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Rh required allegiance to itself even from the sub-tenants of the peers, but all the same it was less than a hundred and fifty years later that Magna Charta was forced through (1215), and actual power transferred from the King to the Parliament of the vassals — made up of great barons and ecclesiastics in the Upper house, gentry and patricians in the Lower — which thenceforward became the support and champion of national development. In France the baronage, in conjunction with the clergy and the towns, forced the calling of the States-General in 1302; the General Privilege of Saragossa in 1283 made Aragon into a quasi-republic of nobles ruled by its Cortes, and in Germany a few decades earlier a group of great vassals made the election of the German Kingship dependent upon themselves as Electors.

The mightiest expression that the feudal idea found for itself — not merely in the West, but in any Culture — came out in the struggle between Empire and Papacy, both of which dreamed of a consummation in which the entire world was to become an immense feudal system, and so intimately enwove themselves into the dream that, with the decay of feudalism, both together fell from their heights in lamentable ruin.

The idea of a Ruler whose writ should run throughout the whole historical world, whose Destiny should be that of all mankind, has taken visible shape in, so far, three instances — firstly, in the conception of the Pharaoh as Horus; secondly, in the great Chinese imagining of the Ruler of the Middle, whose domain is tien-hia, everything lying below the heavens; and, thirdly, in early Gothic times. In 962 Otto the Great, answering to the deep mystical sense and yearning for historical and spatial infinity that was sweeping through the world of those days, conceived the idea of the "Holy Roman Empire, German by nation." But even earlier, Pope Nicolas I (860), still completely involved in Augustinian — that is, Magian — lines of thought, had dreamed of a Papal democracy which was to stand above the princes of this world, and from 1059 Gregory VII with all the prime force of his Faustian nature set out to actualize a papal world-dominion under the forms of a universal feudalism, with kings as vassals. The Papacy itself, indeed, under its domestic aspect, constituted the small feudal State of the Campagna, whose noble families controlled the election of popes, and which very rapidly converted the college of cardinals (to which the duty was entrusted from 1059 on) into a sort of noble oligarchy. But under the broader aspect of external policy Gregory VII actually obtained feudal supremacy over the Norman states of England and Sicily, both of which were created with his support, and actually awarded the Imperial crown as Otto