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.
The Holy Roman Empire.
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.[1]
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.[2] 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 The Empire and feudalism. 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,
The
Empire and the Papacy.
ruling together the commonwealth of Europe.[3] 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 Conclave). 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 Investiture contest. 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
- ↑ It is a curious fact that imperial titles (imperator and basileus) are used in the Anglo-Saxon diplomata of the 10th century. Edred, for instance (946–955) is “imperator,” “cyning and casere totius Britanniae,” “basileus Anglorum hujusque insulae barbarorum”: Edgar is “totius Albionis imperator Augustus” (cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist. i. c. vii. § 71). These titles partly show the turgidity of English Latinity in the 10th century, partly indicate the quasi-imperial position held by the Wessex kings after the reconquest of the Dane-law. But there seems to be no real ground for Freeman’s view (Norman Conquest, i. 548 sqq.), that England was regarded as a third Empire, side by side with the other Empires of West and East Europe. That the titles were assumed in order to repudiate possible claims of the Western Empire to the overlordship of England is disproved by the fact that they are assumed at a time when there is no Western emperor. The assumption of an imperial style by Henry VIII., which is mentioned below, is explained by the Reformation, and does not mean any recurrence to a forgotten Anglo-Saxon style.
- ↑ It is in virtue of this aspect that the Empire is holy. The term sacrum imperium seems to have been first used about the time of Frederick I., when the emperors were anxious to magnify the sanctity of their office in answer to papal opposition. The emperor himself (see under Emperor) was always regarded, and at his coronation treated, as a persona ecclesiastica.
- ↑ The emperor claimed suzerainty over the greater part of Europe at various dates. Hungary and Poland, France and Spain, the Scandinavian peninsula, the British Isles, were all claimed for the Empire at different times (see Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, c. xii.). The “effective” empire, if indeed it may be called effective, embraced only Germany, Burgundy and the regnum Italiae (the old Lombard kingdom in the valley of the Po).
