CHAP. VII. divorced from it. Ferocious and sensual, that age worshipped humility and asceticism: there has never been a purer ideal of love, nor a grosser profligacy of life.

The power of the Emperor cannot as yet be called international, though this became in later times its most important aspect; for in the tenth century national distinctions had scarcely begun to exist. But its genius was clerical rather than territorial, Roman rather than Teutonic: it rested not on armed hosts or wide lands, but upon the duty, the awe, the love of its subjects.

CHAPTER VIII

THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM

CHAP. VIII.

Union of

the Roman

Empire with the German

THIS was the office which Otto the Great assumed in A.D. 962. But it was not his only office. He was already a German king; and the new dignity by no means superseded the old. The union in one person of two characters, a union at first personal, then official, and which kingdom. became at last a fusion of the two characters into something different from what either had been, is the key to the whole subsequent history of Germany and the Empire.

Of the German kingdom little need be said, since it Germany and differs in no essential respect from the other kingdoms of its monarchy. Western Europe as they stood in the tenth century. The five or six great tribes or tribe-leagues which composed the German nation had been first brought together under the sceptre of the Carolingians; and, though still retaining marks of their independent origin, were prevented from separating by community of speech and a common. pride in the great Frankish Empire. When the male line of Charles the Great ended in A.D. 911, by the death of Lewis the Child (son of Arnulf), Conrad, duke of the Franconians, and after him Henry (the Fowler), duke of the Saxons, were chosen to fill the vacant throne. By his vigorous yet conciliatory action, his upright character, his courage and good fortune in repelling the Hungarians, Henry laid deep the foundations of royal power: under his more famous son it rose into a stable edifice. Otto's

CHAP. VIII. Coronation feast at Aachen, where the great nobles of the realm did him menial service, where Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, Thuringians, and Lorrainers gathered round the Saxon monarch, is the inauguration of a true Teutonic realm, which, though it called itself not German but East Frankish, and claimed to be the lawful representative of the Carolingian monarchy of Charles, had a constitution and a tendency in many respects different.

Feudalism.

There had been under the Carolingian princes a singular mixture of the old German local organization by tribes or districts (the so-called Gauverfassung), such as we find in the earliest records, with the method introduced by Charles of maintaining by means of officials, some fixed, others moving from place to place, the control of the central government. In the suspension of that government which followed his days, there grew up a system whose seeds had been sown as far back as the time of Clovis, a system whose essence was the combination of the tenure of land by military service with a peculiar personal relation between the landlord and his tenant, whereby the one was bound to render fatherly protection, the other aid and obedience. This is not the place for tracing the origin of feudality on Roman soil, nor for shewing how, by a sort of contagion, it spread into Germany, how it struck firm root in the period of comparative quiet under Pipin and Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the impress which determined its ultimate form, how the weakness of his successors allowed it to triumph everywhere. Still less would it be possible here to examine its social and moral influence. Politically it might be defined as the system which made the owner of a piece of land, whether large or small, the governor of those who dwelt thereon: an annexation of personal to territorial authority more familiar to Eastern despotism

than to the free races of primitive Europe. On this prin- CHAP. VIII. ciple were founded, and by it are explained, feudal law and justice, feudal finance, feudal legislation, each tenant holding towards his lord the position which his own tenants held towards himself. And it is just because the relation was so uniform, the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly bound to its support, that feudalism was able to lay upon society that grasp which the struggles of twenty generations have, in some parts of Europe, not yet wholly shaken off.

Now by the middle of the tenth century, Germany, less The feudal fully committed than France to feudalism's worst feature, king. the bondage of the peasantry, was otherwise thoroughly feudalized. As for that equality of all the freeborn save the sacred line which we find in the Germany of Tacitus, there had been substituted a gradation of ranks and a concentration of power in the hands of a landholding caste, so had the monarch lost his ancient character as leader and judge of the people, to become the head of a turbulent oligarchy. He was titular lord of the soil, could exact from his vassals service and aid in arms and money, could dispose of vacant fiefs, could at pleasure declare war or make peace. But all these rights he exercised less as sovereign of the nation than as standing in a peculiar relation to the feudal tenants, a relation which had in its origin been personal, and whose prominence obscured the political duties of prince and subject. And great as these rights might become in the hands of an ambitious and politic ruler, they were in practice limited by the corresponding duties he owed to his vassals, and by the difficulty of enforcing them against a powerful offender. The king was not permitted to retain in his own hands escheated fiefs, must even grant away those he had held before coming to the throne; he could not interfere with the juris

The Ger

CHAP. VIII. diction of his tenants in their own lands, nor prevent them The nobility. from waging war or forming leagues with each other like independent princes. Chief among the Germanic nobles stood the dukes, who, although their authority was now delegated, theoretically at least, instead of independent, territorial instead of personal, retained nevertheless much of that hold on the exclusive loyalty of their subjects which had belonged to them as hereditary leaders of the tribe under the ancient system. They were, with the three Rhenish archbishops, by far the greater subjects, often aspiring to the crown, sometimes not unable to resist its wearer. The constant.encroachments which Otto made upon their privileges, especially through the institution of the Counts Palatine, destroyed their ascendancy, but not their importance. It was not till the thirteenth century that they disappeared with the rise of the second order of nobility. That order, at this period far less powerful, manic feudal included the counts, margraves or marquises, and landgraves, originally officers of the crown, now feudal tenants; holding their lands of the dukes, and maintaining against them the same contest which they in turn waged with the crown. Below these came the barons and simple knights, then the diminishing class of freemen, the increasing class of serfs. The institutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone; supplanted by a new system, partly the natural result of the formation of a settled from a halfnomad society, partly imitated from that which had arisen upon Roman soil, west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. The army was no longer the Heerbann of the whole nation, which had been wont to follow the king on foot in distant expeditions, but a cavalry militia of barons and their retainers, bound to service for a short period, and rendering it unwillingly where their own interest was not concerned. The frequent popular assemblies, whereof under the names

polity

generally.