The Chief Periods of European History

In the East our case is much clearer. The event of 1204 is one that stands out with far greater distinctness than the event of 1250. No years in the Byzantine annals are more honourable than those in which they for a while cease to be Byzantine. It is when the Ῥωμαῖοι again become Byzantine that they again degenerate. If the name of Roman is to be held as an epithet of honour, at no time did prince and people better deserve that name than when they were banished from the New Rome. Adversity brought out vigorous qualities indeed in the Emperors of Nikaia and their subjects. Yet the fact that they were Emperors of Nikaia and not of Constantinople puts a wide barrier between them and their predecessors. The life of the Eastern Empire had been so thoroughly bound up in the possession of the Eastern Rome that no change could seem so great as that which gave the Eastern Rome to a Latin stranger. The Empire of Nikaia proved in the end the most vigorous and abiding among its fellows; but it had fellows. It was only one of a crowd of states, Greek and Latin, into which the Roman Empire of the East was broken in pieces. That the old Empire was utterly broken in pieces, that its old position had wholly passed away, is shown by unavoidable changes in language. It is now indeed hard to avoid using the word Greek. To be sure no Orthodox speaker of the Greek tongue – that is now the definition of the artificial Greek nation – dreamed of calling himself Ἕλλην; the Greeks, the Griffons, of Western speakers were still everywhere Ῥωμαῖοι in their own eyes. Strange indeed is the opposition of names in these days. When we find Ῥωμαῖοι and Λατῖνοι opposed, we seem to be carried back to the consulship of Manlius and Decius; when somewhat earlier we find a strife between Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί, we seem to be carried back from the pages of Anna to the pages of Dionysios, from the reign of Alexios to the reign of Tullus. But now that Emperors, Kings, Despots, Dukes, Grand-Sires, outlying possessions of Italian commonwealths and Italian families, have become thick on the ground and still thicker on the waters, we can hardly use any other name than Greek to distinguish a prince or a people speaking the later shape of the tongue of Hellas from princes and people speaking the later shapes of the tongue of Latium. When we step within the range of theological controversy, our difficulties become greater still. If we keep to our elder language, the special badge of the Roman will be that he denies the authority of the Roman Church. The Roman name, as the formal name of a power, ceased only in 1453, or rather in 1461. The Roman name, as the name of a people, can hardly be said to have even now passed away. But from 800 onwards we may fairly use such distinguishing forms as “Eastern” and “Byzantine”; from 1204 onwards we can hardly help adopting the Western language of the time, and speaking of those scattered fragments of the Eastern Empire which were still held by its own people as “Greek.”

The Empire of Nikaia may seem to have well proved its right to be looked on as the true successor of the old Empire by the great exploit of winning back the Imperial city. For eight hundred years we have had to deal with powers that win back oftener than with powers that can be strictly said to advance; but to win back Constantinople in the thirteenth century was to gain a richer prize than even to win back Rome in the sixth. Without Constantinople an East-Roman or Greek Empire might seem to have no position in the face of the world. In possession of Constantinople, it might seem to be brought back to something like its old place among powers and nations. Still the Empire of the Palaiologoi was but a feeble representative, a mere shadow and survival, not only of the Empire of the Macedonians, but of the Empire of the Komnênoi. For a while it was an advancing power in Europe; even when its northern frontiers had fallen back before the Bulgarian, the Servian, the Ottoman himself, it could still advance in the old Greek lands. It showed the Byzantine power of revival in its last and strangest form, when the whole of Peloponnêsos, bating the points held by Venice, was again united under a Greek prince. In those days it was something for the Roman Empire to outlive the principality of Achaia, days when the Isle of Pelops formed the main body of an Empire of which the city of Constantine was the distant head. If the last Emperor of the West took his crown at Bologna, the last Emperor of the East took his on the spot which had been Sparta. But “Emperor of the East” I should not say. That is one of the many conventional ways of describing the princes of the Eastern Rome, the use of which may sometimes help to turn a sentence. But no prince reigning at Constantinople ever called himself Emperor of the East, and there was another prince who did. In those days Empires arose and fell with speed in the Eastern world. Even before 1204, a stranger born on English soil, a Count of Poitou whom a strange chance made also King of England, had the privilege of overthrowing an Emperor of the Romans whose Empire was bounded by the isle of Cyprus. Master of that island, that old battle-field of Aryan and Semitic man, he had the wisdom to get rid of an useless possession, and to bestow it as a kingdom on a vassal of his own who had lately been King of Jerusalem. So, after the great crash of the Latin conquest, momentary Emperors had reigned in Epeiros and at Thessalonikê. But there was yet another Imperial claimant whose power, like that of him of Nikaia, was more than momentary. It should never be forgotten that the last fragment of Greek-speaking Roman power that the world saw lingered on, not in Megarian Byzantium but at Arkadian Trebizond. As the northern shore of the Euxine saw the last Greek commonwealth, so its southern shore saw the last Greek Empire. For Greek we must call it. The Komnênos at Trebizond, admitting the superiority of the Palaiologos at Constantinople, cast aside his Roman style, and called himself among other titles Emperor of the East. The West had long before heard of an Emperor of Britain and of an Emperor of the Spains; but now for the first time in the East a man was found calling himself βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ, but βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ of something else and not Ῥωμαίων. But an Emperor of the East, an Emperor of all the East, πάσης τῆς ἀνατολῆς, still keeps about him something of the sublimity of vagueness; his Imperial style has a better sound than the Imperial style of a German duchy or a negro island; an Emperor of the East does not seem to be cabined, cribbed, confined, within quite such a paltry space as an Emperor of Hayti or an Emperor of Austria. Still a prince who called himself Emperor, but did not dare to call himself Emperor of the Romans, proclaimed himself by his very style to be, to use the most civil words, a shadow and a survival. Indeed there is a curious analogy between the survival at Trebizond and the survival at Vienna. The Komnênos and the Lotharingian each cast aside his Roman style, to carry on the business, as our own expounder of things Imperial puts it, under another name.

But, if we cannot allow the so-called Empires of Cyprus, Epeiros, and Trebizond, or even the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi, to be more than shadows and survivals of the old Roman Empire of the East, they did at least continue it in the sense in which any whole may be said to be continued in its fragments. We can hardly say that that Empire was in the same sort continued either in the Turkish Sultanate of Roum or in the Latin Empire of Romania. Truly they are shadows and survivals of the old Empire; but shadows and survivals of a different kind from those at Epeiros and Trebizond. That the Seljuk lords of Nikaia should have been called Sultans of Roum, that the Ottoman lord of Constantinople and his people should bear the same Roman name among the nations of the further East, that, before the Ottoman was lord of Constantinople, Bajazet should have been addressed by Timour as the Keiser of Roum, all these things are strange and startling tributes to the abiding life of the Roman name, but of little more than the name. The Latin Empire of Romania is more remarkable. Two or three centuries earlier, if a band of Western warriors had made their way into Constantinople, their most obvious legal pretext, if they had sought for a legal pretext, would have been the establishment of the authority of the Emperor crowned at Rome over the Eastern as well as the Western portion of the Empire. To German crusaders such a thought might possibly have presented itself even in the thirteenth century; Constantinople might have been claimed for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with more show of reason than Prussia or Livonia. But the thought was not likely to come into the minds of Frenchmen, of Flemings, of Venetians so lately themselves vassals of the Eastern Emperor, of Italians other than the most zealous Ghibelins. Earlier crusaders had consented to become liegemen of Alexios Komnênos, and if some refused or delayed, it was certainly not out of loyalty to Henry of Franconia. The men of Pisa, firm stay of Cæsar in the West, did not scruple to fight for his Eastern rival against the Latin invaders. That the chief of the conquerors took the title of Emperor was in itself a confession that Constantinople was a lawful seat of Empire; but difficulties on either side might hinder the authors of the new Imperial style from literally translating Ῥωμαίων βασιλεύς as the description of a Latin potentate. The style became territorial; Baldwin and Henry shrank, not unreasonably, from calling themselves Emperors of the Roman people, but they did not shrink from proclaiming themselves Emperors of a Roman land. A strange position it was that the Latin Emperors of Romania held during the two generations of their rule in Constantinople. Almost more strange is the long cleaving of Western opinion to their supposed rights after the Greek princes and people again held their old home.

We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1204 as the time when the true Roman Empire of the East came to an end. The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only as fragments; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself, however cut short. But they are genuine fragments; if not the very thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East Ῥωμαῖοι had become the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial, and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later, its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue the national existence of any people that could be called even artificial Romans. It continues Roman titles and memories; as so doing, it is a true survival of the Roman power, but it has passed away from all Roman national life to become no small element in the national life of another people. It became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The personal dignity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he was not like the Franks and the Swabians; Lewis of Bavaria is rather the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third; the crowning of Charles at Rome may be bracketted with his crowning at Arles, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and Pater Patriæ and something like Pontifex as well, in that strange gathering of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at Innsbrück. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called Roman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break between 800 and 1806. The difference is the difference between a thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment keeps, so far as a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a thing which lives on, which never loses its personality, which is never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is a wider difference between the Empire of the first Cæsars and the Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors; whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible, they were still Imperial objects, objects that reached far beyond the bounds of Swabia or of Germany. Among the other princes of the West they held something more than a mere precedency. The kings of France, of Britain, of Spain, might deny their supremacy, but they denied it as a thing which needed to be denied; they might refuse to acknowledge the Emperor as their lord, but they still felt that the one Emperor was a being of another class from the kings around him who might or might not be his men. Their whole position was not German but European; if not the sovereigns, they were at least the chiefs, of all Western Christendom. But the Austrian Emperors sank to be Kings of Germany keeping the titles of Empire, and Kings of Germany who had much less authority in their own kingdom than other kings. For in truth the German kingdom had given way beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. The Imperial tradition had first split the kingdom in pieces, and had then kept the pieces from altogether falling apart. The Emperor was set too high in formal dignity to exercise the ordinary authority of lesser kings. We cannot speak of the Austrian Emperors as chiefs of Western Christendom, though, in a character which was not Imperial, they might sometimes become its champions. The Swabian Emperors were, if not above, at least before, all other princes; the Austrians can barely maintain their right to be the first among them. They keep at most a barren precedency, and even that is not always undisputed. Their policy is not European; it is hardly German; it seeks only the advancement of their own house in Germany and out of it. At last they seem altogether to forget who and what they are. When an Emperor-elect of the Romans, King of Germany and Jerusalem, could cast aside his Roman and German style, his Roman and German speech, and could describe himself as “Empereur d’Allemagne et d’Autriche” in a treaty with one who called himself “Empereur des Français,” it was time that the ancient titles should yet be used in one document more, in that which should announce to the world that, as the titles had now ceased to have a meaning, the thing which they described had ceased to be.

Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions, signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a-days, use the words “Emperor” and “Empire” simply to sound fine. When he called himself “Emperor of the French,” he knew perfectly well what he meant by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not hang badly together. The lordship of the world, at the lowest the supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Rome and Germany to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which the rulers of Rome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact; the style of 1804 did but put that fact into very emphatic words. There was again an Emperor, a βασιλεύς with ῥῆγες around him; only that βασιλεύς was no longer Roman, Greek, or German, but, by conquest at least, French. It might even add a malicious sweetness to the new Imperial position to reckon Rome and Germany among the subject lands of France. The first French Empire was not a mere survival of the Roman Empire in any of its stages; nor was it a mere analogy, as when we apply the Imperial name to barbarian princes who hold an Imperial position in their own world. The Empire of the Moguls in many things repeated the Empire of the Cæsars; but it repeated it unconsciously. But about the French Empire everything was conscious; every detail of imposture had a meaning. It was not in any sense a survival, neither was it a true revival; it was in some sort a mockery, in some sort an imitation, a spurious branch of the same stock, a parody of the old Empire set up in a kind of strange rivalry on the ground of the old Empire. But the old Empire was not made but grew; it took a long time even to crumble in pieces. The new Empire, made by one man, grew mightily for a few years, and then broke asunder in a moment. Still the new Civilis, the man who made the Empire of the Gauls, must be allowed the doubtful pre-eminence of being, if κακοπράγμων, at least μεγαλοπράγμων also. Of the grotesque imitation of his work to which some bowed down not twenty years back, it is needless to speak.

I spoke just now of a document, the treaty of Pressburg, which was signed by two personages described as the “Emperor of the French” and the “Emperor of Germany and Austria.” It must never be forgotten that the title of “Emperor of Austria” dates, not from 1806 but from 1804. The King of Germany, Emperor-elect of the Romans, while he still held the highest place on earth, thought good to call himself “Hereditary Emperor of Austria” —Erbkaiser von Oesterreich. What the two titles meant side by side, no man can tell; but when the Roman and German titles were dropped, the so-called “Empire of Austria” went on as a distinct survival of the old Empire, and a very memorable survival too. For it is the most successful imposture on record. This use of an Imperial style has caused a power which is in its own nature modern, upstart, and revolutionary, to be looked on as ancient, venerable, and conservative. A power of yesterday, which has lived only by trampling on every historic right and every national memory, has somehow come to be looked on as the very embodiment of dignified and conservative antiquity. But the particular way in which the imposture has succeeded is the most wonderful thing of all. In the last century among ourselves Smithson thought good to call himself Percy, and the world believes that he is Percy. But the world believes that Smithson is Percy; it does not believe that the old Percies were Smithsons. This last is what is believed in the Austrian case. Nobody believes that the present King of Hungary and Archduke of Austria is Emperor of the Romans and King of Germany. But many believe that real Emperors of the Romans and Kings of Germany were, what he calls himself, Emperors of Austria. I have seen Frederick Barbarossa called “Emperor of Austria;” half the world believes that the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles the Sixth settled an Empire of Austria on Maria Theresa; I have seen a book of the eighteenth century in which Joseph the Second was of course spoken of simply as “the Emperor,” but in which the editor in the nineteenth century thought it needful to explain that the “Emperor” spoken of was “Emperor of Austria.” I have found natives of Switzerland on their ground who believed that the Imperial eagle carved on this or that ancient building was the badge of Austria and not of Rome. Yes; never was imposture more successful; never was the truth of history more thoroughly turned round. It would be somewhat hard to bear if Francis of Lorraine were thought to be something like Frederick of Hohenstaufen; but the dead may turn in their graves when Frederick of Hohenstaufen is thought to be something like Francis of Lorraine.

The truth is that the strange neglect into which the Imperial history has fallen, the general incapacity or unwillingness to grasp the leading fact in the whole history of Europe, is largely owing to the existence and the success of the great Austrian imposture. But there are two other European powers which also take to themselves the Imperial style, and each of which is in a certain sense a revival of the old Empire. Neither the Russian nor the German Empire can be allowed to be more than a survival of the true Empire; but neither of them is a sheer imposture like the so-called Empire of Austria. The German Empire called yesterday into being is a real new birth of the old German kingdom. Its head, with no claim to represent the Imperial position of Charles and Otto, is a real representative of Henry of Saxony and Rudolf of Habsburg. But so many Kings of Germany had been Emperors that it might have seemed strange to make a King of Germany and not to call him Emperor. And it would have been hard to find any lower title for the head of a Confederation which numbers other kings among its members. Such an one in truth has in some sort an Imperial position; he too, like Agamemnôn or Æthelstan, is a βασιλεύς with his ῥῆγες round him. The elder Empire of Russia stands on quite another ground. So far as it is an Imperial survival, it is a survival of the Empire of the East. The Tzar of Moscow belongs to the same class as the Tzars of Bulgaria and Servia. We have seen how the Slavonic powers which, while assaulting the Empire, bowed down before the greatness of the Empire, took to themselves its Imperial titles, and bore outside the Tzarigrad the lofty style which they would have been better pleased to bear within its walls. And since the fall of Constantinople, the Russian princes, to say nothing of some supposed kindred with the last Imperial house, have, as the most powerful princes of the Eastern Church, stepped into something like the general position in the world which had belonged to the Eastern Emperors. With less of geographical connexion, they certainly represent the Eastern Empire with far more of truth than any modern Western power can claim to represent the Western Empire. Only the title of “Emperor of all the Russias” can hardly be accepted as a truth, as long as two Russian lands, the lands of Halicz and Vladimir, are tied on to the Austrian duchy on the strength of having been in far distant ages conquered by a Hungarian king.

In all these powers then which bear or have borne the Imperial style, Russia, Germany, Austria, France under the first Buonaparte, we can see a distinct connexion with the Roman power. The thought of the Roman power in some of its forms and stages was present to the minds of those by whom the Imperial style was taken. But the application of that style to so many powers has gone far to take from it any distinct meaning. I will not say that the words “Empire” and “Imperial” were always in my younger days used with a conscious reference to Rome and her memories; but I will say that they were not used quite as they are now, simply to sound fine. A poet or an orator might use them in some impassioned strain; men did not in every day speech talk about “the Empire” as familiarly as they talk about “the parish.” A little time back, in opposition to this new insular whim, “Empire” always meant something specially French. Even the cant phrase of “the Second Empire” to mean the dominion of the last Buonaparte has, I suspect, done something to overshadow the great truths of history; we all know that a man who has written many volumes on a great historical subject took for granted that a “Prince of the Empire,” above all a Prince of Orange, must mean something in France. To those whose studies lead them to look on Imperator and βασιλεύς as words which translate each other, it does seem a pity if the style of Emperor should come simply to be the English equivalent for τύραννος.

But leaving smaller questions like these aside, there is indeed one survival of the ancient Empire before whose mighty history all minds must bend in awe, a survival well nigh greater and more memorable than that of which it is the survival. When Gratian, the Christian Imperator, laid aside the badges of the pagan Pontifex Maximus, truly he did not foresee the day when a Christian Pontifex Maximus should claim to place the crown of the Imperator on his brow, and should even claim the right to take away what he might in some sort seem to have given. Christian Cæsars might indeed repeat what a pagan Cæsar had said in unconscious prophecy, that he could better bear the proclamation of a rival Emperor than the election of a Christian Bishop in the Imperial city. A day was to come when, if men deemed that two great lights were set in the Christian firmament, yet it was Cæsar’s moon that shone with a feebler and reflected light, a light that might suffice to rule the night of earthly things, while the sun of the Pontiff shone with a light that came straight from the Creator’s hand, a greater light to rule the day of man’s spiritual being. It might still be held that God had two earthly Vicars, that two swords were placed by His grant, each in the hand chosen to wield it; but the sword that was wielded by the successor of Augustus was held to be of baser metal and duller edge than the sword that was wielded by the successor of Peter. Great and mighty were those claims, and great and mighty were once the men who put them forth. Even Ghibelins in heart, historic liegemen of Cæsar, must stand by and wonder, if they cannot approve, when Cæsar stands uncrowned, unclad, unheeded, at the Pontiff’s gate, cast down from the throne of the world by a word sent forth from Rome in Rome’s new character. At one moment the lord of fifty legions is left, at the bidding of an unarmed man, without a single sword ready to leave its scabbard at his call. At another moment he whose word has wrought such wonders, himself in turn driven from his church and throne, leaves the world with the protest that it is because he has loved righteousness and hated iniquity that he dies in exile, and is comforted in his dying hour by the answer that in exile he cannot die, seeing God hath given him the nations for his inheritance and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. Rome again rules the world, and again rules it by a moral power; she rules the world so surely that she can again as it were turn her back upon herself; the voice of her Pontiff can speak from Avignon as the voice of her Augustus had once spoken from Ravenna. But we must bear in mind that it was simply because her Emperors had come to speak from Ravenna and from a crowd of other spots other than Rome, that a voice that would have seemed as strange to Constantine as to Trajan had learned to come forth, it might be from Rome, it might be from Clermont or from Lyons. Let us look at the case with the calm gaze of history. History knows nothing of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as the centre of spiritual unity, the divinely commissioned head of the Universal Church. History knows just as little of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as Antichrist and the Man of Sin. It may indeed be the business of history to trace the steps by which either theory arose in men’s minds; but it is not by the light of such theories as these that she will look at the facts of her own science. In the eyes of history the power of the Roman Church grew up simply because it was the Roman Church and the Church of no meaner city. The church founded in the mother and head of all cities could not fail to rank as the mother and head of all churches. Rome, the local Rome, still had life in her to rule, and if her Emperor forsook his calling in the local seat of rule, her Bishop was there to take his place. When the sword of Valentinian was powerless against the Hun, the voice of Leo was ready to charm with all its wisdom. Claudius and Vespasian had brought the elder folk of Britain beneath the earthly yoke of Rome; when their work of a moment had passed away, it was for Gregory to bring another folk of Britain as more abiding dwellers within her ghostly fold. Cæsar after Cæsar had given and taken away the crowns of vassal kings; when Cæsar’s name had become but a shadow in Western lands, it was for the Roman Pontiff to bid shear the locks of the last degenerate Merwing, to pour for the first time the kingly unction on a Frankish head. In all these cases, in a hundred others, Rome still speaks as the head and teacher of the nations; she is driven to speak through the voice of her Bishop simply because her Emperor has forsaken her. How truly, how wholly, it was the constant absence, the frequent weakness, of the Emperor out of which the power of the Pontiff grew will be seen by comparing the story of the Old Rome with the story of the New. At Constantinople the Emperor was ever present, ever reigning; where he dwelled and reigned there was no room for any other power to take to itself the slightest fragment of Imperial rule. Never was any line of princes more deeply impressed with a religious character than the Eastern Cæsars; none more constantly made the Faith, the advancement of the Faith, the humiliation of its enemies, the abiding objects of their policy; their style was the “Faithful Emperor;” their cry of battle was “Victory to the Cross.” Nowhere were Church and State more truly one; but nowhere was the temporal ruler more distinctly in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme. In the West the present Patriarch had well nigh taken the place of the absent Emperor; in the East the present Emperor had well nigh taken on himself the functions of a Patriarch who in his presence was but his creature. Like his pagan predecessors, it was he, and not the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly Pontifex Maximus as well as Pater Patriæ. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his cave, in Nikêphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome.