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THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE.
THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE BY JAMES BRYCE, D.C.L. FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE and PROFESSOR OF CIVIL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD THIRD EDITION REVISED London MACMILLAN AND CO. 1871 OXFORD: By T. Combe, M.A., E. B. Gardner, and E. Pickard Hall, PRINTERS TO THE UNIVERSITY....
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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
The object of this treatise is not so much to give a narrative history of the countries included in the Romano-Germanic Empire—Italy during the middle ages, Germany from the ninth century to the nineteenth—as to describe the Holy Empire itself as an institution or system, the wonderful offspring of a body of beliefs and traditions which have almost wholly passed away from the world. Such a description, however, would not be intelligible without some account of the great events which accompanied
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CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE of EMPERORS AND POPES.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE of EMPERORS AND POPES.
[†] The names in italics are those of German kings who never made any claim to the imperial title. [*] Those marked with an asterisk were never actually crowned at Rome. THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE....
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CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY.
Of those who in August, 1806, read in the English newspapers that the Emperor Francis II had announced to the Diet his resignation of the imperial crown, there were probably few who reflected that the oldest political institution in the world had come to an end. Yet it was so. The Empire which a note issued by a diplomatist on the banks of the Danube extinguished, was the same which the crafty nephew of Julius had won for himself, against the powers of the East, beneath the cliffs of Actium; and
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CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS.
CHAPTER II. THE ROMAN EMPIRE BEFORE THE INVASIONS OF THE BARBARIANS.
The Roman Empire in the second century. That ostentation of humility which the subtle policy of Augustus had conceived, and the jealous hypocrisy of Tiberius maintained, was gradually dropped by their successors, till despotism became at last recognised in principle as the government of the Roman Empire. With an aristocracy decayed, a populace degraded, an army no longer recruited from Italy, the semblance of liberty that yet survived might be swept away with impunity. Republican forms had never
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CHAPTER III. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
CHAPTER III. THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS.
The Barbarians. Upon a world so constituted did the barbarians of the North descend. From the dawn of history they shew as a dim background to the warmth and light of the Mediterranean coast, changing little while kingdoms rise and fall in the South: only thought on when some hungry swarm comes down to pillage or to settle. It is always as foes that they are known. The Romans never forgot the invasion of Brennus; and their fears, renewed by the irruption of the Cimbri and Teutones, could not let
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CHAPTER IV. RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
CHAPTER IV. RESTORATION OF THE WESTERN EMPIRE.
It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in the furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought within the pale of civilizati
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CHAPTER V. EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
CHAPTER V. EMPIRE AND POLICY OF CHARLES.
The coronation of Charles is not only the central event of the Middle Ages, it is also one of those very few events of which, taking them singly, it may be said that if they had not happened, the history of the world would have been different. In one sense indeed it has scarcely a parallel. The assassins of Julius Cæsar thought that they had saved Rome from monarchy, but monarchy came inevitable in the next generation. The conversion of Constantine changed the face of the world, but Christianity
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CHAPTER VI. CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
CHAPTER VI. CAROLINGIAN AND ITALIAN EMPERORS.
Lewis the Pious. Lewis the Pious [86] , left by Charles's death sole heir, had been some years before associated with his father in the Empire, and had been crowned by his own hands in a way which, intentionally or not, appeared to deny the need of Papal sanction. But it was soon seen that the strength to grasp the sceptre had not passed with it. Too mild to restrain his turbulent nobles, and thrown by over-conscientiousness into the hands of the clergy, he had reigned few years when dissensions
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CHAPTER VII. THEORY OF THE MEDIÆVAL EMPIRE.
CHAPTER VII. THEORY OF THE MEDIÆVAL EMPIRE.
Why the revival of the Empire was desired. These were the events and circumstances of the time: let us now look at the causes. The restoration of the Empire by Charles may seem to be sufficiently accounted for by the width of his conquests, by the peculiar connection which already subsisted between him and the Roman Church, by his commanding personal character, by the temporary vacancy of the Byzantine throne. The causes of its revival under Otto must be sought deeper. Making every allowance for
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CHAPTER VIII. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM.
CHAPTER VIII. THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM.
Union of the Roman Empire with the German kingdom. 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. This union in one person of two characters, a union at first personal, then official, and which became at last a fusion of the two into something different from either, is the key to the whole subsequent history of Germany and the Empire. Germany and its monarchy. Of the G
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CHAPTER IX. SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
CHAPTER IX. SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS.
He who begins to read the history of the Middle Ages is alternately amused and provoked by the seeming absurdities that meet him at every step. He finds writers proclaiming amidst universal assent magnificent theories which no one attempts to carry out. He sees men who are stained with every vice full of sincere devotion to a religion which, even when its doctrines were most obscured, never sullied the purity of its moral teaching. He is disposed to conclude that such people must have been eithe
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CHAPTER X. STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.
CHAPTER X. STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.
Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the schemes of polity shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to their completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became the centre of the subsequent history
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CHAPTER XI. THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
CHAPTER XI. THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, 1152-1189. The reign of Frederick the First, better known under his Italian surname Barbarossa, is the most brilliant in the annals of the Empire. Its territory had been wider under Charles, its strength perhaps greater under Henry the Third, but it never appeared in such pervading vivid activity, never shone with such lustre of chivalry, as under the prince whom his countrymen have taken to be one of their national heroes, and who is still, as the half-mythic type of
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CHAPTER XII. IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
CHAPTER XII. IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.
The era of the Hohenstaufen is perhaps the fittest point at which to turn aside from the narrative history of the Empire to speak shortly of the legal position which it professed to hold to the rest of Europe, as well as of certain duties and observances which throw a light upon the system it embodied. This is not indeed the era of its greatest power: that was already past. Nor is it conspicuously the era when its ideal dignity stood highest: for that remained scarcely impaired till three centur
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CHAPTER XIII. FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
CHAPTER XIII. FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
In the three preceding chapters the Holy Empire has been described in what is not only the most brilliant but the most momentous period of its history; the period of its rivalry with the Popedom for the chief place in Christendom. For it was mainly through their relations with the spiritual power, by their friendship and protection at first, no less than by their subsequent hostility, that the Teutonic Emperors influenced the development of European politics. The reform of the Roman Church which
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CHAPTER XIV. THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION: THE SEVEN ELECTORS.
CHAPTER XIV. THE GERMANIC CONSTITUTION: THE SEVEN ELECTORS.
Territorial Sovereignty of the Princes. Adolf, 1292-1298. Albert I, 1298-1308. Henry VII, 1308-1314. Lewis IV, 1314-1347. The reign of Frederick the Second was not less fatal to the domestic power of the German king than to the European supremacy of the Emperor. His two Pragmatic Sanctions had conferred rights that made the feudal aristocracy almost independent, and the long anarchy of the Interregnum had enabled them not only to use but to extend and fortify their power. Rudolf of Hapsburg had
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CHAPTER XV. THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
CHAPTER XV. THE EMPIRE AS AN INTERNATIONAL POWER.
Theory of the Roman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. That the Roman Empire survived the seemingly mortal wound it had received at the era of the Great Interregnum, and continued to put forth pretensions which no one was likely to make good where the Hohenstaufen had failed, has been attributed to its identification with the German kingdom, in which some life was still left. But this was far from being the only cause which saved it from extinction. It had not ceased to be upheld
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CHAPTER XVI. THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
CHAPTER XVI. THE CITY OF ROME IN THE MIDDLE AGES.
'It is related,' says Sozomen in the ninth book of his Ecclesiastical History, 'that when Alaric was hastening against Rome, a holy monk of Italy admonished him to spare the city, and not to make himself the cause of such fearful ills. But Alaric answered, "It is not of my own will that I do this; there is One who forces me on, and will not let me rest, bidding me spoil Rome [323] ."' Towards the close of the tenth century the Bohemian Woitech, famous in after legend as St. Adalbert, forsook his
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CHAPTER XVII. THE RENAISSANCE: CHANGE IN THE CHARACTER OF THE EMPIRE.
CHAPTER XVII. THE RENAISSANCE: CHANGE IN THE CHARACTER OF THE EMPIRE.
Wenzel, 1378-1400. Rupert, 1400-1410. Sigismund, 1410-1438. Council of Constance. In Frederick the Third's reign the Empire sank to its lowest point. It had shot forth a fitful gleam under Sigismund, who in convoking and presiding over the council of Constance had revived one of the highest functions of his predecessors. The precedents of the first great œcumenical councils, and especially of the council of Nicæa, had established the principle that it belonged to the Emperor, even more properly
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CHAPTER XVIII. THE REFORMATION AND ITS EFFECTS UPON THE EMPIRE.
CHAPTER XVIII. THE REFORMATION AND ITS EFFECTS UPON THE EMPIRE.
The Reformation falls to be mentioned here, of course not as a religious movement, but as the cause of political changes, which still further rent the Empire, and struck at the root of the theory by which it had been created and upheld. Luther completed the work of Hildebrand. Hitherto it had seemed not impossible to strengthen the German state into a monarchy, compact if not despotic; the very Diet of Worms, where the monk of Wittenberg proclaimed to an astonished church and Emperor that the da
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CHAPTER XIX. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA: LAST STAGE IN THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE.
CHAPTER XIX. THE PEACE OF WESTPHALIA: LAST STAGE IN THE DECLINE OF THE EMPIRE.
The Peace of Westphalia is the first, and, with the exception perhaps of the Treaties of Vienna in 1815, the most important of those attempts to reconstruct by diplomacy the European states-system which have played so large a part in modern history. It is important, however, not as marking the introduction of new principles, but as winding up the struggle which had convulsed Germany since the revolt of Luther, sealing its results, and closing definitively the period of the Reformation. Although
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CHAPTER XX. FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
CHAPTER XX. FALL OF THE EMPIRE.
Francis II, 1792-1806. Goethe has described the uneasiness with which, in the days of his childhood, the burghers of his native Frankfort saw the walls of the Roman Hall covered with the portraits of Emperor after Emperor, till space was left for few, at last for one [399] . In A.D. 1792 Francis the Second mounted the throne of Augustus, and the last place was filled. Three years before there had arisen on the western horizon a little cloud, no bigger than a man's hand, and now the heaven was bl
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CHAPTER XXI. CONCLUSION.
CHAPTER XXI. CONCLUSION.
General summary. After the attempts already made to examine separately each of the phases of the Empire, little need be said, in conclusion, upon its nature and results in general. A general character can hardly help being either vague or false. For the aspects which the Empire took are as many and as various as the ages and conditions of society during which it continued to exist. Among the exhausted peoples around the Mediterranean, whose national feeling had died out, whose faith was extinct
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NOTE A. On the Burgundies.
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 ),
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NOTE B. On the Relations to the Empire of the Kingdom of Denmark, and the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein.
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 qu
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NOTE C. On certain Imperial Titles and Ceremonies.
NOTE C. On certain Imperial Titles and Ceremonies.
This subject is a great deal too wide and too intricate to be more than touched upon here. But a few brief statements may have their use; for the practice of the Germanic Emperors varied so greatly from time to time, that the reader becomes hopelessly perplexed without some clue. And if there were space to explain the causes of each change of title, it would be seen that the subject, dry as it may appear, is very far from being a barren or a dull one. I. Titles of Emperors. Charles the Great sty
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NOTE D. Lines contrasting the Past and Present of Rome.
NOTE D. Lines contrasting the Past and Present of Rome.
Dum simulacra mihi, dum numina vana placebant, Militia, populo, mœnibus alta fui: At simul effigies arasque superstitiosas Deiiciens, uni sum famulata Deo, Cesserunt arces, cecidere palatia divûm, Servivit populus, degeneravit eques. Vix scio quæ fuerim, vix Romæ Roma recordor; Vix sinit occasus vel meminisse mei. Gratior hæc iactura mihi successibus illis; Maior sum pauper divite, stante iacens: Plus aquilis vexilla crucis, plus Cæsare Petrus, Plus cinctis ducibus vulgus inerme dedit. Stans dom
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