Feudalism in France, England, Germany.
It is instructive to compare the results of the system of feudality in the three chief countries of modern Europe. In France, the feudal head absorbed all the powers of the state, and left to the aristocracy only a few privileges, odious indeed, but politically worthless. In England,the mediæval system expanded into a constitutional monarchy, where the oligarchy was still strong, but the commons had won the full recognition of equal civil rights. In Germany, everything was taken from the sovereign, and nothing given to the people; the representatives of those who had been fief-holders of the first and second rank before the Great Interregnum were now independent potentates; and what had been once a monarchy was now an aristocratic federation. The Diet, originally an assembly of magnates meeting from time to time like our early English Parliaments, became inA.D.1654 a permanent body, at which the electors, princes, and cities were represented by their envoys. In other words, it was now not a national council, but an international congress of diplomatists.
Causes of the continuance of the Empire.
Where the sacrifice of imperial, or rather federal, rights to state rights was so complete, we may wonder that the farce of an Empire should have been retained at all. A mere German Empire would probably have perished; but the Teutonic people could not bring itself to abandon the venerable heritage of Rome. Moreover, the Germans were of all European peoples the most slow-moving and long-suffering; and as, if the Empire had fallen, something must have been erected in its place, they preferred to work on with the clumsy machine so long as it would work at all. Properly speaking, it has no history after this; and the history of the particular states of Germany which takes its place is one of the dreariest chapters in the annals of mankind. It would be hard to find, from the Peace of Westphalia to the French Revolution, a single grand character or a single noble enterprise; a single sacrifice made to great public interests, a single instance in which the welfare of nations was preferred to the selfishpassions of their princes. The military history of those times will always be read with interest; but free and progressive countries have a history of peace not less rich and varied than that of war; and when we ask for an account of the political life of Germany in the eighteenth century, we hear nothing but the scandals of buzzing courts, and the wrangling of diplomatists at never-ending congresses.
The Empire and the Balance of power.
Useless and helpless as the Empire had become, it was not without its importance to the neighbouring countries, with whose fortunes it had been linked by the Peace of Westphalia. It was the pivot on which the political system of Europe was to revolve: the scales, so to speak, which marked the equipoise of power that had become the grand object of the policy of all states. This modern caricature of the plan by which the theorists of the fourteenth century had proposed to keep the world at peace, used means less noble and attained its end no better than theirs had done. No one will deny that it was and is desirable to prevent a universal monarchy in Europe. But it may be asked whether a system can be considered successful which allowed Frederick of Prussia to seize Silesia, which did not check the aggressions of Russia and France upon their neighbours, which was for ever bartering and exchanging lands in every part of Europe without thought of the inhabitants, which permitted and has never been able to redress that greatest of public misfortunes, the partitionment of Poland. And if it be said that bad as things have been under this system, they would have been worse without it, it is hard to refrain from asking whether any evils could have been greater than those which the people of Europe have suffered through constant wars with each other, and through thewithdrawal, even in time of peace, of so large a part of their population from useful labour to be wasted in maintaining a standing army.
Position of the Empire in Europe.
The result of the extended relations in which Germany now found herself to Europe, with two foreign kings never wanting an occasion, one of them never the wish, to interfere, was that a spark from her set the Continent ablaze, while flames kindled elsewhere were sure to spread hither. Matters grew worse as her princes inherited or created so many thrones abroad. The Duke of Holstein acquired Denmark, the Count Palatine Sweden, the Elector of Saxony Poland, the Elector of Hanover England, the Archduke of Austria Hungary and Bohemia, while the Elector (originally Margrave) of Brandenburg obtained, on the strength of non-imperial territories to the north-eastward which had come into his hands, the style and title of King of Prussia. Thus the Empire seemed again about to embrace Europe; but in a sense far different from that which those words would have expressed under Charles and Otto. Its history for a century and a half is a dismal list of losses and disgraces. The chief external danger was from French influence, for a time supreme, always menacing. For though Lewis the Fourteenth, on whom, inA.D.1658, half the electoral college wished to confer the imperial crown, was before the end of his life an object of intense hatred, officially entitled 'Hereditary enemy of the Holy Empire[380],' France had nevertheless a strong party among the princes always at her beck. The Rhenish and Bavarian electors were her favourite tools. The 'réunions' begun inA.D.1680, a pleasant euphemism for robbery in time of peace, added Strasburg and other places in Alsace, Lorraine, andFranche Comté to the monarchy of Lewis, and brought him nearer the heart of the Empire; his ambition and cruelty were witnessed to by repeated wars, and by the devastation of the Rhine countries; the ultimate though short-lived triumph of his policy was attained when Marshal Belleisle dictated the election of Charles VII inA.D.1742. In the Turkish wars, when the princes leftWeakness and stagnation of Germany.Vienna to be saved by the Polish Sobieski, the Empire's weakness appeared in a still more pitiable light. There was, indeed, a complete loss of hope and interest in the old system. The princes had been so long accustomed to consider themselves the natural foes of a central government, that a request made by it was sure to be disregarded; they aped in their petty courts the pomp and etiquette of Vienna or Paris, grumbling that they should be required to garrison the great frontier fortresses which alone protected them from an encroaching neighbour. The Free Cities had never recovered the famines and sieges of the Thirty Years' War: Hanseatic greatness had waned, and the southern towns had sunk into languid oligarchies. All the vigour of the people in a somewhat stagnant age either found its sphere in rising states like the Prussia of Frederick the Great, or turned away from politics altogether into other channels. The Diet had become contemptible from the slowness with which it moved, and its tedious squabbles on matters the most frivolous. Many sittings were consumed in the discussion of a question regarding the time of keeping Easter, more ridiculous than that which had distracted the Western churches in the seventh century, the Protestants refusing to reckon by the reformed calendar because it was the work of a Pope. Collective action through the old organs was confessed impossible, when the common object ofdefence against France was sought by forming a league under the Emperor's presidency, and when at European congresses the Empire was not represented at all[381]. No change could come from the Emperor, whom the capitulation ofA.D.1658 deposedipso factoif he violated its provisions. As Dohm[382]said, to keep him from doing harm, he was kept from doing anything.
Leopold I, 1658-1705.
Joseph I, 1705-1711.
Charles VI, 1711-1742.
The Hapsburg Emperors and their policy.
Yet little was lost by his inactivity, for what could have been hoped from his action? From the election of Albert the Second,A.D.1437, to the death of Charles the Sixth,A.D.1742, the sceptre had remained in the hands of one family. So far from being fit subjects for undistinguishing invective, the Hapsburg Emperors may be contrasted favourably with the contemporary dynasties of France, Spain, or England. Their policy, viewed as a whole from the days of Rudolf downwards, had been neither conspicuously tyrannical, nor faltering, nor dishonest. But it had been always selfish. Entrusted with an office which might, if there be any power in those memories of the past to which the champions of hereditary monarchy so constantly appeal, have stirred their sluggish souls with some enthusiasm for the heroes on whose throne they sat, some wish to advance the glory and the happiness of Germany, they had cared for nothing, sought nothing, used the Empire as an instrument for nothing but the attainment of their own personal or dynastic ends. Placed on the eastern verge of Germany, the Hapsburgs had added to their ancient lands in Austria proper and Tyrol, non-German territories far more extensive, and had thus become the chiefs of a separate and independent state. They endeavoured to reconcile its interests withthe interests of the Empire, so long as it seemed possible to recover part of the old imperial prerogative. But when such hopes were dashed by the defeats of the Thirty Years' War, they hesitated no longer between an elective crown and the rule of their hereditary states, and comported themselves thenceforth in European politics not as the representatives of Germany, but as heads of the great Austrian monarchy. There would have been nothing culpable in this had they not at the same time continued to entangle Germany in wars with which she had no concern: to waste her strength in tedious combats with the Turks, or plunge her into a new struggle with France, not to defend her frontiers or recover the lands she had lost, but that some scion of the house of Hapsburg might reign in Spain or Italy. Watching the whole course of their foreign policy, marking how inA.D.1736 they had bartered away Lorraine for Tuscany, a German for a non-German territory, and seeing how at home they opposed every scheme of reform which could in the least degree trench upon their own prerogative, how they strove to obstruct the imperial chamber lest it should interfere with their own Aulic council, men were driven to separate the body of the Empire from the imperial office and its possessors[383], and when plans for reinvigorating the one failed, to leave the others to their fate. Still the old lineCauses of the long retention of the throne by Austria.clung to the crown with that Hapsburg gripe which has almost passed into a proverb. Odious as Austria was, no one could despise her, or fancy it easy to shake her commanding position in Europe. Her alliances were fortunate: her designs were steadily pursued: her dismembered territories always returned to her. Thoughthe throne continued strictly elective, it was impossible not to be influenced by long prescription. Projects were repeatedly formed to set the Hapsburgs aside by electing a prince of some other line[384], or by passing a law that there should never be more than two, or four, successive Emperors of the same house. France[385]ever and anon renewed her warnings to the electors, that their freedom was passing from them, and the sceptre becoming hereditary in one haughty family. But it was felt that a change would be difficult and disagreeable, and that the heavy expense and scanty revenues of the Empire required to be supported by larger patrimonial domains than most German princes possessed. The heads of states like Prussia and Hanover, states whose size and wealth would have made them suitable candidates, were Protestants, and so excluded both by the connexion of the imperial office with the Church, and by the majority of Roman Catholics in the electoral college[386], who, however jealous they might be of Austria, were led both by habit and sympathy to rally round her in moments of peril. Theone occasion on which these considerations were disregarded shewed their force. On the extinction of the male line of Hapsburg in the person of Charles the Sixth, the intrigues of the French envoy, Marshal Belleisle, procured the election of Charles Albert of Bavaria,Charles VII, 1742-1745.who stood first among the Catholic princes. His reign was a succession of misfortunes and ignominies. Driven from Munich by the Austrians, the head of the Holy Empire lived in Frankfort on the bounty of France, cursed by the country on which his ambition had brought the miseries of a protracted war[387]. The choice in 1745Francis I, 1745-1765.of Duke Francis of Lorraine, husband of the archduchess of Austria and queen of Hungary, Maria Theresa, was meant to restore the crown to the only power capable of wearing it with dignity: in Joseph the Second, her son, it again rested on the brow of a Hapsburg[388]. Inthe war of the Austrian succession, which followed on the death of Charles the Sixth, the Empire as a body took no part; in the Seven Years' War its wholeSeven Years' War.might broke in vain against one resolute member. Under Frederick the Great Prussia approved herself at least a match for France and Austria leagued against her, and the semblance of unity which the predominance of a single power had hitherto given to the Empire was replaced by the avowed rivalry of two military monarchies. The Emperor Joseph the Second, a sort of philosopher-king,Joseph II, 1765-1790.than whom few have more narrowly missed greatness, made a desperate effort to set things right, striving to restore the disordered finances, to purge and vivify the Imperial Chamber. Nay, he renounced the intolerant policy of his ancestors, quarrelled with the Pope[389], and presumed to visit Rome, whose streets heard once more the shout that had been silent for three centuries,'Evviva il nostro imperatore! Siete a casa vostra: siete il padrone[390].'But his indiscreet haste was met by a sullen resistance, and he died disappointed in plans for which the time was not yet ripe, leaving no result save the league of princes which Frederick the Great had formed to oppose his designs on Bavaria. His successor, LeopoldLeopold II, 1790-1792. Last phase of the Empire.the Second, abandoned the projected reforms, and a calm, the calm before the hurricane, settled down again upon Germany. The existence of the Empire was almost forgotten by its subjects: there was nothing to remind them of it but a feudal investiture now and then at Vienna (realfeudal rights were obsolete[391]); a concourse of solemn old lawyers at Wetzlar puzzling over interminable suits[392]; and some thirty diplomatists at Regensburg[393], the relics of thatThe Diet.Imperial Diet where once a hero-king, a Frederick or a Henry, enthroned amid mitred prelates and steel-clad barons, had issued laws for every tribe from the Mediterranean to the Baltic[394]. The solemn triflings of this so-called 'Diet of Deputation' have probably never been equalled elsewhere[395]. Questions of precedence and title, questions whether the envoys of princes should have chairs of red cloth like those of the electors, or only of the less honourable green, whether they should be served on gold or on silver, how many hawthorn boughs should be hung up before the door of each on May-day; these, and such as these, it was their chief employment not to settle but to discuss. The pedantic formalism of old Germany passed that of Spaniards or Turks; it had now crushed under a mountain of rubbish whatever meaning or force its old institutions had contained. It is the penalty of greatness that its form should outlive its substance: that gilding and trappings should remain when that which they were meant to deck and clothe has departed. So our sloth or our timidity, not seeing that whatever is false must be also bad, maintains in being what once was good long after it has become helpless and hopeless: so now at the close of the eighteenth century,strings of sounding titles were all that was left of the Empire which Charles had founded, and Frederick adorned, and Dante sung.
Feelings of the German people.
The German mind, just beginning to put forth the blossoms of its wondrous literature, turned away in disgust from the spectacle of ceremonious imbecility more than Byzantine. National feeling seemed gone from princes and people alike. Lessing, who did more than any one else to create the German literary spirit, says, 'Of the love of country I have no conception: it appears to me at best a heroic weakness which I am right glad to be without[396].' The Emperor Joseph II writes to his brother of France: 'You must know that the annihilation of German nationality is a necessary leading principle of my policy[397].' There were nevertheless persons who saw how fatal such a system was, lying like a nightmare on the people's soul. Speaking of the union of princes formed by Frederick of Prussia to preserve the existing condition of things, Johannes von Müller writes[398]: 'If the German Union serves for nothing better than to maintain thestatus quo, it is against the eternal order of God, by which neither the physical nor the moral world remains for a moment in thestatus quo, but all is life and motion and progress. To exist without law or justice, without security from arbitrary imposts, doubtful whether we can preserve from day to day our honours, our liberties, our rights, our lives, helpless before superior force, without a beneficial connexion between our states, without a national spirit at all, this is thestatus quoof our nation. And it was this that the Union was meant to confirm. If it be this andnothing more, then bethink you how when Israel saw that Rehoboam would not hearken, the people gave answer to the king and spake, "What portion have we in David, or what inheritance in the son of Jesse? to your tents, O Israel: David, see to thine own house." See then to your own houses, ye princes.'
Nevertheless, though the Empire stood like a corpse brought forth from some Egyptian sepulchre, ready to crumble at a touch, there seemed no reason why it should not stand so for centuries more. Fate was kind, and slew it in the light.
Francis II, 1792-1806.
Goethe has described the uneasiness with which, in the days of his childhood, the burghers of his native Frankfort saw the walls of the Roman Hall covered with the portraits of Emperor after Emperor, till space was left for few, at last for one[399]. InA.D.1792 Francis the Second mounted the throne of Augustus, and the last place was filled. Three years before there had arisen on the western horizon a little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, and now the heaven was black with storms of ruin. There was a prophecy[400], dating from the first days of the Empire's decline, that when all things were falling to ruin, and wickedness rife in the world, a second Frankish Charles should rise as Emperor to purge and heal, to bring back peace and purify religion. If this was not exactly the mission of the new ruler of the West Franks, he was at least anxious to tread in the steps and revive the glories of the hero whose crown he professed to have inherited. It were a task superfluously easy to shew how delusive is that minute historical parallel of which every Parisian was full inA.D.1804, the parallel between the heir of a longNapoleon, Emperor of the West.line of fierce Teutonic chieftains, whose vigorous genius had seized what it could of the monkish learning of the eighth century, and the son of the Corsican lawyer, with all the brilliance of a Frenchman and all the resolute profundity of an Italian, reared in, yet only half believing, the ideas of the Encyclopædists, swept up into the seat of absolute power by the whirlwind of a revolution. Alcuin and Talleyrand are not more unlike than are their masters. But though in the characters and temper of the men there is little resemblance, though their Empires agree in this only, and hardly even in this, that both were founded on conquest, there is nevertheless a sort of grand historical similarity between their positions. Both were the leaders of fiery and warlike nations, the one still untamed as the creatures of their native woods, the other drunk with revolutionary fury. Both aspired to found, and seemed for a time to have succeeded in founding, universal monarchies. Both were gifted with a strong and susceptible imagination, which if it sometimes overbore their judgment, was yet one of the truest and highest elements of their greatness. As the one looked back to the kings under the Jewish theocracy and the Emperors of Christian Rome, so the other thought to model himself after Cæsar and Charlemagne. For, useful as was the fancied precedent of the title and career of the great Carolingian to a chief determined to be king, yet unable to be king after the fashion of the Bourbons, and seductive as was such a connexion to the imaginative vanity of the French people, it was no studied purpose or simulating art that led NapoleonBelief of Napoleon that he was the successor of Charlemagne.to remind his subjects so frequently of the hero he claimed to represent. No one who reads the records of his life can doubt that he believed, as fully as he believed anything, that the same destiny which had made Francethe centre of the modern world had also appointed him to sit on the throne and carry out the projects of Charles the Frank, to rule all Europe from Paris, as the Cæsars had ruled it from Rome[401]. It was in this belief that he went to the ancient capital of the Frankish Emperors to receive there the Austrian recognition of his imperial title: that he talked of 'revendicating' Catalonia and Aragon, because they had formed a part of the Carolingian realm, though they had never obeyed the descendants of Hugh Capet: that he undertook a journey to Nimeguen, where he had ordered the ancient palace to be restored, and inscribed on its walls his name below that of Charles: that he summoned the Pope to attend his coronation as Stephen had come ten centuries before to instal Pipin in the throne of the last Merovingian[402]. The same desireto be regarded as lawful Emperor of the West shewed itself in his assumption of the Lombard crown at Milan; in the words of the decree by which he annexed Rome to the Empire, revoking 'the donations which my predecessors, the French Emperors, have made[403];' in the title 'King of Rome,' which he bestowed on his ill-fated son, in imitation of the German 'King of the Romans[404].' We are even told that it was at one time his intention to eject the Hapsburgs, and be chosen Roman Emperor in their stead. Had this been done, the analogy would have been complete between the position which the French ruler held to Austria now, and that in which Charles and Otto had stood to the feeble Cæsars of Byzantium. It wasAttitude of the Papacy towards Napoleon.curious to see the head of the Roman church turning away from his ancient ally to the reviving power of France—France, where the Goddess of Reason had been worshipped eight years before—just as he had sought the help of the first Carolingians against his Lombard enemies[405]. The difference was indeed great between the feelings wherewith Pius the Seventh addressed his 'very dear son in Christ,' and those that had pervaded the intercourse of Pope Hadrian the First with the son of Pipin; just as the contrast is strange between the principles that shaped Napoleon's policy and the vision of a theocracy that had floated before the mind of Charles. Neithercomparison is much to the advantage of the modern; but Pius might be pardoned for catching at any help in his distress, and Napoleon found that the protectorship of the church strengthened his position in France, and gave him dignity in the eyes of Christendom[406].
The French Empire.
A swift succession of triumphs had left only one thing still preventing the full recognition of the Corsican warrior as sovereign of Western Europe, and that one was the existence of the old Romano-Germanic Empire. Napoleon had not long assumed his new title when he began to mark a distinction between'la France'and'l'Empire Française.'France had, sinceA.D.1792, advanced to the Rhine, and, by the annexation of Piedmont, had overstepped the Alps; the French Empire included, besides the kingdom of Italy, a mass of dependent states, Naples, Holland, Switzerland, and many German principalities, the allies of France in the same sense in which the'socii populi Romani'were allies of Rome[407]. When the last of Pitt's coalitions had been destroyed at Austerlitz, and Austria had made her submission by the peace of Presburg, the conqueror felt that his hour was come. He had now overcome two Emperors, those of Austria and Russia, claiming to represent the old and the new Romerespectively, and had in eighteen months created more kings than the occupants of the Germanic throne in as many centuries. It was time, he thought, to sweep away obsolete pretensions, and claim the sole inheritance of that Western Empire, of which the titles and ceremonies of his court presented a grotesque imitation[408]. The task was an easy one after what had been already accomplished. Previous wars and treaties had so redistributed the territories and changed the constitution of the Germanic EmpireNapoleon in Germany.that it could hardly be said to exist in anything but name. In French history Napoleon appears as the restorer of peace, the rebuilder of the shattered edifice of social order: the author of a code and an administrative system which the Bourbons who dethroned him were glad to preserve. Abroad he was the true child of the Revolution, and conquered only to destroy. It was his mission—a mission more beneficent in its result than in its means[409]—to break up in Germany and Italy the abominable system of petty states, to reawaken the spirit of the people, to sweep away the relics of an effete feudalism, and leave the ground clear for the growth of newer and better forms of political life. SinceA.D.1797, when Austria at Campo Formio perfidiously exchanged the Netherlands for Venetia, the work of destruction had gone on apace. All the German sovereigns west of the Rhine had been dispossessed, and their territories incorporated with France, while the rest of the country had been revolutionized by the arrangementsof the peace of Luneville and the 'Indemnities,' dictated by the French to the Diet in February 1803. New kingdoms were erected, electorates created and extinguished, the lesser princes mediatized, the free cities occupied by troops and bestowed on some neighbouring potentate. More than any other change, the secularization of the dominions of the prince-bishops and abbots proclaimed the fall of the old constitution, whose principles had required the existence of a spiritual alongside of the temporal aristocracy. The Emperor Francis, partly foreboding the events that were at hand, partly in order to meet Napoleon's assumption of the imperial name by depriving that name of its peculiar meaning, began inA.D.1805 to style himself 'Hereditary Emperor of Austria,' while retaining at the same time his former title[410]. The next act of the drama was one in which we may more readily pardon the ambition of a foreign conqueror than the traitorous selfishness of the German princes, who broke every tie of ancient friendship and duty to grovel at his throne. By the Act of the Confederation[411]The Confederation of the Rhine.of the Rhine, signed at Paris, July 12th, 1806, Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and several other states,sixteen in all, withdrew from the body and repudiated the laws of the Empire, while on August 1st the French envoy at Regensburg announced to the Diet that his master, who had consented to become Protector of the Confederate princes, no longer recognized the existence of the Empire. Francis the Second resolved at onceAbdication of the Emperor Francis II.to anticipate this new Odoacer, and by a declaration, dated August 6th, 1806, resigned the imperial dignity. His deed states that finding it impossible, in the altered state of things, to fulfil the obligations imposed by his capitulation, he considers as dissolved the bonds which attached him to the Germanic body, releases from their allegiance the states who formed it, and retires to the government of his hereditary dominions under the title of 'Emperor of Austria[412].' Throughout, the term 'German Empire' (Deutsches Reich) is employed. But it was the crown of Augustus, of Constantine, of Charles, of Maximilian, that Francis of Hapsburg laid down, and a new era in the world's history was marked by the fall of its most venerable institution. One thousand and six yearsEnd of the Empire.after Leo the Pope had crowned the Frankish king, eighteen hundred and fifty-eight years after Cæsar had conquered at Pharsalia, the Holy Roman Empire came to its end.
There was a time when this event would have been thought a sign that the last days of the world were athand. But in the whirl of change that had bewildered men sinceA.D.1789, it passed almost unnoticed. No one could yet fancy how things would end, or what sort of a new order would at last shape itself out of chaos. When Napoleon's universal monarchy had dissolved, and old landmarks shewed themselves again above the receding waters, it was commonly supposed that the Empire would be re-established on its former footing[413]. Such was indeed the wish of many states, and among them of Hanover, representing Great Britain[414]. Though a simple revival of the old Romano-Germanic Empire was plainly out of the question, it still appeared to them that Germany would be best off under the presidency of a single head, entrusted with the ancient office of maintaining peace among the members of the confederation. But the new kingdoms, Bavaria especially, were unwilling to admit a superior; Prussia, elated at the glory she had won in the war of independence, would have disputed the crown with Austria; Austria herself cared little to resume an office shorn of much of its dignity, with duties to perform and no resources to enable her to discharge them. Use was therefore made of an expression in the Peace of Paris which spoke of uniting Germany by a federative bond[415],Congress of Vienna.and the Congress of Vienna was decided by the wishes of Austria to establish a Confederation. Thuswas brought about the present German federal constitution, which is itself confessed, by the attempts so often made to reform it, to be a mere temporary expedient, oppressive in the hands of the strong, and useless for the protection of the weak. Of late years, one school of liberal politicians, justly indignant at their betrayal by the princes after the enthusiastic uprising ofA.D.1814, has aspired to the restoration of the Empire, either as an hereditary kingdom in the Prussian or some other family, or in a more republican fashion under a head elected by the people[416]. The obstacles in the way of such plans are evidently very great; but even were the horizon more clear than it is, this would not be the place from which to scan it[417].
General summary.
After the attempts already made to examine separately each of the phases of the Empire, little need be said, in conclusion, upon its nature and results in general. A general character can hardly help being either vague or false. For the aspects which the Empire took are as many and as various as the ages and conditions of society during which it continued to exist. Among the exhausted peoples around the Mediterranean, whose national feeling had died out, whose faith was extinct or turned to superstition, whose thought and art was a faint imitation of the Greek, there arises a huge despotism, first of a city, then of an administrative system, which presses with equal weight on all its subjects, and becomes to them a religion as well as a government. Just when the mass is at length dissolving, the tribes of the North come down, too rude to maintain the institutions they found subsisting, too few to introduce their own, and a weltering confusion follows, till the strong hand of the first Frankish Emperor raises the fallen image and bids the nations bow down to it once more. Under him it is for some brief space a theocracy; under his German successors the first of feudal kingdoms, the centre of European chivalry. As feudalism wanes, it is again transformed,Perpetuation of the name of Rome.and after promising for a time to become an hereditary Hapsburg monarchy, sinks at last into the presidency, not more dignified than powerless, of an international league. To us moderns, a perpetuation under conditions so diverse of the same name and the same pretensions, appears at first sight absurd, a phantom too vain to impress the most superstitious mind. Closer examination will correct such a notion. No power was ever based on foundations so sure and deep as those which Rome laid during three centuries of conquest and four of undisturbed dominion. If her empire had been an hereditary or local kingdom, it might have fallen with the extinction of the royal line, the conquest of the tribe, the destruction of the city to which it was attached. 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 theories of the Greeks had been reduced to practice; by her the new religion had been embraced and organized; her language, her theology, her laws, her architecture made their way where the eagles of war had never flown, and with the spread of civilization have found new homes on the Ganges and the Mississippi.
Parallel instances.
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 not insignificant now, howClaims to represent the Roman Empire.Austria.much less so in ages of ignorance and unreason. It would be an instructive, if it were not a tedious task, to examine the many pretensions that are still put forward to represent the Empire of Rome, all of them baseless, none of them effectless. Austria clings to a name which seems to give her a sort of precedence in Europe, and was wont, while she held Lombardy, to justify her position there by invoking the feudal rights of the Hohenstaufen. With no more legal right than the prince of Reuss or the landgrave of Homburg might pretend to, she has assumed the arms and devices of the old Empire, and being almost the youngest of European monarchies, is respected as theFrance.oldest and most conservative. Bonapartean France, as the self-appointed heir of the Carolingians, grasped for a time the sceptre of the West, and still aspires 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[418]. Professing the creed of Byzantium,Russia.Russia claims the crown of the Byzantine Cæsars, and trusts that the capital which prophecy has promised for a thousand years will not be long withheld. The doctrine of Panslavism, under an imperial head of the whole Eastern church, has become a formidable engine of aggression in the hands of a crafty and warlike despotism. Another testimony to the enduring influence of old political combinations is supplied by the eagerness with which modern Hellas has embraced the notion ofGreece.gathering all the Greek races 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, has more than once declared himself the representativeof the Eastern Cæsars, whose dominion heThe Turks.extinguished. Solyman the Magnificent assumed the name of Emperor, and refused it to Charles the Fifth: his successors were long preceded through the streets of Constantinople by twelve 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 has there been that apparent legality of title which the shouts of the people and the benediction of the pontiff conveyed to Charles and Otto[419].
Parallel of the Papacy.
These examples, however, are minor parallels: the complement and illustration of the history of the Empire is to be found in that of the Holy See. The Papacy, whose spiritual power was itself the offspring of Rome's temporal dominion, evoked the phantom of her parent, used it, obeyed it, rebelled and overthrew it, in its old age once more embraced it, till in its downfall she has heard the knell of her own approaching doom[420].
Both Papacy and Empire rose in an age when the human spirit was utterly prostrated before authority and tradition, when the exercise of private judgment was impossible to most and sinful to all. Those who believed the miracles recorded in theActa Sanctorum, and did not question the Isidorian decretals, might well recognize as ordained of God the twofold authority of Rome, founded, as it seemed to be, on so many texts of Scripture, and confirmed by five centuries of undisputed possession.
Both sanctioned and satisfied the passion of the MiddleAges 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, not seeing the true connexion or the true difference of the spiritual and the secular, the idea of the Visible Church was full of awful meaning. Solitary thought was helpless, and strove to lose itself in the aggregate, since it could not create for itself that which was universal. The schism that severed a man from the congregation of the faithful on earth was hardly less dreadful than the heresy which excluded him from the company of the blessed in heaven. He who kept not his appointed place in the ranks of the church militant had no right to swell the rejoicing anthems of the church triumphant. Here, as in so many other cases, the continued use of traditional language seems to have prevented us from seeing how great is the difference between our own times and those in which the phrases we repeat were first used, and used in full sincerity. Whether the world is better or worse for the change which has passed upon its feelings in these matters is another question: all that it is necessary to note here is that the change is a profound and pervading one. Obedience, almost the first of mediæval 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 certainly nolonging for an abstract unity of faith. They have no horror of schism. They do not, cannot, understand the intense fascination which the idea of one all-pervading church exercised upon their mediæval 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 famous mediæval 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[421].'
Again, both Empire and Papacy rested on opinion rather than on physical force, and when the struggle of the eleventh century came, the Empire fell, because its rival's hold over the souls of men was firmer, more direct, enforced by penalties more terrible than the death of thebody. The ecclesiastical body under Alexander and Innocent 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 Cæsars. Its allegiance was undivided; it comprehended the principles for which it fought: they trembled at even while they resisted the spiritual power.
Papacy and Empire compared as perpetuations of a name.
Both sprang from what might be called the accident of name. The power of the great Latin patriarchate was a Form: the ghost, it has been said, of the older Empire, favoured in its growth by circumstances, but really vital because capable of wonderful adaptation to the character and wants of the time. So too, though far less perfectly, was the Empire. Its Form was the tradition of the 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 assuming in its old age the presidency of a European confederation. And the history of both, as it shews the power of ancient names and forms, shews also within what limits such a perpetuation is possible, and how it sometimes deceives men, by preserving the shadow while it loses the substance. This perpetuation itself, what is it but the expression of the belief of mankind, a belief incessantly corrected yet never weakened, that their old institutions do and may continue to subsist unchanged, that what has served their fathers will do well enough for them, that it is possible to make a system perfect and abide in it for ever? Of all political instincts this is perhaps the strongest; often useful, often grossly abused, but never so natural and so fitting as when it leads menwho feel themselves inferior to their predecessors, to save what they can from the wreck of a civilization higher than their own. It was thus that both Papacy and Empire were maintained by the generations who had no type of greatness and wisdom save that which they associated with the name of Rome. And therefore it is that no examples shew so convincingly how hopeless are all such attempts to preserve in life a system which arose out of ideas and under conditions that have passed away. Though it never could have existed save as a prolongation, though it was and remained through the Middle Ages an anachronism, the Empire of the tenth century had little in common with the Empire of the second. Much more was the Papacy, though it too hankered after the forms and titles of antiquity, in reality a new creation. And in the same proportion as it was new, and 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 younger, and so in fuller harmony with the feelings of its contemporaries: stronger, because at the head of the great ecclesiastical body, in and through which, rather than through secular life, all the intelligence and political activity of the Middle Ages sought its expression. The famous simile of Gregory the Seventh is that which best describes the Empire and the Popedom. They were indeed the 'two lights in the firmament of the militant church,' the lights which 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.
The Empire, it has just been said, was never trulyIn what sense was the Empire Roman?mediæval. Was it then Roman in anything but name? and was that name anything better than a piece of fantastic antiquarianism? It is easy to draw a comparison between the Antonines and the Ottos which should shew nothing but unlikeness. What the Empire was in the second century every one knows. In the tenth it was a feudal monarchy, resting on a strong territorial 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 were limited. It could scarcely be said to have a regular organization at all, whether judicial or administrative. It was consecrated to the defence, nay, it existed by virtue of the religion which Trajan and Marcus had persecuted. Nevertheless, when the contrast has been stated in the strongest terms, there will remain points of resemblance. The thoroughly Roman idea of universal denationalization survived, and drew with it that of a certain equality among all free subjects. It has been remarked already, that the world's highest dignity was for many centuries the only civil office to which any free-born Christian was legally eligible. And there was also, during the earlier ages, that indomitable vigour which might have made Trajan or Severus seek their true successors among the woods of Germany rather than in the palaces of Byzantium, where every office and name and custom had floated down from the court of Constantine in a stream of unbroken legitimacy. The ceremonies of Henry the Seventh's coronation would have been strange indeed to Caius Julius Cæsar Octavianus Augustus; but how much nobler, how much more Roman in force and truth than the childish and unmeaning forms with which a Palæologus was installed! It was not in purple buskins that thedignity of the Luxemburger lay[422]. To such a boast the Germanic Empire had long ere its death lost right: it had lived on, when honour and nature bade it die: it had become what the Empire of the Moguls was, and that of the Ottomans is now, a curious relic of antiquity, over which the imaginative might muse, but which the mass of men would push aside with impatient contempt. But institutions, like men, should be judged by their prime.
'Imperialism:' Roman, French, and mediæval.
The comparison of the old Roman Empire with its Germanic representative raises a question which has been a good deal canvassed of late years. That wonderful system which Julius Cæsar and his subtle nephew erected upon the ruins of the republican constitution of Rome has been made the type of a certain form of government and of a certain set of social as well as political arrangements, to which, or rather to the theory whereof they are a part, there has been given the name of Imperialism. The sacrifice of the individual to the mass, the 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, are commonly taken, whether rightly or wrongly, to characterize that theory. Its enemies cannot deny that it has before now given and may again give to nations a sudden and violent access of aggressive energy; that it has often achieved the glory (whatever that may be) of war and conquest; that it has a better title to respect in the ease with which it may be made, as it was by the Flavian and Antonine Cæsars of old, and at the beginning of this century by Napoleon in France, the instrument of comprehensivereforms in law and government. The parallel between the Roman world under the Cæsars and the French people now is indeed less perfect than those who dilate upon it fancy. That equalizing despotism which was a good to a medley of tribes, the force of whose national life had spent itself and left them languid, yet restless, with all the evils of isolation and none of its advantages, is not necessarily a good to a country already the strongest and most united in Europe, a country where the administration is only too perfect, and the pressure of social uniformity only too strong. But whether it be a good or an evil, no one can doubt that France represents, and has always represented, the imperialist spirit of Rome far more truly than those whom the Middle Ages recognized as the legitimate heirs of her name and dominion. In the political character of the French people, whether it be the result of the five centuries of Roman rule in Gaul, or rather due to the original instincts of the Gallic race, is to be found their claim, a claim better founded than any which Napoleon put forward, to be the Romans[423]of thePolitical character of the Teutonic and Gallic races.modern world. The tendency of the Teuton was and is to the independence of the individual life, to the mutual repulsion, if the phrase may be permitted, of the social atoms, as contrasted with Keltic and so-called Romanic peoples, among which the unit is more completely absorbed in the mass, who live possessed by a common idea which they are driven to realize in the concrete. Teutonic states have been little more successful than their neighbours in the establishment of free constitutions. Their assemblies meet, and vote, and are dissolved, and nothing comes of it: their citizens endure without greatly resentingoutrages that would raise the more excitable French or Italians in revolt. But, whatever may have been the form of government, the body of the people have in Germany always enjoyed a freedom of thought which has made them comparatively careless of politics; and the absolutism of the Elbe is at this day no more like that of the Seine than a revolution at Dresden is to a revolution at Paris. The rule of the Hohenstaufen had nothing either of the good or the evil of the imperialism which Tacitus painted, or of that which the panegyrists of the present system in France paint in colours somewhat different from his.
Essential principles of the mediæval Empire.
There was, nevertheless, such a thing as mediæval imperialism, a theory of the nature of the state and the best form of government, which has been described once already, and need not be described again. It is enough to say, that from three leading principles all its properties may be derived. The first and the least essential was the existence of the state as a monarchy. The second was the exact coincidence of the state's limits, and the perfect harmony of its workings with the limits and the workings of the church. The third was its universality. These three were vital. Forms of political organization, the presence or absence of constitutional checks, the degree of liberty enjoyed by the subject, the rights conceded to local authorities, all these were matters of secondary importance. But although there brooded over all the shadow of a despotism, it was a despotism not of the sword but of law; a despotism not chilling and blighting, but one which, in Germany at least, looked with favour on municipal freedom, and everywhere did its best for learning, for religion, for intelligence; a despotism not hereditary, but one which constantly maintained in theorythe 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 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.
Influence of the Holy Empire on Germany.
The influence of the Empire upon Germany is a subject too wide to be more than glanced at here. There is much to make it 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 fourteenth 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 aggressive and superior in all the arts of success, they came to regard France as the persecuted Slave regards them. The want of national union and political liberty from which Germany has suffered, and to some extent suffers still, cannot be attributedto the differences of her races; for, conspicuous as that difference was in the days of Otto the Great, it was no greater than in France, where intruding Franks, Goths, Burgundians, and Northmen were mingled with primitive Kelts and Basques; not so great as in Spain, or Italy, or Britain. Rather is it due to the decline of the central government, which was induced by its strife with the Popedom, its endless Italian wars, and the passion for universal dominion which made it the assailant of all the neighbouring countries. The absence or the weakness of the monarch enabled his feudal vassals to establish petty despotisms, debarring the nation from united 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—liberty to oppress the subject—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 have found the lack of such experience impede their efforts to this day.
For these misfortunes, however, there has not been wanting some compensation. The inheritance of the Roman Empire made the Germans the ruling race of Europe, and the brilliance of that glorious dawn can never fade entirely from their name. A peaceful people now, peaceful in sentiment even now when they have become a great military power, submissive to paternal government, and given to the quiet enjoyments of art, music, and meditation, they delight 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 keenstimulus 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 connexion 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 all the richness of their mediæval life and literature: it first awoke in them a consciousness of national existence; its history has inspired and served as material to their poetry; to many ardent politicians the splendours of the past have become the beacon of the future[424]. There is a bright side even to their political disunion. When they complain that they are not a nation, and sigh for the harmony of feeling and singleness of aim which their great rival displays, the example of the Greeks may comfort them. To the variety which so many small governments have produced may be partly attributed the breadth of development in German thought and literature, by virtue of which it transcends the French hardly less than the Greek surpassed the Roman. Paris no doubt is great, but a country may lose as well as gain by the predominance of a single city; and Germany need not mourn that she alone among modern states has not and never has had a capital.
The merits of the old Empire were not long since the subject of a brisk controversy among several German professors of history[425]. The spokesmen of the Austrian or Roman Catholic party, a party which ten years ago was not less powerful in some of the minor South GermanAustria as heir of the Holy Empire.States than in Vienna, claimed for the Hapsburg monarchy the honour of being the legitimate representative of the mediæval 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.' It is possible, one may hope, to escape the alternative of admiring the Austrian Empire or denouncing the Holy Roman. Austria has indeed, in some things, but too faithfully reproduced the policy of the Saxon and Swabian Cæsars. Like her, they oppressed and insulted the Italian people: but it was in the defence of rights which the Italians themselves admitted. Like her, they lusted after a dominion over the races on their borders, but that dominion was to them a means of spreading civilization and religion in savage countries, not of pampering upon their revenues a hated court and aristocracy. Like her, they strove to maintain a strong government at home, but they did it when a strong government was the first of political blessings. Like her, they gathered and maintained vast armies; but those armies were composed of knights and barons who lived for war alone, not of peasants torn away from useful labour and condemned to the cruel task of perpetuatingtheir own bondage by crushing the aspirations of another nationality. They sinned grievously, no doubt, but they sinned in the dim twilight of a half-barbarous age, not in the noonday blaze of modern civilization. The enthusiasm for mediæval faith and simplicity which was so fervid some years ago has run its course, and is not likely soon to revive. He who reads the history of the Middle Ages will not deny that its heroes, even the best of them, were in some respects little better than savages. But when he approaches more recent times, and sees how, during the last three hundred years, kings have dealt with their subjects and with each other, he will forget the ferocity of the Middle Ages, in horror at the heartlessness, the treachery, the injustice all the more odious because it sometimes wears the mask of legality, which disgraces the annals of the military monarchies of Europe. With regard, however, to the pretensions of modern Austria, the truth is that this dispute about the worth of the old system has no bearing upon them at all. The day of imperial greatness was already past when Rudolf the first Hapsburg reached the throne; while during what may be called the Austrian period, from Maximilian 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. The Germans are welcome to appeal to the old Empire to prove that they were once a united people. Nor is there any harm in their comparing the politics of the twelfth century with those of the nineteenth, although to argue from the one to the other seems to betray a want of historical judgment. But the one thing which is wholly absurd is to make Francis Joseph of Austria the successor of Frederick of Hohenstaufen, and justify the most sordid and ungenialof modern despotisms by the example of the mirror of mediæval chivalry, the noblest creation of mediæval thought.
Bearing of the Empire upon the progress of European civilization.
We are not yet far enough from the Empire to comprehend or state rightly its bearing on European progress. The mountain lies behind us, but miles must be traversed before we can take in at a glance its peaks and slopes and buttresses, picture its form, and conjecture its height. Of the perpetuation among the peoples of the West of the arts and literature of Rome it was both an effect and a cause, a cause only less powerful than the church. It would be endless to shew in how many ways it affected the political institutions of the Middle Ages, and through them of the whole civilized world. Most of the attributes of modern royalty, to take the most obvious instance, belonged originally and properly to the Emperor, and were borrowed from him by other monarchs. The once famous doctrine of divine right had the same origin. To the existence of the Empire is chiefly to be ascribed the prevalence of Roman law through Europe, and its practical importance in our own days. For while in SouthernInfluence upon modern jurisprudence.France and Central Italy, where the subject population greatly outnumbered their conquerors, the old system would have in any case survived, it cannot be doubted that in Germany, as in England, a body of customary Teutonic law would have grown up, had it not been for the notion that since the German monarch was the legitimate successor of Justinian, theCorpus Jurismust 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, could not but admit its validity, and before the end of the Middle Ages Roman law prevailedthrough all Germany[426]. 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 code to regulate their intercourse became pressing. That code Grotius and his successors formed out of what was then the private law of Germany, which thus became the foundation whereon the system of international jurisprudence has been built up during the last two centuries. That system is, indeed, entirely a German creation, and could have arisen in no country where the law of Rome had not been the fountain of legal ideas and the groundwork of positive codes. In Germany, too, was it first carried out in practice, and that with a success which is the best, some might say the only, title of the later Empire to the grateful remembrance of mankind. Under its protecting shade small princedoms and free cities lived unmolested beside states like Saxony and Bavaria; each member of the Germanic body feeling that the rights of the weakest of his brethren were also his own.
Influence of the Empire upon the history of the Church.
The most important chapter in the history of the Empire is that which describes its relation to the Church and the Papacy. 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 oftheir own downfall. The struggle which Gregory the Seventh began, although it was political rather than religious, awoke in the Teutonic nations a hostility to the pretensions of the Romish court. That struggle ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the victory of the priesthood, a victory whose abuse by the insolent and greedy pontiffs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made it more ruinous than a defeat. The anger which had long smouldered in the breasts of the northern nations of Europe burst out in the sixteenth with a violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto defended, 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 whichNature of the question at issue between the Emperors and the Popes.had preceded it must not be misunderstood. It is a natural, but not the less a serious error to suppose, as modern writers often seem to do, that the pretensions of the Empire and the Popedom were mutually exclusive; that each claimed all the rights, spiritual and secular, of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the case, that we find mediæval 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, Cæsar in things temporal. The relative position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo a signal alteration. In the days of Charles, the barbarous age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but be governed chiefly by physical force, the Emperor was practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent the Third, when the power of ideas had grown stronger in the world, and was able to resist or to bend to its service the armsand the wealth of men, we see the balance inclined the other way. Spiritual authority is conceived of as being of a nature so high and holy that it must inspire and guide the civil administration. But it is not proposed to supplant that administration nor to degrade its head: the great struggle of the eleventh and two following centuries does not aim at the annihilation of one or other power, but turns solely upon the character of their connexion. Hildebrand, the typical representative of the Popedom, requires the obedience of the Emperor on the ground of his own personal responsibility for the souls of their common subjects: he demands, not that the functions of temporal government shall be directly committed to himself, but that they shall be exercised in conformity with the will of God, whereof he is the exponent. The imperialist party had no means of meeting this argument, for they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, nor the transcendant importance of eternal salvation. They could therefore only protest that the Emperor, being also divinely appointed, was directly answerable to God, and remind the Pope that his kingdom was not of this world. There was in truth no way out of the difficulty, for it was caused by the attempt to sever things that admit of no severance, life in the soul and life in the world, life for the future and life in the present. What it is most pertinent to remark is that neither combatant pushed his theory to extremities, since he felt that his adversary's title rested on the same foundations as his own. The strife was keenest at the time when the whole world believed fervently in both powers; the alliance came when faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the other; from the Reformation onwards Empire and Popedom fought no longer for supremacy, but forexistence. One is fallen already, the other shakes with every blast.