Page:Nicolae Iorga - My American lectures.djvu/111

 in the newer and, if continuity was not perfect, it was merely because perfection has ever been impossible.

To the barbarian states, Byzantium appeared as the true, indeed the only, Rome, which remained as the sole undefiled source of royalty, whence all new things sprang. Theodoric was only its viceroy in Italy. The conquest of the peninsula by Justinian, as well as his conquest of Africa and the East coast of Spain, was not an invasion in the true sense, but merely the return of the true master. Theoretically speaking, Byzantium never relinquished its rights.

Compared to the realm of Charles the Great, it was much stronger and had a degree of legitimacy to which the Frank could never successfully have aspired. The emperor in Constantinople never recognised an impossible equality with Charlemagne, the usurper in the West, whose ascendancy was prepared by a long series of Italian disturbances which aimed at giving the whole world over to western thraldom. Because Charlemagne himself did not confine this authority to the West, he became, according to his own theory only, emperor of the world. Similarly Eirene, his supposed wife, is herself not an empress but, as she appears on coins, an « emperor »!

Nor was Otto the First a German conqueror of Italy. He was in reality adopted by the Italian realm: being sought in marriage by Adelaide. Queen of Italy, she considered herself as reigning in her own right. The second Otto, destined to die for Italy in Italy, was an Italian, and the third, son of a Byzantine princess, an Oecumenic emperor preparing himself for Rome as well as for Constantinople.

Now the capital energy of the middle ages was French. They changed, through such women as Agnes the Burgundian, the character of the emperors. The French spirit