upon the

history of the

and the Apostolic See. Of the ecclesiastical power it was CHAP. XXII. alternately the champion and the enemy. In the ninth Influence of and tenth centuries the Emperors extended the dominion the Empire of Peter's chair: in the tenth and eleventh they rescued it from an abyss of guilt and shame to be the instrument Church. of their own downfall. The struggle which began under Gregory the Seventh, although it belonged to the political rather than to the religious sphere, awoke in the Teutonic nations a suspicion of the papal court, and a disposition. to resist its pretensions. That struggle ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the victory of the priesthood a victory whose abuse by the arrogant and rapacious pontiffs of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries made it more ruinous than a defeat. The anger which had long smouldered in the breasts of the Northern peoples burst out in the sixteenth with a violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto supported, and made the Emperors once more the allies of the Popedom, and the partners of its declining fortunes. But the nature of that alliance and of the hostility which had preceded it must not be misunderstood. It is a natural, but not the Nature of the less a serious error to suppose, as some modern writers question at have done, that the pretensions of the Empire and the the Emperors Popedom were mutually exclusive; that each claimed all and the Popes. the rights, spiritual and secular, of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the case, that we find mediaeval writers and statesmen, even Emperors and Popes themselves, expressly recognizing a divinely appointed duality of government - two potentates, each supreme in the sphere of his own activity, Peter in things eternal, Caesar in things temporal. The relative position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo a signal alteration. In the age of Charles, the barbarous age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but be governed chiefly by

issue between

CHAP. XXII. physical force, the Emperor was practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent III, when the power of ideas had grown stronger in the world, and was able to resist, or to bend to its service, the arms and the wealth of men, we see the balance inclined the other way. Spiritual authority is conceived of as being of a nature so high and holy that it is entitled to inspire and guide the civil administration. But there was not yet a purpose to supplant that administration or to degrade its head. The great struggle of the eleventh and two following centuries does not aim at the annihilation of one or other power, but turns upon the character of their connection. Hildebrand, the typical representative of the Popedom, requires the obedience of the Emperor on the ground of his own personal responsibility for the souls of their common subjects: he demands, not that the functions of temporal government shall be directly committed to himself, but that they shall be exercised in conformity with the will of God, whereof he is the exponent. The imperialist party, since they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, nor the transcendent importance of eternal salvation, could do no more than protest that the Emperor, being also divinely appointed, was directly answerable to God, and remind the Pope that his kingdom was not of this world. There was in truth no way out of the difficulty, for it was caused by the attempt to sever things which, distinguishable in thought, hardly admit of severance in practice, life in the soul and life in the world, life for the future and life in the present. Then the Papacy, embittered by strife and intoxicated by victory, began to advance pretensions so extravagant as to provoke reaction. Frederick II claimed ecclesiastical authority: Lewis IV deposed a reigning Pope and crowned a friar as his successor. Each power had

grievously wounded the other; the decline of both had CHAP. XXII. begun, for each was losing its hold upon opinion. Yet for a while neither combatant had pushed his theory to extremities, since he felt that his adversary's title rested on the same foundations as his own. The strife which had been keenest at the time when the world believed fervently in both powers, suddenly died away; and an alliance came when faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the other. From the Reformation onwards. Empire and Popedom fought no longer against one another for supremacy, but side by side for existence.

the conception

of the World

Nor was that which may be called the inner life of the Ennobling Empire less momentous in its influence upon the minds influence of of men than were its outward dealings with the Roman Church upon the various phases of her fortunes. In the Empire. Middle Ages, men conceived of the communion of the saints as the formal unity of an organized body of worshippers, and found the concrete realization of that conception in their universal religious state, which was in one aspect the Church, in another, the Empire. Into the meaning and worth of the conception, into the nature of the connection which subsists or ought to subsist between the Church and the State, this is not the place to inquire. That the form which that connection took in the Middle Ages was always imperfect and became eventually rigid and unprogressive was sufficiently proved by the event. But by it the European peoples were saved from the isolation, and narrowness, and jealous exclusiveness which had checked the growth of the earlier civilizations of the world, and which we see now lying like a weight upon the kingdoms of the East: by it they were brought into that mutual knowledge and co-operation which is the condition if it be not the source of all true culture and progress. For as by the Roman Empire of old the

CHAP. XXII. nations were first forced to own a common sway, so by the Empire of the Middle Ages was preserved the feeling of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor distinction.

Principles

As despotic monarchs claiming the world for their realm, adverse to the the Teutonic Emperors strove from the first against three Empire. principles, over all of which their forerunners of the elder Rome had triumphed - those of Nationality, Aristocracy, and Popular Freedom. Their early struggles were against the first of these principles, and ended with its victory in the emancipation, one after another, of France, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Burgundy, and Italy. The second, in the form of feudalism, menaced even when seeming to exalt and obey them, and succeeded, during and after the Great Interregnum, in destroying their effective strength in Germany. Aggression and inheritance turned the numerous independent principalities thus formed out of the greater fiefs, into a few military monarchies, resting neither on reciprocal loyalty, like feudal kingdoms, nor on religious duty and tradition, like the Empire, but on material force, more or less disguised by legal forms. That the hostility to the Empire of the impulse towards free self-government was accidental rather than necessary is seen by this, that the very same monarchs who sought to crush the Lombard and Tuscan cities favoured the growth of the free towns of Germany and sometimes favoured the free rural communities of what afterwards became Switzerland. The theoretical autocracy of Caesar could in practice reconcile itself with civic or cantonal autonomy just as easily as it did with the rights of the feudal vassal in the days when the vassal was content to keep his place. Nevertheless the principles whereon the Holy Empire rested, were in so far incompatible with freedom of judgement, of speech, and of action,

that when the German and Swiss Reformers asserted the CHAP. XXII. rights of the individual in the sphere of religion, they weakened the Empire by denying the necessity of external unity in matters spiritual. The extension of such doctrines to the secular world would have in like manner struck at the doctrine of imperial absolutism had it not found a nearer and deadlier foe in the actual tyranny of the princes. It is more than a coincidence, that as the proclamation of the liberty of thought had shaken, so the proclamation of liberty of action made by the revolutionary movement, whose beginning the world saw and only half understood in 1789, should have indirectly become the cause which overthrew the Holy Empire.

fall.

Its fall in the midst of the great convulsion that changed Change the face of Europe marks an era in history, an era whose marked by its character the events of the sixty years that followed went on unfolding an era of the destruction of old forms and systems and the building up of new. The latest instances are the most memorable. Under our eyes, the work which Theodorich and Lewis the Second, Guido and Ardoin and the second Frederick, essayed in vain, was achieved by the steadfast will of the Italian people. The fairest province of the Empire, for which Franconian and Swabian battled so long, became at last a single monarchy under the Burgundian count, whom Sigismund created imperial vicar in Italy, and who, now that he holds the ancient capital, may call himself 'king of the Romans' more truly than did ever Greek or Frank or Saxon or Austrian since Constantine forsook the Tiber for the Bosphorus. No longer the prey of the stranger, Italy could forget the past, and sympathize, as indeed, since the fortunate alliance of 1866, she began to sympathize, with the efforts after national unity of her ancient enemy efforts confronted by so many obstacles that for many years they seemed all but hope