, and only retained titular rights in the Lombard plain.

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