Page:EB1911 - Volume 09.djvu/375

Rh 10th century made its acquisition not only possible, but almost imperative. Begun in 952, the acquisition was completed ten years later; and all the conditions were now present for Otto’s assumption of the imperial throne.

He was crowned by John XII. on Candlemas Day 962, and thus was begun the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted henceforth with a continuous life until 1806.

The same ideas underlay the new empire which had underlain that of Charlemagne, strengthened and reinforced by the fact that they had already found a visible expression before in that earlier empire. Historically, there was the tradition of the old Roman empire, preserved by the Church as an idea, and preserved in the Church, and its imperial organization, as an actual fact. Ecclesiastically, there was the Pauline conception of a single Christian Church, one in subjection to Christ as its Head, and needing (so men still thought) a secular counterpart of its indivisible unity. To these two sanctions philosophy later added a third; and the doctrine of 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 1032, one must also add Burgundy, though the addition is in reality nominal) under a single rule. Historians of the 19th 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 remains that the union of Teutonic Germany and Latin Italy was, from an external point of view, the essential fact in the structure of the medieval 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 conception 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 12th 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 turned them into its vassals—for was not the advocatus who defended the lands of an abbey or church its tenant by feudal service, and might not analogy extend the feudal relation to the imperial advocate himself?

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. (962–1250). For a century (962–1076) 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. (already distinguished as Gerbert, 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 institution 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 with the premature death of Otto; and after the death of Silvester II. 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 from 1024 to 1125), when in 1046 he caused the deposition of three competing 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. reserved the right of electing the popes to the college of cardinals (see ). 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 1059 had greatly promoted, was ultimately due to an ecclesiastical revival, which goes by the name of the Cluniac movement. 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 (1076–1122). Whether or no 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