EMPIRE, a term 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 from 1870 to 1918, or a unitary state, like the Russian empire before its collapse, or even, like the British empire, a loose commonwealth of free states united to a number of sub ordinate 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 many ways anticipated the empire of Rome. "In his later years," 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, in different 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 harmo nized with this notion, just as Stoicism did later with the practice of the Roman empire : Alexander, like Diocletian and Constantine afterwards, accustomed a Western people to the forms of an Oriental court ; and he anticipated the Roman Caesars in claiming and receiving 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 (as, for instance, the Hellenization of the East) they were heirs of their master's policy, were destitute of any general conception of empire. 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, through out the middle ages, went together to make the thing which men called empire.
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 em peror might still be regarded as an official 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. The old public aerarium which had survived the republic, became merely a municipal treasury : the fiscus of the emperor became the exchequer of the empire. The officers of the emperor's praetorium, or bodyguard, are made the great officers of state ; his private council becomes the public consistory, or supreme court of appeal; and the comites of his court are also the administrators of his empire. "All is in him, and all comes from him," as our own year-books say of the mediaeval king : his household, for instance, is not only a house hold, but also an administration. On the other hand, this unifica tion seems to be accompanied by a new bifurcation. The exigen cies 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 what seemed a second empire in the East (A.D. 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 lan guage is utterly inexact. The Roman empire was, and always con tinued to be, ideally one and indivisible. There were two em perors, 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, though it may, for convenience, be ruled conjointly by two emperors, resident, again for convenience, in two separate capitals. As a matter of fact, the beginning of the residence of an emperor in the East not only did not spell bifurcation actually fostered, but to some extent, the tendency towards unification.' It helped forward the transformation of the empire into an absolute and quasi-Asiatic monarchy which reduced all its subjects to 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. The deification of the emperor himself dates from the days of Augus tus ; by the time of Constantine it has infected the court and the government, which are now regarded as in some sense "divine." Each emperor, again, had from the first enjoyed the sacrosanct po sition 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." Influence of Christianity.—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 into the Roman empire by Constantine. That recep tion 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 a iroXes or 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 is one church, whereof Christ is the Head, and we are all members—could not but reinforce, in the minds of all Christians, 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. Grow ing up under the shadow of the empire, the church too became an empire, as the empire had become a church. As it took over some thing of the old pagan ceremonial, so it took over much of the old secular organization. The pope borrowed his title of Monti f ex maxirnus from 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 (see DONATION OF CONSTANTINE).
Barbarian Invasions.—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 'Bryce points out, with much subtlety and truth, that the rise of a second Rome in the East not only helped to perpetuate the empire by providing a new centre which would take the place of Rome when Rome fell, but also tended to make it more universal ; "for, having lost its local centre, it subsisted no longer by historic right only, but, so to speak, naturally, as a part of an order of things which a change in external conditions seemed incapable of disturbing." (Holy Roman Empire, p. 8 of the edition of i9o4.) fragmentary kingdoms ; yet it left the Universal Church intact, and with it the conception of empire. With that conception, in deed, 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 abdica tion 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 king doms. De facto, there is some truth in such a view : de jure, there is none. All 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 (see Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 25, note u, in the edition of 1904). As Odoacer thus fitted himself into the scheme of empire, so did both Clovis and Theodoric. They did not claim to be emperors (that was reserved for Charlemagne) : they claimed to be the vicars and lieutenants of the empire. Theodoric spoke of himself to Zeno as imperio vestro famulans; he left justice and adminis tration 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 bor ders. 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.
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 had also passed away from it. The popes abandoned only 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 ; and what had to be found 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 representa tive 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 therewith omnes ltaliae sea occidentalium regionum pro vincias 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 alone 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 concep tion they cherished.' In 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.
Coronation of Charlemagne as Emperor of the West.— 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 'According to the view here followed, the church was the ark in which the conception of empire was saved during the dark ages between 600 and 800. Some influence should perhaps also be assigned to Roman law, which continued to be administered during these centuries, especially in the towns, and maintained the imperial tradi tion. But the influence of the church is the essential fact.
the first Athanasian, and had never been tainted, like most of the Germanic tribes, by the adoption of Arian tenets. His grand father, Charles Martel, had saved Europe from the danger of a Mohammedan conquest by his victory at Poitiers (732) ; his father, Pippin the Short, had helped the English missionary Boni face to achieve the conversion of Germany. The popes themselves had again and again turned to the Frankish rulers for support 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 deposi tion of the last of the Merovingian rois fainéants, and gave to Pippin, their "mayor of the palace," the title of king (75I) ; 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 (7S4), 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 of patricius 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.' Again, 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 7 74 Charles conquered the Lombard king dom, 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 a de facto empire. He bore the title of patricius, 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 Charle magne to maintain himself against his own Romans, crowned him emperor 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 wide de facto empire, 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 springing 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, ac cording to the point of view. From the ecclesiastical point of view, the right resides with the pope. This theory was not promul gated (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 was becoming an established doctrine that a translatio Imperii took place in 800, whereby the pope transferred the Roman empire from the Greeks to the Germans in the person of the magnificent Charles.' One can only say that, as a matter of fact, the popes ceased to recognize the Eastern 'In the 5th century the title patricius came to attach particularly to the head of the Roman army (magister utriusque militiae)—to men like Aetius and Ricimer, to made and unmade emperors (cf. Mommsen, Gesammelte Schriften, iv. 537, 545 sqq.). Later it had been borne by the Greek exarchs of Ravenna. The concession to Pippin of this great title makes him military head of the Western empire, in the sense in which the title was used in the 5th century ; it makes him representative of the empire for Italy, in the sense in which it had been used of the exarchs.
the famous bull Venerabilem (Corp. lur. Canon. Decr. Greg. i. 6, c. 34).
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, inspired by legal ideas, and basing himself on the code of Justinian, we shall find that an emperor must derive his institution and power from a lex regia passed by the populus 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 con temporary 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 con ception of the Roman people as the source of empire is one that was only championed during the middle ages by antiquarian ideal ists like Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi. The faex 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 the Quirites of 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.' 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 corona tion? 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 thoughts were already set on empire, hoped to depose and succeed Irene, and thus to become the sole representative of the conception of empire, alike in the East and the West. Suddenly there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor, an act appar ently unpremeditated at the moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from Einhard's Vita Karoli, and interrupting his plans. It left him representative of the empire for the West only, con fronting 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 recog nition of his imperial title by the two successors of the empress. This did not, however, mean (at any rate in the issue) that hence forth there were to be two conjoint rulers, amicably ruling a single empire as colleagues 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, in the manner common before the days of Diocletian, as demanding 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 'Even on this view, an imperial coronation at the hands of the pope was necessary to complete the title ; but this was regarded by the Germans (though not by the pope) as a form which necessarily followed.
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. in the title of emperor, and viewed the Carolings and their later successors as upstarts and usurpers, with no right to their imperial pretensions. Henceforth two halves confronted one an other, each claiming to be the whole; two finite bodies touched, and each yet claimed to be infinite.
Character of the Carolingian Empire.—If, as has been sug gested, 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 administra tion, cannot have been considerable. The empire added a new sanction to a policy and administration already developed. Char lemagne had already showed himself episcopus episcoporum, anxious not only to suppress heresy and supervise the clergy within his borders, but also to extend true Christianity outside 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 the missi dominici were already at work to superintend the action of the counts, even before the renovatio imperil Romani came to suggest such uniformity and centraliza tion. 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 connection with the Carolingian house, the popes were able to save it. Civil wars raged among the descendants of Charle magne : partitions recurred : the empire was finally dissolved, in the sense that the old realm of Charlemagne fell asunder, in 888. 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 prefer ence to other claimants in 875; and before the end of his pontif icate 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 dis appeared, Benedict IV. could crown Louis of Provence (901), and John X. could invite to the vacant throne an Italian potentate like Berengar of Friuli (9r 5) ; 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.
is in virtue of this aspect that the Empire is holy. The term sacrum imperium seems to have been first used about the time of Frederick I., when the emperors were anxious to magnify the sanctity of their office in answer to papal opposition. The emperor himself (see under EMPEROR) was always regarded, and at his coronation treated, as a persona ecclesiastica.
Realism, that the one universal is the true abiding substance—the doctrine which pervades the De monarchia of 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 thing sui generis. Externally, it meant far less than the empire of Charlemagne; it meant simply a union of Germany and northern Italy (to which, after 2032, one must also add Burgundy, though the addition is in reality nominal) under a single rule. Historians of the 29th 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 re mains that the union of Teutonic Germany and Latin Italy was, from an external point of view, the essential fact in the structure of the mediaeval empire. Internally, again, the empire of the Ottos and their successors was new and unprecedented. If Latin imperialism had been combined with Frankish tribalism 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, his equites in the ranks of the German knights. Feudalism, indeed, came in time to invade the very con ception 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 2 2th 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 the Translatio buttressed their claim to be overlords of the empire; and the emperors found that their very duty to defend the papacy made them appear as its vassals—for was not the advocatus who defended the lands of an abbey or church its tenant by feudal service, and was not the emperor an "advocate" of the papacy and its patrimony in central Italy? The Empire and the Papacy.—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 2250). For a century (962-2076) the relation was one of amity. The pope and the emperor stood as co-ordinate sovereigns, ruling together the commonwealth of Europe.' If 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 of patricius, 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. (the famous Gerbert, who had been scholasticus of 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 institu tion 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 'The emperor claimed suzerainty over the greater part of Europe at various dates. Hungary and Poland, France and Spain, the Scandi navian peninsula, the British Isles, were all claimed for the empire at different times (see Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, c. xii.) . The "effec tive" empire, if indeed it may be called effective, embraced only Ger many, Burgundy and the regnum Italiae (the old Lombard kingdom in the valley of the Po) .
with the premature death of Otto ; and after the death of Silvester 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 Iii. (the second emperor of the new Salian house, which reigned from 1024-1125), when in 1046 he caused the deposition of several popes, and afterwards filled the papal chair with his own nominees; but it was rescued more effectually by itself, when in 1059 the celebrated bull In nomine Domini of Nicholas II. re served the right of electing the popes to the college of cardinals (see CONCLAVE). 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 10S9 had greatly promoted, was ultimately due to one of those movements of ecclesiastical revival which recur in the history of the Catholic Church. The aim 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 (1076-112 2) . Whether or not 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 a great loss of prestige. The em peror 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 stronger dominium tempo rale. The First Crusade came, but the emperor, its natural leader, could not lead it; and the centre of learning and civilization, in the course of the 5o years' War of Investitures, gradually shifted to France. The struggle was finally ended by a compromise—the Concordat of Worms—in 112 2 ; 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 (see INVESTITURE). 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 enunciated by the envoys of Adrian IV. at the diet of Besancon in 1157, now begins to arise. The popes, who had called the emperors to the heads of the European commonwealth in Boo and again in 962, begin to vindicate that headship for them selves. Gregory VII. had already claimed that the pope stood to the emperor as the sun to the moon ; and gradually the old idea of co-ordination disappeared in a new view of the subordination of the empire to the papal plenitudo potestatis. The claim of ecclesiastical independence made in the middle of the 11 th 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 Io59, 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.
The Hohenstaufen Emperors.—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 possessions in Swabia, which took the place of the lost 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 I 183. 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 had rec ognized 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 of Sicily for his son and successor 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 12 20 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 Lom bardy, 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 sum moned Charles of Anjou into Sicily to exterminate his house. By 1268 he had done his work, and the mediaeval 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.
Thus ended the first great chapter in the history of the Holy Roman Empire which Otto had founded in 962. In those three centuries the great fact had been its relation to the papacy : in the last two of those three centuries the relation had been one of enmity. The basis of the enmity had been the papal claim to supreme headship of Latin Christianity, and to an independent temporal demesne in Italy as the condition of that headship. Be cause they desired supreme headship, the popes had sought to reduce the emperor's headship to something lower than, and de pendent upon, their own : because they desired a temporal de mesne, they had sought to expel him from Italy, since any imperial hold on Italy threatened their independence. They had succeeded in defeating the empire, but they had also diminished the papacy; for the French aid which they had invoked against the Hohen staufen developed, within 5o years of the fall of that house, into French control, and the captivity at Avignon (1308-78) was the logical result of the final victory of Charles of Anjou at Taglia cozzo. The struggle seemed to have ended in nothing but the exhaustion of both combatants. Yet in many respects it had in reality made for progress. It had set men thinking of the respec tive limits of church and state, as the many libelli de lite impera torum et pontificum show; and from that thought had issued a new conception of the state, as existing in its own right and supreme in its own sphere, a conception which is the necessary basis of the modern nation-state. If it had dislocated Germany into a number of territorial principalities, it had produced a college of electors to represent the cause of unity : if it had helped to prevent the unification of Italy, and had left to Italy the fatal legacy of Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, it had equally helped to produce Italian municipal independence.
The Empire from the Election of Rudolph of Habsburg, 1273.—A new chapter of the history of the empire fills the three centuries from 1273-1556—from the accession of Rudolph of Habsburg to the abdication of Charles V. Italy was now lost : the empire had now no peculiar connection with Rome, and far less touch with the papacy. A new Germany had risen. The extinction of several royal stocks, and the nomination of anti-kings in the course of civil wars, had made the monarchy elective, and raised to the side of the emperor a college of electors (see ELECTORS), which appears as definitely established soon after 125o. With Italy lost, and Germany thus transmuted, why should the empire have still continued to exist ? In the first place, it continued to exist because the Germans still found a king necessary, and be cause, the German king having been called for three centuries emperor, it seemed necessary that he should still continue to bear the name. In this sense the empire existed as the presidency of a Germanic confederation, and as something analogous to the German empire between 187o and 1918, with the one great difference that the Hohenzollerns derived from Prussia a strength which enabled them to make their imperial position a reality, while no Luxembourg of Habsburg was able to make his imperial position otherwise than honorary and nominal. In the second place, it continued to exist because the conception of the unity of western Europe still lingered, and was still conceived to need an exponent. In this sense the empire existed as a presidency, still more honorary and still more nominal, of the nations of western Europe. In both capacities the emperor may be said to have existed because he was a legal necessity—because, in Germany, he was necessary for the investiture of princes with their princi palities, and because, in Europe, he was necessary, as the source of all rights, to bestow crowns upon would-be kings, or to act as the head of the great orders of chivalry, or to give patents to notaries. With the history of the empire regarded as a German confederation we are not here concerned. The reigns of the Habsburg, Luxembourg and Wittelsbach emperors belong to the history of Germany. Yet two of these emperors, Henry VII. and Louis IV., should not pass without notice, the one for his own sake, the other for the sake of his adherents, and both because, by interfering in Italy, and by coming into conflict with the papacy, they brought once more into prominence the European aspect of the empire.
Henry VII., the contemporary and the hero of Dante, descended into Italy in 131o, partly because he had no power and no occu pation in Germany, partly because he was deeply imbued with the sense of his imperial dignity. Coming as a peacemaker and media tor, he was driven by Guelph opposition into a Ghibelline role ; and he came into conflict with Clement V., the first of the Avignonese popes, who under the pressure of France attempted to enforce upon Henry a recognition of his feudal subjection. Henry asserted his independence : he claimed Rome for his capital, and the lord ship of the world for his right; but, just as a struggle seemed im pending, he died, in 1313. During the reign of his successor, Louis IV., the struggle came. Louis had been excommunicated by John XXII. in 1324 for acting as emperor before he had received papal recognition. None the less, in 1328, he came to Rome for his coronation. He had gathered round him strange allies; on the one hand, the more advanced Franciscans, apostles of the cause of clerical disendowment, and inimical to a wealthy papacy; on the other hand, jurists like Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, who brought to the cause of Louis the spirit and the doctrines which had already been used in the struggle between Boniface VIII. and Philip IV. of France. Marsilius in particular, in a treatise called the De f ensor Pacis, insisted on the majesty of the lay state, and even on its superiority to the church. Perhaps it was Marsilius, learned as he was in Roman law, and remember ing the lex regia by which the Roman people had of old conferred its power on the emperor, who suggested to Louis the policy, which he followed, of receiving the imperial crown by the decree and at the hands of the Roman people. The policy was remark able : Louis embraced an alliance which Frederick Barbarossa had spurned, and recognized the mediaeval Romans as the source of imperial power. Not less remarkable was the new attitude of the German electors, who for the first time supported an emperor against the pope, because they now felt menaced in their own electoral rights ; and the one permanent result which finally flowed from the struggle was the enunciation and definition of the rights and privileges of the electors in the Golden Bull of 1356 (see