The Holy Roman Empire

Bearing of the Empire upon the progress of European civilization.

We are not yet far enough from the Empire to comprehend or state rightly its bearing on European progress. The mountain lies behind us, but miles must be traversed before we can take in at a glance its peaks and slopes and buttresses, picture its form, and conjecture its height. Of the perpetuation among the peoples of the West of the arts and literature of Rome it was both an effect and a cause, a cause only less powerful than the church. It would be endless to shew in how many ways it affected the political institutions of the Middle Ages, and through them of the whole civilized world. Most of the attributes of modern royalty, to take the most obvious instance, belonged originally and properly to the Emperor, and were borrowed from him by other monarchs. The once famous doctrine of divine right had the same origin. To the existence of the Empire is chiefly to be ascribed the prevalence of Roman law through Europe, and its practical importance in our own days. For while in Southern France and Central Italy, where the subject population greatly outnumbered their conquerors, the old system would have in any case survived, it cannot be doubted that in Germany, as in England, a body of customary Teutonic law would have grown up, had it not been for the notion that since the German monarch was the legitimate successor of Justinian, the Corpus Juris must be binding on all his subjects.

Influence upon modern jurisprudence.

This strange idea was received with a faith so unhesitating that even the aristocracy, who naturally disliked a system which the Emperors and the cities favoured, could not but admit its validity, and before the end of the Middle Ages Roman law prevailed through all Germany419. When it is considered how great are the services which German writers have rendered and continue to render to the study of scientific jurisprudence, this result will appear far from insignificant. But another of still wider import followed. When by the Peace of Westphalia a crowd of petty principalities were recognized as practically independent states, the need of a code to regulate their intercourse became pressing. That code Grotius and his successors formed out of what was then the private law of Germany, which thus became the foundation whereon the system of international jurisprudence has been built up during the last two centuries. That system is, indeed, entirely a German creation, and could have arisen in no country where the law of Rome had not been the fountain of legal ideas and the groundwork of positive codes. In Germany, too, was it first carried out in practice, and that with a success which is the best, some might say the only, title of the later Empire to the grateful remembrance of mankind. Under its protecting shade small princedoms and free cities lived unmolested beside states like Saxony and Bavaria; each member of the Germanic body feeling that the rights of the weakest of his brethren were also his own.

Influence of the Empire upon the history of the Church.

The most important chapter in the history of the Empire is that which describes its relation to the Church and the Papacy. Of the ecclesiastical power it was alternately the champion and the enemy. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Emperors extended the dominion of Peter's chair: in the tenth and eleventh they rescued it from an abyss of guilt and shame to be the instrument of their own downfall. The struggle which Gregory the Seventh began, although it was political rather than religious, awoke in the Teutonic nations a hostility to the pretensions of the Romish court. That struggle ended, with the death of the last Hohenstaufen, in the victory of the priesthood, a victory whose abuse by the insolent and greedy 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 nations of Europe burst out in the sixteenth with a violence which alarmed those whom it had hitherto defended, 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.

Nature of the question at issue between the Emperors and the Popes.

It is a natural, but not the less a serious error to suppose, as modern writers often seem to do, that the pretensions of the Empire and the Popedom were mutually exclusive; that each claimed all the rights, spiritual and secular, of a universal monarch. So far was this from being the case, that we find mediæval 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, Cæsar in things temporal. The relative position of the two does indeed in course of time undergo a signal alteration. In the days of Charles, the barbarous age of modern Europe, when men were and could not but be governed chiefly by physical force, the Emperor was practically, if not theoretically, the grander figure. Four centuries later, in the era of Pope Innocent the Third, 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 must inspire and guide the civil administration. But it is not proposed to supplant that administration nor 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 solely upon the character of their connexion. 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 had no means of meeting this argument, for they could not deny the spiritual supremacy of the Pope, nor the transcendant importance of eternal salvation. They could therefore only 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 that admit of no severance, life in the soul and life in the world, life for the future and life in the present. What it is most pertinent to remark is that neither combatant pushed his theory to extremities, since he felt that his adversary's title rested on the same foundations as his own. The strife was keenest at the time when the whole world believed fervently in both powers; the alliance came when faith had forsaken the one and grown cold towards the other; from the Reformation onwards Empire and Popedom fought no longer for supremacy, but for existence. One is fallen already, the other shakes with every blast.

Ennobling influence of the conception of the World Empire.

Nor was that which may be called the inner life of the Empire less momentous in its influence upon the minds of men than were its outward dealings with the Roman church upon her greatness and decline. In the 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 connexion which subsists or ought to subsist between the Church and the State, this is not the place to inquire. That the form which it 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 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.

As despotic monarchs claiming the world for their realm, the Teutonic Emperors strove from the first against three principles, over all of which their forerunners of the elder Rome had triumphed, – those of Nationality, Aristocracy, and Popular Freedom.

Principles adverse to the Empire.

Their early struggles were against the first of these, and ended with its victory in the emancipation, one after another, of England, France, Poland, Hungary, Denmark, Burgundy, and Italy. The second, in the form of feudalism, menaced even when seeming to embrace and obey them, and succeeded, 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 a rude loyalty, like feudal kingdoms, nor on religious duty and tradition, like the Empire, but on physical force, more or less disguised by legal forms. That the hostility to the Empire of the third was accidental rather than necessary is seen by this, that the very same monarchs who strove to crush the Lombard and Tuscan cities favoured the growth of the free towns of Germany. Asserting the rights of the individual in the sphere of religion, the Reformation weakened the Empire by denying the necessity of external unity in matters spiritual: the extension of the same principle to the secular world, whose fulness is still withheld from the Germans, would have 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 it, so that of the liberty of action made by the revolutionary movement, whose beginning the world saw and understood not in 1789, whose end we see not yet, should have indirectly become the cause which overthrew the Empire.

Change marked by its fall.

Its fall in the midst of the great convulsion that changed the face of Europe marks an era in history, an era whose character the events of every year are further unfolding: an era of the destruction of old forms and systems and the building up of new.

The last instance is the most memorable. Under our eyes, the work which Theodoric and Lewis the Second, Guido and Ardoin and the second Frederick essayed in vain, has been achieved by the steadfast will of the Italian people. The fairest province of the Empire, for which Franconian and Swabian battled so long, is now a single monarchy under the Burgundian count, whom Sigismund created imperial vicar in Italy, and who wants only the possession of the capital to be able to call himself 'king of the Romans' more truly than Greek or Frank or Austrian has done since Constantine forsook the Tiber for the Bosphorus. No longer the prey of the stranger, Italy may forget the past, and sympathize, as she has now indeed, since the fortunate alliance of 1866, begun to sympathize, with the efforts after national unity of her ancient enemy – efforts confronted by so many obstacles that a few years ago they seemed all but hopeless. On the new shapes that may emerge in this general reconstruction it would be idle to speculate. Yet one prediction may be ventured. No universal monarchy is likely to arise. More frequent intercourse, and the progress of thought, have done much to change the character of national distinctions, substituting for ignorant prejudice and hatred a genial sympathy and the sense of a common interest. They have not lessened their force. No one who reads the history of the last three hundred years, no one, above all, who studies attentively the career of Napoleon, can believe it possible for any state, however great her energy and material resources, to repeat in modern Europe the part of ancient Rome: to gather into one vast political body races whose national individuality has grown more and more marked in each successive age.

Relations of the Empire to the nationalities of Europe.

Nevertheless, it is in great measure due to Rome and to the Roman Empire of the Middle Ages that the bonds of national union are on the whole both stronger and nobler than they were ever before. The latest historian of Rome, after summing up the results to the world of his hero's career, closes his treatise with these words: 'There was in the world as Cæsar found it the rich and noble heritage of past centuries, and an endless abundance of splendour and glory, but little soul, still less taste, and, least of all, joy in and through life. Truly it was an old world, and even Cæsar's genial patriotism could not make it young again. The blush of dawn returns not until the night has fully descended. Yet with him there came to the much-tormented races of the Mediterranean a tranquil evening after a sultry day; and when, after long historical night, the new day broke once more upon the peoples, and fresh nations in free self-guided movement began their course towards new and higher aims, many were found among them in whom the seed of Cæsar had sprung up, many who owed him, and who owe him still, their national individuality420.' If this be the glory of Julius, the first great founder of the Empire, so is it also the glory of Charles, the second founder, and of more than one amongst his Teutonic successors. The work of the mediæval Empire was self-destructive; and it fostered, while seeming to oppose, the nationalities that were destined to replace it. It tamed the barbarous races of the North, and forced them within the pale of civilization. It preserved the arts and literature of antiquity. In times of violence and oppression, it set before its subjects the duty of rational obedience to an authority whose watchwords were peace and religion. It kept alive, when national hatreds were most bitter, the notion of a great European Commonwealth. And by doing all this, it was in effect abolishing the need for a centralizing and despotic power like itself: it was making men capable of using national independence aright: it was teaching them to rise to that conception of spontaneous activity, and a freedom which is above law but not against it, to which national independence itself, if it is to be a blessing at all, must be only a means. Those who mark what has been the tendency of events since A.D. 1789, and who remember how many of the crimes and calamities of the past are still but half redressed, need not be surprised to see the so-called principle of nationalities advocated with honest devotion as the final and perfect form of political development. But such undistinguishing advocacy is after all only the old error in a new shape. If all other history did not bid us beware the habit of taking the problems and the conditions of our own age for those of all time, the warning which the Empire gives might alone be warning enough. From the days of Augustus down to those of Charles the Fifth the whole civilized world believed in its existence as a part of the eternal fitness of things, and Christian theologians were not behind heathen poets in declaring that when it perished the world would perish with it. Yet the Empire is gone, and the world remains, and hardly notes the change.

Difficulties arising from the nature of the subject.

This is but a small part of what might be said upon an almost inexhaustible theme: inexhaustible not from its extent but from its profundity: not because there is so much to say, but because, pursue we it never so far, more will remain unexpressed, since incapable of expression.

For that which it is at once most necessary and least possible to do, is to look at the Empire as a whole: a single institution, in which centres the history of eighteen centuries – whose outer form is the same, while its essence and spirit are constantly changing. It is when we come to consider it in this light that the difficulties of so vast a subject are felt in all their force. Try to explain in words the theory and inner meaning of the Holy Empire, as it appeared to the saints and poets of the Middle Ages, and that which we cannot but conceive as noble and fertile in its life, sinks into a heap of barren and scarcely intelligible formulas. Who has been able to describe the Papacy in the power it once wielded over the hearts and imaginations of men? Those persons, if such there still be, who see in it nothing but a gigantic upas-tree of fraud and superstition, planted and reared by the enemy of mankind, are hardly further from entering into the mystery of its being than the complacent political philosopher, who explains in neat phrases the process of its growth, analyses it as a clever piece of mechanism, enumerates and measures the interests it appealed to, and gives, in conclusion, a sort of tabular view of its results for good and for evil. So, too, is the Holy Empire above all description or explanation; not that it is impossible to discover the beliefs which created and sustained it, but that the power of those beliefs cannot be adequately apprehended by men whose minds have been differently trained, and whose imaginations are fired by different ideals. Something, yet still how little, we should know of it if we knew what were the thoughts of Julius Cæsar when he laid the foundations on which Augustus built: of Charles, when he reared anew the stately pile: of Barbarossa and his grandson, when they strove to avert the surely coming ruin. Something more succeeding generations will know, who will judge the Middle Ages more fairly than we, still living in the midst of a reaction against all that is mediæval, can hope to do, and to whom it will be given to see and understand new forms of political life, whose nature we cannot so much as conjecture. Seeing more than we do, they will also see some things less distinctly. The Empire which to us still looms largely on the horizon of the past, will to them sink lower and lower as they journey onwards into the future. But its importance in universal history it can never lose. For into it all the life of the ancient world was gathered: out of it all the life of the modern world arose.

THE END

APPENDIX

NOTE A.

On the Burgundies

It would be hard to mention any geographical name which, by its application at different times to different districts, has caused, and continues to cause, more confusion than this name Burgundy. There may, therefore, be some use in a brief statement of the more important of those applications. Without going into the minutiæ of the subject, the following may be given as the ten senses in which the name is most frequently to be met with: —

I. The kingdom of the Burgundians (regnum Burgundionum), founded A.D. 406, occupying the whole valley of the Saone and lower Rhone, from Dijon to the Mediterranean, and including also the western half of Switzerland. It was destroyed by the sons of Clovis in A.D. 534.

II. The kingdom of Burgundy (regnum Burgundiæ), mentioned occasionally under the Merovingian kings as a separate principality, confined within boundaries apparently somewhat narrower than those of the older kingdom last named.

III. The kingdom of Provence or Burgundy (regnum Provinciæ seu Burgundiæ) – also, though less accurately, called the kingdom of Cis-Jurane Burgundy – was founded by Boso in A.D. 877, and included Provence, Dauphiné, the southern part of Savoy, and the country between the Saone and the Jura.

IV. The kingdom of Trans-Jurane Burgundy (regnum Iurense, Burgundia Transiurensis), founded by Rudolf in A.D. 888, recognized in the same year by the Emperor Arnulf, included the northern part of Savoy, and all Switzerland between the Reuss and the Jura.

V. The kingdom of Burgundy or Arles (regnum Burgundiæ, regnum Arelatense), formed by the union, under Conrad the Pacific, in A.D. 937, of the kingdoms described above as III and IV. On the death, in 1032, of the last independent king, Rudolf III, it came partly by bequest, partly by conquest, into the hands of the Emperor Conrad II (the Salic), and thenceforward formed a part of the Empire. In the thirteenth century, France began to absorb it, bit by bit, and has now (since the annexation of Savoy in 1861) acquired all except the Swiss portion of it.

VI. The Lesser Duchy (Burgundia Minor), (Klein Burgund), corresponded very nearly with what is now Switzerland west of the Reuss, including the Valais. It was Trans-Jurane Burgundy (IV) minus the parts of Savoy which had belonged to that kingdom. It disappears from history after the extinction of the house of Zahringen in the thirteenth century. Legally it was part of the Empire till A.D. 1648, though practically independent long before that date.

VII. The Free County or Palatinate of Burgundy (Franche Comté), (Freigrafschaft), (called also Upper Burgundy), to which the name of Cis-Jurane Burgundy originally and properly belonged, lay between the Saone and the Jura. It formed a part of III and V, and was therefore a fief of the Empire. The French dukes of Burgundy were invested with it in A.D. 1384, and in 1678 it was annexed to the crown of France.

VIII. The Landgraviate of Burgundy (Landgrafschaft) was in Western Switzerland, on both sides of the Aar, between Thun and Solothurn. It was a part of the Lesser Duchy (VI), and, like it, is hardly mentioned after the thirteenth century.

IX. The Circle of Burgundy (Kreis Burgund), an administrative division of the Empire, was established by Charles V in 1548; and included the Free County of Burgundy (VII) and the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands, which Charles inherited from his grandmother Mary, daughter of Charles the Bold.

X. The Duchy of Burgundy (Lower Burgundy), (Bourgogne), the most northerly part of the old kingdom of the Burgundians, was always a fief of the crown of France, and a province of France till the Revolution. It was of this Burgundy that Philip the Good and Charles the Bold were Dukes. They were also Counts of the Free County (VII).

The most copious and accurate information regarding the obscure history of the Burgundian kingdoms (III, IV, and V) is to be found in the contributions of Baron Frederic de Gingins la Sarraz, a Vaudois historian, to the Archiv für Schweizer Geschichte. See also an admirable article in the National Review for October 1860, entitled 'The Franks and the Gauls.'

NOTE B.

On the Relations to the Empire of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein

The history of the relations of Denmark and the Duchies to the Romano-Germanic Empire is a very small part of the great Schleswig-Holstein controversy. But having been unnecessarily mixed up with two questions properly quite distinct, – the first, as to the relation of Schleswig to Holstein, and of both jointly to the Danish crown; the second, as to the diplomatic engagements which the Danish kings have in recent times contracted with the German powers, – it has borne its part in making the whole question the most intricate and interminable that has vexed Europe for two centuries and a half. Setting aside irrelevant matter, the facts as to the Empire are as follows: —

I. The Danish kings began to own the supremacy of the Frankish Emperors early in the ninth century. Having recovered their independence in the confusion that followed the fall of the Carolingian dynasty, they were again subdued by Henry the Fowler and Otto the Great, and continued tolerably submissive till the death of Frederick II and the period of anarchy which followed. Since that time Denmark has been always independent, although her king was, until the treaty of A.D. 1865, a member of the German Confederation for Holstein.

II. Schleswig was in Carolingian times Danish; the Eyder being, as Eginhard tells us, the boundary between Saxonia Transalbiana (Holstein), and the Terra Nortmannorum (wherein lay the town of Sliesthorp), inhabited by the Scandinavian heathen. Otto the Great conquered all Schleswig, and, it is said, Jutland also, and added the southern part of Schleswig to the immediate territory of the Empire, erecting it into a margraviate. So it remained till the days of Conrad II, who made the Eyder again the boundary, retaining of course his suzerainty over the kingdom of Denmark as a whole. But by this time the colonization of Schleswig by the Germans had begun; and ever since the numbers of the Danish population seem to have steadily declined, and the mass of the people to have grown more and more disposed to sympathize with their southern rather than their northern neighbours.