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Rh within the Church itself, a reform both in diocesan and monastic life, beginning in Lorraine and Burgundy, and seen significantly in the rapid Western growth of Canon Law. But it was complicated and conditioned by politics, especially by those of Italy and Germany, imperfectly linked together by the Empire. Its history in the earlier stages is indicated in this volume, but must be discussed more fully along with the church policy of the great Emperor Henry III. Because its history under him is so closely joined to that of the wider period, reaching from the Synod of Sutri to the Concordat of Worms, it is left over for a later volume, although the purely political side of his reign is treated here.

To the German kingship, ruling the great German duchies, inevitably entangled in Italian affairs and in touch with warlike neighbours as yet heathen and uncivilised, fell the traditions of the Empire, so far as territorial sway and protectorship of the Papacy was involved. But to the growing kingdom of France there came naturally the guardianship of Carolingian civilisation. Mayence, Salzburg, Ratisbon, and Cologne to begin with, Hamburg and Bamberg at a later date, might be the great missionary sees of the West, but Rheims and the kingdom to which it belonged, together with the debateable and Austrasian land of Lorraine, inherited more distinctly the traditions of thought and learning. Paris, the cradle of later France, had a preeminence in France greater than had any city in its Eastern neighbour-land. So France with its older and more settled life from Roman and Merovingian days had, although with some drawbacks, a unity and coherence almost unique, just as it had a history more continuous. Yet even so it had its great fiefs, with their peculiarities of temperament and race, so that much of French history lies in their gradual incorporation in the kingdom of which Paris was the birthplace and the capital. And at Paris the varied story of Scholasticism, that is, of medieval thought, may be said to begin.

Thus the lines upon which later histories were to run were already being laid for France, Germany, and England, and for Italy something the same may be said. There to the mixture of races and rule, already great, was added now the Norman element, to be at first a further cause of discord, and then, as in France and England, a centre of stability and strength. The grasp of the Byzantine Emperors on Italy was becoming nominal and weak; the Lombards, with scanty aspirations after unity, were by this time settled. In Sicily, and for a time in the South, Saracens had made a home, and, as in Spain, were causing locally the terror which, in a form vaster and more undefined, was to form, later on, a dark background for the history of Europe as a whole. Rome, for all the West outside Italy a place of reverence and the seat of Papal