MEDIEVAL HISTORY

 

INTRODUCTION

THE RISE OF THE PAPAL SUPREMACY

 

I

 

THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE

 

 

ON Christmas Day 800 there happened in St. Peter's one of the few events which have forever changed the whole course of history: the restoration of the Western Empire, the re­establishment of Rome as once more the head of the civilized world. Three hundred and twenty-four years had passed since the last Cesar on the Seven Hills, the boy Romulus Augustulus, resigned his sceptre to the Emperor at Constantinople. Nevertheless, to all men Rome was still the imperial city; the idea of her empire had become a necessary part of the world's order. In nothing is her might more visible than in the spell which she cast over the whole Western world for more than a thousand years after her sack by Alaric. The traveller might tell how she lay in ruins, with a population reduced to less than fifty thousand, but men never doubted that her dominion was still universal. To her divinely appointed sway there were neither bounds nor barriers. In her alone could the proud prophecy of the poet attain reality

 

His ego, nee metas rerum, nee tempora pono,

Imperium sine fine dadi.

 

The mother of martyrs, the home of the apostles, the city of kings, she was still the source of all power. Though a widow, she was none the less a queen. Her barbaric conquerors might beat down her walls and destroy her palaces, yet they bowed before the memory of her mighty past, and held their countries as fiefs of Rome. As the successive swarms of Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, Franks, and Teutons swept over Italy and Gaul, they one and all sought to identify themselves with the system they were thoughtlessly destroying. Not one of them dared to establish his seat in the ancient capital, or to inhabit the palace of the Caesars; they asked and received the consular office, and reigned as the titular vicars of the Lord at Constantinople. Even the greatest of the barbarians, Theodoric the Ostrogoth, ruled from his palace at Verona as the nominal lieutenant of Justinian. The instincts of man went deeper than historical fact. The Empire had not ceased; by the nature of things that was impossible. Her foundations were the immutable decrees of God. Though for four centuries in suspended animation, men felt that her life was eternal. She could not die, nor could the sceptre depart from between her feet. So when, on Christmas Day 800, as Charles the Frank was hearing mass in the Basilica of St. Peter, the reading of the Gospel ended, the Pope, Leo III, rose from his chair, and crossing over to where Charles knelt in prayer at the high altar, placed on his brow the diadem of the Caesars, barbarians and Latins alike felt that the dream of years was accomplished. The Eternal City had risen from her long sleep to enter upon a new era of life and power.

The Roman Empire which Charles the Great and Pope Leo thus restored was another empire, and yet not another. It was not another, in that it was the heir to all the assets of the old empire of the Caesars; inheriting its traditions of supremacy, the majesty of its laws, its elaborate system of municipal government, and its unrivalled powers of organisation. It was not another, in that there was supposed to be no break of continuity. For three hundred years the legal head of the world had resided at Constantinople; now the throne was vacant, for the Empress Irene had deposed and blinded her son, Constantine VI, and ascended the throne herself. But by what right did a woman grasp the sceptre of the Cesars? Surely also elections at Rome were as valid as those at Constantinople: the daughter was not above her mother. So the act of Constantine the Great was reversed, and Old Rome once more assumed to herself the civil and ecclesiastical headship. Charles the Great was proclaimed as the legitimate successor, not merely of Romulus Augustulus and the extinct line of the West, but of Justinian, Arcadius, and the emperors of the East. He is, said men, the sixty-eighth in direct descent from Augustus.

The new empire was, however, another, in that the old order had for ever passed away, giving place to new aims and larger hopes. The former empire had been founded on paganism. Her literature, art, and methods were alike the inspiration of vanished ideals. All that civilization, perfectly developed after its kind, had been deliberately renounced for new forms that to a Julian, blinded by the glamour of the past, seemed frightful in their incompleteness. The pagan city of the ancients was buried; new Rome had risen from the catacombs. Christianity was alike its bulwark and its basis; the Church and the State were but two names for the same thing. The limits of both were determined by the power of the Cross to subdue the barbarians unto itself. Imperial unity lay in acommon religion, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, with one Church and creed. By the strength of this unity alone was she able to confront an aggressive Islam with its one inspiration and one Commander of the Faithful. In the old empire religion had been merely a branch of the civil service, recognised as part of the political constitution, and strictly subordinated to utilitarian needs. In the new empire the religion of the Cross rising in the midst of hostile powers that struggled in vain to crush it, was in no wise the servant of a State to whom it owed nothing. The stone cut without hands had broken in pieces, and consumed the iron, the clay, the brass, and the gold of the fourth kingdom; it had become a great mountain, and filled the whole earth. It was the Church that had subdued the barbarians, after they had subdued the State. Amid the greatest convulsion that the world had ever known, when " on the earth was distress of nations with perplexity, the seas and the waves roaring, and men's hearts failing them for fear," the Church alone had stood erect and strong, her work never arrested, her faith in herself and her mission never faltering. With her martyr heroes, and her history of conquest, with her unquenchable faith in the coming of the Son of Man, she was more than the equal of the new empire which she had in reality called into being. Her organisation—in which, after the manner of the older state, was combined local responsibility with a highly centralized system of oversight—her doctrines, her sacraments, her ritual, her struggles after purity and truth, her great idea of a universal brotherhood and common citizenship, were the very life and salt of the new civilization and its form of government.

With a true insight both into this continuity and difference, men called the new republic the Holy Roman Empire. It was "holy," for the Church was its foundation. The greatest fact about the coronation of Charles to men of his time was the gift of the sceptre through the hands of the Pontiff. He was, in the joyous shout of the crowd, "Charles Augustus, crowned of God." The very absence of strict legal basis or formal election but stamped it as the work of Divine Providence interpreting itself to men through the Roman See. Charles ruled the world by the grace of God. The new republic was also Roman, for its empire was one in continuity and authority with that of the Eternal City. Lastly, it was an empire, for though kings and princes, counts and bishops, might war together for dominion in its parts, it was still a unity, with one system of law, one religion, and one supreme head. The world was still one Fatherland, with Rome as its centre.

 

II

 

In the Holy Roman Empire as thus re-established the student will discern three elements the Empire, the Papacy, and the City. In theory they were a unity; in actual fact they were constantly struggling with each other for supremacy. The whole history of the Papacy, at any rate in its external or political aspect, and therefore, in a narrow sense, the whole history of the Middle Ages, is the resultant of the conflict between these three. Without a knowledge of their character and causes the record of the times is a sealed book.

The rise of the Papacy to well-nigh universal dominion is not the less marvelous because it is capable of explanation. Modern critics may smile at the tale of Constantine granting the West to Bishop Sylvester, while he retired to his new city in the East; but, after all, the Middle Ages were right when they believed in its literal truth. In removing the seat of his government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus, the aim of Constantine was to restore the imperial power by building on a new foundation where he would be free from the restraints and memories of freedom and paganism alike. Part of his plan was certainly accomplished, and a due recognition of the vitality of the Eastern Empire as it withstood for a thousand years the onset of successive hordes is the greatest tribute which history can pay to his genius. But Constantine, with all his insight, did not realize that he had done more than change the centre of his empire. He had, in fact, made the separation of East and West inevitable; not less inevitable was it that in the West the dominion should pass to the one power that represented continuity with the historic splendors of the Roman name. Hitherto the Bishops of Rome had been obscure men, whose chief dignity, to later ages, often lay in their martyrdom. We search in vain among their shadowy names for either a distinguished writer or a master mind. Only in the case of a few popes before Constantine do we possess much information. For the great Fathers of the Church—Origen, Athanasius, Basil, Augustine—as well as the great prelates who established the power of the hierarchy—Cyprian, Ambrose, and Chrysostom—we must look elsewhere than Rome. At one time Jerome (d. 420) cherished the hope that he would succeed to that see. But either through good fortune or intuitive wisdom, the rising Papacy refused to burden itself with his stormy and erratic genius. Without greatness in themselves the Bishops of Rome owed their influence to the consciousness of men that they were confronting paganism, with all its splendor and pride, in the capital of the world. In Rome also had the apostles sealed their testimony with their blood. Though from the days of Cyprian the primacy of Peter was recognised as an established fact, nevertheless the Bishop of Rome, who claimed to be his successor, had been but the princes inter pares: he was forced, however reluctantly, to acknowledge as his equals the apostolic patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch.

By the removal of the imperial seat to the Bosphorus, followed by the decay and ruin of the imperial power in Italy, Constantine unwittingly put the Bishops of Rome in the place of the absent emperors, inheriting their power, their prestige, and the very titles which they had themselves derived from the forces of paganism. Moreover, the step which led to the aggrandisement of the see of Rome was destructive of any rivalry from the Eastern bishops. At Constantinople the Emperor had no intention of being other than supreme head of the Church. Constantine and Justinian controlled and guided ecclesiastical legislation, administered discipline, and enforced orthodoxy. In their hands was the appointment and deposition of both bishops and patriarchs—prerogatives never surrendered by the feeblest of their successors. The son of Constantine delighted in the title "Bishop of Bishops," and claimed to impose Arianism on the empire at his will; while by the Council of Chalcedon (451) the emperors were accorded by divine right an inviolable priesthood. The Patriarch of Constantinople, even when a Chrysostom, stood under the shadow of the imperial throne. To the one possible rival of papal Rome, thus hopelessly restricted by the pressure of secular authority, there was denied the opportunity of contesting her supremacy.

But in the West Rome had no peer. Neither Gaul nor Spain claimed apostolic foundation, and without this requirement there could be no patriarchate. Against them also weighed their Arian apostasy. Nor must we forget as a factor in papal growth the speculations and discussions which wrecked the moral supremacy of the great Eastern sees, and which rent asunder the Greek Church. In the West there was peace, for Rome had impressed upon the Churches the characteristics of her power, subordination to authority and legal form. Her bishops also gained reputation even from their obscurity and silence. Without either the intellect or desire to enter into subtleties and mysteries so dear to the Oriental mind they had their reward. Others had gone astray; the Bishops of Rome alone were infallible. So with the spread of Arianism and the decay of the troubled East, men turned more and more from its struggles to the decision of the Roman Pontiff. By the Council of Sardica (343) its Bishop was made a court of appeal in matters concerning orthodoxy. Each faction, when oppressed by its rival, flung itself at his feet. The very stars in their courses fought for the popes. The Eastern patriarchates fell in their day before the Moslem hordes, but in the West the sack of Rome by Alaric (Aug. 24, 410) led more than any other event to papal aggrandisement. It delivered the Papacy from the dead hand of the past. The pagan city was hopelessly ruined. Honorius and his feeble successors hid themselves at Ravenna, while the power of her famous aristocracy was for ever broken. But the Bishop of Rome rose in added grandeur above the wreck of old institutions and shattered society. In the East eight hundred sees were swallowed up in the vortex of Islam; out of four hundred in Africa, only four survived. In the West the barbarians, already conquered by the Church, infused by their victories new blood into the new dominion of Peter. In the general massacre it was in the churches alone that there was deliverance and safety. The thicker the hay, the easier it is mowed," was the concise reply of the barbarian to the trembling messengers of the Senate: he would leave them only their lives." Nevertheless, even Alaric respected the sanctuaries of the apostles: treasure and liberty were alike safe there.

At this date we come across the first pope on whose mind dawned the vast conception of Rome's universal spiritual supremacy. Innocent I (402-417), who, like all the greater popes, was a Roman, claimed that the Churches of the West, having been planted by Peter and his successors, owed obedience to his see, and must maintain a rigid uniformity with her usages. He was succeeded, at no great interval, by Leo the Great (440-461). It was his fortune to stand out alone as the one great name in the Christian world. Augustine (438) and Cyril (445) were both dead; women and boys ruled in Ravenna and Constantinople. When the terrible Attila and his Huns swept down on the defenceless city (451), it was neither by her armies nor by her walls that Rome was saved. The barbarian bowed before the eloquence and confidence of Leo; and the Scourge of God retired from Italy. A Roman of the Romans, Leo was thus the first of the popes to assert to his countrymen, by actions and words, that the power of Rome was eternal. Babylon the Great had fallen; Goths and Huns sacked her palaces and ravaged her treasures. In her place was the City of God, whose dominion should be an everlasting dominion. It was for this that the former things, their work accomplished, had passed away. Leo had adopted the thought of Augustine: the pagan city of Rome ruled the bodies and died through the vices of its sons; the new city should rule the spirits and live through the virtues of the saints of God.

At the Council of Chalcedon the visions and claims of Leo received authoritative recognition. His letter was accepted by the East as the settlement of the weary dispute over the hypostatic union; the primacy of the Roman See was acknowledged. The Council's rider that this was the result of political supremacy did not detract from its value as an instrument in the hands of her bishops. They soon found opportunity for its use. When Hilary of Arles claimed the primacy of Gaul, Leo, on the appeal of the bishops, summoned him to Rome. On his refusal to recognise the jurisdiction of the apostolic see, Leo deposed Hilary from his office. The triumph of Rome was complete when the Emperor Valentinian, in his famous Constitution (445), denounced Hilary, proclaimed the decrees of the Bishop of Rome to be binding, and his consent necessary for any changes in the Church of Gaul. Justinian also, in his Code, recognised the supremacy of the Roman Church, and commanded all others to be united with her. Another custom which dates from this period gave the Bishop of Rome a further hold on the prelates of the West. This was the grant of the pallium, a white scarf of lamb's wool with black spots, the sign of metropolitan authority. It was eagerly sought after, though its acceptance of necessity involved some recognition of dependence.

The founders of the popedom, Innocent I and Leo I, were succeeded at the close of the sixth century by one who more than consolidated their work. Gregory I (590-604), to whom, by universal consent, men have given the double titles of Saint and Great, is, in the verdict of Milman, "the real father of the Mediaeval Papacy." He marks in more ways than one the beginning of a new era. In the year before he ascended the throne Spain renounced her Arianism at the Council of Toledo, and proclaimed her return to the Roman unity. The first monk to become a pope Gregory was also the first of the popes to turn to Western races to redress the balance of the East. By his writings, his zeal, his charity, his fame for personal sanctity, his quickness to grasp opportunity, and his administrative wisdom, he succeeded in giving to his see an almost universal dominion. Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, and Africa acknowledged his metropolitan claims, while Italy, swept by the Lombards, recognized in him her head, in temporal as well as spiritual matters. One of his biographers speaks of him as "an Argus with an hundred eyes, casting his glances over the length and breadth of the whole world." Nevertheless he refused the title of "Universal Bishop," which John of Constantinople had arrogated to himself. He preferred rather, by a shrewd humility, to adopt the name made familiar to us by centuries of irony, "The Servant of the Servants of God." "To hold the metropolitans in dependence on the Roman See, to restore the rights of the bishops, to crush heresy and schism, to revive the spiritual life of the Church, to make monasticism an effective instrument of good, to send the gospel to the barbarous heathen, these were some of his aims, these were some of the duties he conceived of the successor of Peter. In his charter to the monastery of Autun we have the first instance of the papal curse used as a bulwark against royal oppression. Hildebrand and Innocent III only carried out with further detail the ideas of Gregory. On the 12th of March 604, in the sixty-fifth year of his age, Gregory, "the consul of God,"—to use the fine phrase that men wrote over his tomb,—"went to enjoy an eternal triumph." Many as are his acknowledged claims to a place among

 

The noble and great who are gone

Pure souls honoured and blest

By former ages,

 

this is perhaps his chief: by the bloodless weapons of his missionaries the barbarians of Britain and Germany, the heretics of Gaul and Spain, were once more added to an empire more lasting than that of Julius. Through him rude and lawless countries recognized the supremacy of the new Caesars. For the children that she had lost Rome had found others. Her sons and her daughters had come from far; kings had become her nursing fathers, and queens her nursing mothers. On the firm foundations laid by Gregory the life of Europe was established anew. The secular empire had been built on the sands, and was swept away by the flood; against the "rock" of Peter the deluge of barbarism broke in vain. Upon this Ararat the ark of civilization rested until the waters abated.

The Bishops of Rome were still in theory the elect of Constantinople. Even Gregory had been deferential to Phocas, and servile to Maurice, while his successors were not consecrated until confirmed by the Emperor or his representative, the Exarch of Ravenna. Two of the popes, Silverius and Martin I, who came into collision with the imperial despotism, were the victims of its anger. But in the eighth century the force of circumstances led the popes to throw off what little dependence still bound them to the rulers of Constantinople. The opportunity arose over the Iconoclastic Controversy (726). The great Emperor, Leo the Syrian, stung by the Mohammadan taunt that the Christians worshipped idols, and desiring to infuse a new life into the Empire by correcting the effete sentimentalism of Oriental Christianity, ordered that images should only be used as architectural ornament. The sympathies of Protestants will of course be with this reformer: they do not attach much importance to the plea of Gregory the Great, "that paintings are to the ignorant what writing is to those who can read." But the intemperate violence of Leo—whose attempted reformation was rather "a premature Rationalism enforced upon an unreasoning age"—became the defence of that which was in itself indefensible. In the West as in the East the common people, goaded by persecution and superstition, rose in defence of these relics of paganism or religious childhood. The Exarch of Ravenna was slain, and Pope Gregory II, whom the Emperor had deposed and endeavoured to seize, yielding, though unwillingly, to the popular voice, declared Leo excommunicate, and cut himself off from all dependence on Constantinople (729). The controversy had passed from its first theological aspect into a struggle between the claims of the Church and the absolutism of the State.

These events led to more important consequences. Liudprand, King of the Lombards, saw in these dissensions a double opportunity. He would run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Proclaiming himself the champion of the popular faith, he overran the exarchate; professing that he acted for his overlord at Constantinople, he almost succeeded in capturing Rome. Gregory III in despair appealed to the protection of the Franks (739). Under the leadership of Clovis (481-512), this great league of German tribes had stretched their empire from the Atlantic to the Inn. From the first they had been the faithful allies of papal Rome. The other Teutonic nations had been converted by Arian missionaries; the baptism of Clovis was into the Catholic faith. On Christmas Day 496 he and three thousand of his warriors were solemnly received into the Church at Rheims. The eloquent Remigius held up before him the cross: "Adore," said he, "that which you have hitherto burned, burn the idols that you have hitherto adored." As the Bishop enlarged on the passion and death of Jesus, Clovis could restrain himself no longer. "Had I," he burst out, " been present at the head of my valiant Franks, I would have revenged his injuries."

The zeal of the Franks was increased by subsequent events. By his signal victory at Poitiers over the Saracens (732), Charles the Hammer proved himself more than the champion of Christianity. In rolling back from Western Europe the Moslem invaders, the Frank had changed the history of the world. To him, therefore, Gregory III turned for aid, beseeching him in urgent letters to complete his victories for the faith by delivering the Holy See. Charles died before he could obey the call; but his son, Pippin the Short, fulfilled what may have been his father's intentions. Influenced by Boniface, the apostle of Germany, he entered into an alliance with Rome, the advantages of which were mutual. On his side the Pope Zacharias, now claiming to be the king of kings, pronounced the deposition of the nominal sovereign, the last of the Merovingian kings, Childeric III (751). When the Franks, thus freed by the Church from their oath, elected to the vacant throne the real head of the nation, hitherto styled merely the Mayor of the Palace, a sanctity as yet unknown and more potent than legal claim was added to the office. In 754 a pope, Stephen II, for the first time crossed the Alps, and at St. Denis anointed the new sovereign and his two sons with holy oil. Pippin in return discharged his share of the compact by twice descending into Italy to the rescue of the Papacy. The Lombards were driven back, the imperial exarchate delivered from their power and bestowed on the Bishop of Rome.

Thus began the temporal sovereignty of papaI Rome. This was the nucleus of the States of the Church. In return for this fateful gift Stephen bestowed on the Frankish king the title of Patrician of the Romans. Its authority was as vague as its legality was doubtful: its rights were an undefined superintendence of the papal elections; its duties the defence and protection of the Church and her temporal interests. It paved the way for the higher dignity that was to follow. For when on Pippin's death (768) the Lombards once more rose in revolt and threatened the new States of the Church, his son Charles, by all ages surnamed the Great, swept down from the Alps, seized the Lombard kingdom for his own, and renewed to the Pope the gift of his father (774). Henceforth for four-and-twenty years the government of Rome was carried on in his name as Patrician, though events were still dated and edicts issued in the name and by the year of the reign of the Emperor at Constantinople. Such homage to legality was shadowy; the rule of Charles was in reality absolute. He demanded the oath of allegiance; he received the symbols of his guardianship—the keys of St. Peter's grave, and the banner of the city. In one of his letters he expresses his pleasure "at the humility of the Pope's obedience and the promise of his loyalty." But it was time to draw closer and establish on a basis more legal and better understood this alliance between the Franks and the Latins, between Church and State. In 798 a murderous attack was made on Leo III as he went in solemn procession from the Lateran to the Church of St. Lorenzo. The Pope was wounded and left for dead. He recovered, and fled across the Alps. At Paderborn he found his protector, who received him with all honour and respect. In the autumn of 800, after a trial in St. Peter's, at which he himself presided, of the charges which the Romans brought against their Bishop, Charles restored the Pope to his rebellions city. The gratitude of Leo had something to bestow in return. So on Christmas Day 800 there took place that memorable event, which separates the history of Modern Europe from that of the Ancient World, the coronation, by the sole surviving representative of the original apostolic sees, of the kneeling Charles as the overlord of the world, the first head of the Holy Roman Empire.

To the careless observer it might seem as if by this coronation the Papacy had voluntarily surrendered to another part of her power and claims. Henceforth the popes would no longer rule alone in the imperial city; others would represent more fully than they its past glories. In reality it was not so. It is true that Charles was supreme in Church as in State. This second Constantine convened and directed the deliberations of Synods, lecturing even popes, and exacting their obedience. The Council of Frankfort, at his bidding, directly opposed in the matter of image-worship the policy followed by the popes. In the famous Caroline books we read of certain usages as "allowed rather by the ambition of Rome than by any apostolical tradition." But the Church gained more than she gave; for Charles lavished upon her wealth and power. Her bishops and abbots were made a part of the rising feudalism, while tithes were for the first time enforced by law. Throughout his vast dominions he knit the Church into one compact body, subjecting the bishops to the control of the metropolitans, and the metropolitans in turn to the Bishop of Rome. From this unification and centralization of a dismembered Europe which Charles had accomplished, the Papacy stood to win in the long-run more than the Empire itself. The temporary dependence galled her not; she awaited with patience the inevitable developments. The relations which had begun in real if unacknowledged subjection were soon to emerge into the assertion of supremacy. When the great Emperor rested from those labours that to a later generation seemed superhuman in their vastness and variety, Rome kept her gains, canonised his memory as a saint, and laughed at the attempted control of his feeble successors.

 

III

In a sketch such as the present details must be strictly subordinated to the outline of tendency; that which was the accident of circumstance to the fixed and essential. We may therefore pass by the interregnum of anarchy into which the Empire fell after the death of Charles, and regard Otto the Great as his direct successor. His coronation (962) was the setting of the topstone to the work of Charles. For in nothing is the greatness of Charles more manifest than in the indestructibility of his idea of a universal Christian republic. In the gorgeous mists of romance he and his work loomed the larger through very indistinctness. In the general darkness and chaos of the next age, when the fountains of the great deep were opened and the floods of barbarism once more whelmed the world, men remembered the gleams of a better order which had illuminated his times. Though his empire was rent in pieces, never more in actual fact to be reunited, men still clung to belief in its existence. So when the waters had subsided, and Wends, Czechs, Normans, and Huns no longer carried terror from the Danube to the Ocean, men turned back to his grand vision of a universal Christian republic and made this the governing idea in politics and progress. By a true historical instinct they dated from Charles the foundation of Modern Europe, while history refuses to recognize any real break in its subsequent continuity until the cataclysm of the Reformation.

The history of the Empire as Empire need not further concern us. Here it is sufficient to note those elements which influenced the growth of the Papacy and led to centuries of feud between the civil and ecclesiastical powers. The first of these elements was the very character of the Empire itself. As we have seen, it rested not so much on a strictly legal basis, or even on the right of conquest, as on a sort of mutual understanding, one party to which was the Papacy. Its rights and its duties were alike left undetermined. It was the resultant of memories and dreams, and of hopes mistaken for facts. Its strength lay in its appeal to men's imagination. We need not wonder that its actual power always fell hopelessly short of its claims. In theory the Western world acknowledged one overlord. In actual fact not only Spain and England but even France cared little what new Germanic Cesar was the ghostly representative of a dead power. This weakness of the Empire gave to the popes their chance, a weakness accentuated by the fact that the emperors were invariably, though not of necessity, Germans whose hands were busy at home, and whose visits to Italy were limited, as a rule, to the journey to Rome to receive the imperial crown. Here and there arose an emperor—the three Ottos, Frederic of the Redheard, and Frederic II—who turned the dream into fact; but speaking generally, the history of the Empire is the history of sovereigns whose power to make good their unbounded claims grew yearly less, while their rivals, the Bishops of Rome, grew yearly in strength.

At this stage it may be well to point out at some slight cost of anticipation and anachronism the relations which in theory were assumed to exist in this new republic between the Empire and the Papacy. An incidental advantage in so doing will be that we shall be able to make clearer the grounds upon which not only the Holy Roman Empire rested, but also the foundations of the power of the Bishops of Rome. As the doctrine of the Papacy and the Empire was in essence the same during the whole Middle Ages, no real injustice is done by summing up in one survey ideas some of which were of slower growth than others.

To the Middle Ages that antagonism between Church and State upon which so many modern thinkers have laid stress as fundamental, did not exist, at any rate in idea. Strange as it may seem to us, no thinker then hesitated to affirm that the very existence of the Roman, i.e. universal, Church was bound up and one with the very existence of the Roman, i.e. catholic, Empire. If the former was eternal the latter must be so also. Dante was no shallow dreamer, yet to him no doctrine was more real than this: one world dominion is inseparably connected with one spiritual dominion, the two are but different aspects of the same thing. For this belief there was in fact an historical justification. Christianity and the Roman Empire had risen together. As Bryce admirably puts it, "the analogy of the two had made them appear parts of one great world movement towards unity." Both were the emphasis of universal Humanity, the striving after one common citizenship. By the barbarians also Christianity had been associated from the first with the Roman Empire as its visible unity and bulwark. There is this further justification that in the ancient world religious and political divisions usually went hand in hand together. The organic principle in all social and national life was the religious belief. The chief basis, therefore, of national unity must be a common religious life. It was not by accident that the break-up of the Holy Roman Empire and the rise of the modern States of Europe, with their intense individualism and religious divisions, took place at the same time as the Reformation. Of this unity of world-dominion, though there were kings many and lords many, yet was there but one head, the Emperor; so of the unity of the one world-religion, though there were bishops many and metropolitans many, yet was there but one head, the Pope. The belief in the existence of national Churches, so dear to some modern thinkers, is the invention at a later date of the new spirit of the nations: we may be sure of this, that it was utterly foreign to the thought of the Middle Ages. Of the Pope, the supreme duty was to save men's souls; of the Emperor, to care for their bodies. But as body and soul are but one, so also are they in their mutual dependence. The one was the antitype of the other: the Emperor a civil Pope, the Pope a spiritual Emperor. Between the two opposition should be as inconceivable as between body and soul. The seat of dominion of both lay in the City on the Seven Hills. There were they crowned as the elect of God; there they received their commission, not through men, or even through one another, but direct from the King of kings. Other crowns the Emperors wore, the iron crown of Italy, the silver crown of Germany : that of Rome alone was pure gold; double also, for Empire and Rome, as urbis et orbis. At their coronation each called Heaven to witness that he would cherish and defend the other. Against this union of the two the gates of hell should not prevail. They were the two swords of which Christ had said, "It is enough."

We shall do well not to inquire whether this beautiful ideal was ever realised in fact. It is characteristic of the Middle Ages that they did not seek to reconcile belief and practice. The more deeply they outraged the one, the more tenaciously they clung to the other. Laxity of practice was the concern of the individual. It might involve the loss of his soul; but laxity of belief meant the downfall of the social structure. So in an age when an individual did not recognise himself save in so far as he formed part of State or Church, the theories of social economy were everything, the facts of private life of little moment. Men were saved both in this world and in the life to come by their correctness of dogma and doctrine.

"Ferocious and sensual, that age worshipped humility and asceticism; there has never been a purer ideal of love, nor a grosser profligacy of life." Of the illogicalness of the age there is no greater illustration than the extraordinary case of Honorius I. The fact that in 680 the sixth Ecumenical Council publicly anathematised this Pope for monothelistic heresies formed no bar to papal claims of infallibility. When facts would not square with doctrine, then so much the worse for the facts. The very recollection of the circumstance undoubtedly faded away in the eighth century, until revived in the sixteenth.

In this same spirit men treated the Holy Boman Empire. Pope and Emperor were supposed to be like the Siamese twins, two and yet one. Severance between the two was impossible; they must work together for the one common good of the one common flock. But this complete accord of the papal and imperial powers was probably never attained but three times in the history of the centuries: " in the time of Charles and Leo; under Otto III and his two popes, Gregory V and Sylvester II; thirdly under Henry III; certainly never thenceforth" (Bryce). At all other times Pope and Emperor were seeking to subordinate the other to himself; the Pope declaring that he made the Emperor as the vicar of God and that the temporal power was his gift; the Emperors seeking to get the election of Popes into their own hands and to subordinate the spiritual to the civil authority. This battle of the two forms the centre round which revolves the churchmanship and politics of the Middle Ages. In the struggle both parties found that a man's foes are they of his own household; the Emperor in the dukes and princes of Germany seeking to throw off all feudal dependence, and welcoming for this purpose the papal thunders; the Pope in the nobles and mob of the city ever looking to the power beyond the Alps to deliver them from the control of the sovereign within their gates. Nor ought we to forget as one element in this conflict of centuries that the public opinion of Europe—to use a modern phrase—was undoubtedly expressed in brief by Gregory IV when he wrote to a cousin of Charles the Great: "You ought not to be ignorant that the government of souls, which belongs to the Pontiff, is above that of temporal matters, which belongs to the Emperors." Body and soul are undoubtedly one; but in the well-regulated man the body will obey the soul; otherwise,were to return to the level of brutes. Thus the world found that "it could do better without a Caesar than without a Pope."

One effect of the Holy Roman Empire must not be overlooked. We have already briefly alluded to it. It is summed up more fully for us in the words of the great Emperor Frederic I (Barbarossa). "As there is in heaven but one God, so there is here but one Pope and one Emperor. Divine Providence has specially appointed the Roman Empire to prevent the continuance of schism in the Church." So long as the Empire was strong, national Churches were an impossibility; heresy, schism, and reformation by individuals were alike ruthlessly stamped out by the civil as well as the spiritual power. The Church stood for a solidarity one element in which was uniformity. "Truth," it was said, "is one, and as it must bind into one body all who hold it, so it is only by continuing in that body that they can preserve it." The visible unity of the Empire demands and depends on the visible body of believers under a rigid unity of belief and organisation, and bound into one by participating in the same sacraments. Such unity must have a centre—that centre is Rome. At the Reformation, in fact, the unity of Church and State broke up together. At the same time the unity of knowledge, or ignorance, broke up into the diversity of science. The centripetal forces which underlie the life of the ages from Charles to Luther gave place to the centrifugal forces of Modern Europe: individualism, dissent, nationality, protection, the supposed antagonism of science and religion, and the conflict of democracy with absolutism.