EMPIRE

empire, a term now used to denote a state of large size and also (as a rule) of composite character, often, but not necessarily, ruled by an emperor--a state which may be a federation, like the german empire, or a unitary state, like the russian, or even, like the british empire, a loose commonwealth of free states united to a number of subordinate dependencies. for many centuries the writers of the church, basing themselves on the apocalyptic writings, conceived of a cycle of four empires, generally explained--though there was no absolute unanimity with regard to the members of the cycle--as the assyrian, the persian, the macedonian and the roman. but in reality the conception of empire, like the term itself (lat. _imperium_), is of roman origin. the empire of alexander had indeed in some ways anticipated the empire of rome. "in his later years," professor bury writes, "alexander formed the notion of an empire, both european and asiatic, in which the asiatics should not be dominated by the european invaders, but europeans and asiatics alike should be ruled on an equality by a monarch, indifferent to the distinction of greek and barbarian, and looked upon as their own king by persians as well as by macedonians." the contemporary cynic philosophy of cosmopolitanism harmonized with this notion, as stoicism did later with the practice of the roman empire; and alexander, like diocletian and constantine, accustomed a western people to the forms of an oriental court, while, like the earlier caesars, he claimed and received the recognition of his own divinity. but when he died in 323, his empire, which had barely lasted ten years, died with him; and it was divided among diadochi who, if in some other respects (for instance, the hellenization of the east) they were heirs of their master's policy, were destitute of the imperial conception. the work of alexander was rather that of the forerunner than the founder. he prepared the way for the world-empire of rome; he made possible the rise of a universal religion. and these are the two factors which, throughout the middle ages, went together to make the thing which men called empire. the roman empire. at rome the term _imperium_ signified generally, in its earlier use, the sovereignty of the state over the individual, a sovereignty which the romans had disengaged with singular clearness from all other kinds of authority. each of the higher magistrates of the roman people was vested, by a _lex curiata_ (for power was distinctly conceived as resident in, and delegated by, the community), with an _imperium_ both civil and military, which varied in degree with the magnitude of his office. in the later days of the republic such imperium was enjoyed, partly in rome by the resident consuls and praetors, partly in the provinces by the various proconsuls or propraetors. there was thus a certain _morcellement_ of _imperium_, delegated as it was by the people to a number of magistrates: the coming of the empire meant the reintegration of this _imperium_, and its unification, by a gradual process, in the hands of the _princeps_, or emperor. the means by which this process was achieved had already been anticipated under the republic. already in the days of pompey it had been found convenient to grant to an extraordinary officer an _imperium aequum_ or _majus_ over a large area, and that officer thus received powers, within that area, equal to, or greater than, the powers of the provincial governors. this precedent was followed by augustus in the year 27 b.c., when he acquired for himself sole _imperium_ in a certain number of provinces (the imperial provinces), and an _infinitum imperium majus_ in the remaining provinces (which were termed senatorial). as a result, augustus enjoyed an _imperium_ coextensive indeed with the whole of the roman world, but concurrent, in part of that world, with the _imperium_ of the senatorial proconsuls; and the early empire may thus be described as a dyarchy. but the distinction between imperial and senatorial provinces finally disappeared; by the time of constantine the emperor enjoyed sole _imperium_, and an absolute monarchy had been established. we shall not, however, fully understand the significance of the roman empire, unless we realize the importance of its military aspect. all the soldiers of rome had from the first to swear _in verba caesaris augusti_; and thus the whole of the roman army was his army, regiments of which he might indeed lend, but of which he was sole _imperator_ (see under emperor). thus regarded as a permanent commander-in-chief, the emperor enjoyed the privileges, and suffered from the weaknesses, of his position. he had the power of the sword behind him; but he became more and more liable to be deposed, and to be replaced by a new commander, at the will of those who bore the sword in his service. development under diocletian and constantine. division of the empire. the period which is marked by the reigns of diocletian and constantine (a.d. 284-337) marks a great transformation in the character of the empire. the old dyarchy, under which the emperor might still be regarded as an official of the respublica romana, passed into a new monarchy, in which all political power became, as it were, the private property of the monarch. there was now no distinction of provinces; and the old public _aerarium_ became merely a municipal treasury, while the _fiscus_ of the emperor became the exchequer of the empire. the officers of the imperial praetorium, or bodyguard, are now the great officers of state; his private council becomes the public consistory, or supreme court of appeal; and the _comites_ of his court are the administrators of his empire. "all is in him, and all comes from him," as our own year-books say of the medieval king; his household, for instance, is not only a household, but also an administration. on the other hand, this unification seems to be accompanied by a new bifurcation. the exigencies of frontier defence had long been drawing the empire towards the troubled east; and this tendency reached its culmination when a new rome arose by the bosporus, and constantinople became the centre of what seemed a second empire in the east (a.d. 324). particularly after the division of the empire between arcadius and honorius in 395 does this bifurcation appear to be marked; and one naturally speaks of the two empires of the west and the east. yet it cannot be too much emphasized that in reality such language is utterly inexact. the roman empire was, and always continued to be, ideally one and indivisible. there were two emperors, but one empire--two persons, but one power. the point is of great importance for the understanding of the whole of the middle ages: there only is, and can be, one empire, which may indeed, for convenience, be ruled conjointly by two emperors, resident, again for convenience, in two separate capitals. and, as a matter of fact, not only did the residence of an emperor in the east not spell bifurcation, it actually fostered the tendency towards unification. it helped forward the transformation of the empire into an absolute and quasi-asiatic monarchy, under which all its subjects fell into a single level of loyal submission: it helped to give the emperor a gorgeous court, marked by all the ceremony and the servility of the east.[1] the deification of the emperor himself dates from the days of augustus; by the time of constantine it has infected the court and the government. each emperor, again, had from the first enjoyed the sacrosanct position which was attached to the tribunate; but now his palace, his chamber, his charities, his letters, are all "sacred," and one might almost speak in advance of a "holy roman empire." influence of christianity. but there is one factor, the greatest of all, which still remains to be added, before we have counted the sum of the forces that made the world think in terms of empire for centuries to come; and that is the reception of christianity into the roman empire by constantine. that reception added a new sanction to the existence of the empire and the position of the emperor. the empire, already one and indivisible in its aspect of a political society, was welded still more firmly together when it was informed and permeated by a common christianity, and unified by the force of a spiritual bond. the empire was now the church; it was now indeed indestructible, for, if it perished as an empire, it would live as a church. but the church made it certain that it would not perish, even as an empire, for many centuries to come. on the one hand the church thought in terms of empire and taught the millions of its disciples (including the barbarians themselves) to think in the same terms. no other political conception--no conception of a [greek: polis] or of a nation--was any longer possible. when the church gained its hold of the roman world, the empire, as it has been well said, was already "not only a government, but a fashion of conceiving the world": it had stood for three centuries, and no man could think of any other form of political association. moreover, the gospel of st paul--that there is _one_ church, whereof christ is the head, and we are all members--could not but reinforce for the christian the conception of a necessary political unity of all the world under a single head. _una chiesa in uno stato_--such, then, was the theory of the church. but not only did the church perpetuate the conception of empire by making it a part of its own theory of the world: it perpetuated that conception equally by materializing it in its own organization of itself. growing up under the shadow of the empire, the church too became an empire, as the empire had become a church. as it took over something of the old pagan ceremonial, so it took over much of the old secular organization. the pope borrowed his title of _pontifex maximus_ from the emperor: what is far more, he made himself gradually, and in the course of centuries, the caesar and imperator of the church. the offices and the dioceses of the church are parallel to the offices and dioceses of the diocletian empire: the whole spirit of orderly hierarchy and regular organization, which breathes in the roman church, is the heritage of ancient rome. the donation of constantine is a forgery; but it expresses a great truth when it represents constantine as giving to the pope the imperial palace and insignia, and to the clergy the ornaments of the imperial army (see donation of constantine). barbarian invasions. upon this world, informed by these ideas, there finally descended, in the 5th century, the avalanche of barbaric invasion. its impact seemed to split the empire into fragmentary kingdoms; yet it left the universal church intact, and with it the conception of empire. with that conception, indeed, the barbarians had already been for centuries familiar: service in roman armies, and settlement in roman territories, had made the roman empire for them, as much as for the civilized provincial, part of the order of the world. one of the barbarian invaders, odoacer (odovakar), might seem, in 476, to have swept away the empire from the west, when he commanded the abdication of romulus augustulus; and the date 476 has indeed been generally emphasized as marking "the fall of the western empire." other invaders, again, men like the frank clovis or the great ostrogoth theodoric, might seem, in succeeding years, to have completed the work of odoacer, and to have shattered the sorry scheme of the later empire, by remoulding it into national kingdoms. _de facto_, there is some truth in such a view: _de jure_, there is none.[2] all that odoacer did was to abolish one of the two joint rulers of the indivisible empire, and to make the remaining ruler at constantinople sole emperor from the bosporus to the pillars of hercules. he abolished the dual sovereignty which had been inaugurated by diocletian, and returned to the unity of the empire in the days of marcus aurelius. he did not abolish the roman empire in the west: he only abolished its separate ruler, and, leaving the empire itself subsisting, under the sway (nominal, it is true, but none the less acknowledged) of the emperor resident at constantinople, he claimed to act as his vicar, under the name of patrician, in the administration of the italian provinces.[3] as odoacer thus fitted himself into the scheme of empire, so did both clovis and theodoric. they do not claim to be emperors (that was reserved for charlemagne): they claim to be the vicars and lieutenants of the empire. theodoric spoke of himself to zeno as _imperio vestro famulans_; he left justice and administration in roman hands, and maintained two annual consuls in rome. clovis received the title of consul from anastasius; the visigothic kings of spain (like the kings of the savage lombards) styled themselves flavii, and permitted the cities of their eastern coast to send tribute to constantinople. yet it must be admitted that, as a matter of fact, this adhesion of the new barbaric kings to the empire was little more than a form. the empire maintained its ideal unity by treating them as its vicars; but they themselves were forming separate and independent kingdoms within its borders. the italy of the ostrogoths cannot have belonged, in any real sense, to the empire; otherwise justinian would never have needed to attempt its reconquest. and in the 7th and 8th centuries the form of adhesion itself decayed: the emperor was retiring upon the greek world of the east, and the german conquerors, settled within their kingdoms, lost the width of outlook of their old migratory days. the church and the empire. growing divergence between east and west. the popes. it is here that the action of the church becomes of supreme importance. the church had not ceased to believe in the continuous life of the empire. the fathers had taught that when the cycle of empires was finally ended by the disappearance of the empire of rome, the days of antichrist would dawn; and, since antichrist was not yet come, the church believed that the empire still lived, and would continue to live till his coming. meanwhile the eastern emperor, ever since justinian's reconquest of italy, had been able to maintain his hold on the centre of italy; and rome itself, the seat of the head of the church, still ranked as one of the cities under his sway. the imperialist theory of the church found its satisfaction in this connexion of its head with constantinople; and as long as this connexion continued to satisfy the church, there was little prospect of any change. for many years after their invasion of 568, the pressure which the lombards maintained on central italy, from their kingdom in the valley of the po, kept the popes steadily faithful to the emperor of the east and his representative in italy, the exarch of ravenna. but it was not in the nature of things that such fidelity should continue unimpaired. the development of the east and the west could not but proceed along constantly diverging lines, until the point was reached when their connexion must snap. on the one hand, the development of the west set towards the increase of the powers of the bishop of rome until he reached a height at which subjection to the emperor at constantinople became impossible. residence in rome, the old seat of empire, had in itself given him a great prestige; and to this prestige st gregory (pope from 590 to 604) had added in a number of ways. he was one of the fathers of the church, and turned its theology into the channels in which it was to flow for centuries; he had acquired for his church the great spiritual colony of england by the mission of st augustine; he had been the protector of italy against the lombards. as the popes thus became more and more spiritual emperors of the west, they found themselves less and less able to remain the subjects of the lay emperor of the east. meanwhile the emperors of the east were led to interfere in ecclesiastical affairs in a manner which the popes and the western church refused to tolerate. brought into contact with the pure monotheism of mahommedanism, leo the isaurian (718-741) was stimulated into a crusade against image-worship, in order to remove from the christian church the charge of idolatry. the west clung to its images: the popes revolted against his decrees; and the breach rapidly became irreparable. as the hold of the eastern emperor on central italy began to be shaken, the popes may have begun to cherish the hope of becoming their successors and of founding a temporal dominion; and that hope can only have contributed to the final dissolution of their connexion with the eastern empire. coronation of charlemagne as emperor of the west. thus, in the course of the 8th century, the empire, _as represented by the emperors at constantinople_, had begun to fade utterly out of the west. it had been forgotten by lay sovereigns; it was being abandoned by the pope, who had been its chosen apostle. but it did not follow that, because the eastern emperor ceased to be the representative of the empire for the west, the conception of empire itself therefore perished. the popes only abandoned the representative; they did not abandon the conception. if they had abandoned the conception, they would have abandoned the idea that there was an order of the world; they would have committed themselves to a belief in the coming of antichrist. the conception of the world as a single empire-church remained: what had to be discovered was a new representative of one of the two sides of that conception. for a brief time, it would seem, the pope himself cherished the idea of becoming, in his own person, the successor of the ancient caesars in their own old capital. by the aid of the frankish kings, he had been able to stop the lombards from acquiring the succession to the derelict territories of the eastern emperor in italy (from which their last exarch had fled overseas in 752), and he had become the temporal sovereign of those territories. successor to the eastern emperor in central italy, why should he not also become his successor as representative of the empire--all the more, since he was the head of the church, which was coextensive with the empire? some such hope seems to inspire the donation of constantine, a document forged between 754 and 774, in which constantine is represented as having conferred on silvester i. the imperial palace and insignia, and therewith _omnes italiae seu occidentalium regionum provincias loca et civitates_. but the hope, if it ever was cherished, proved to be futile. the popes had not the material force at their command which would have made them adequate to the position. the strong arm of the frankish kings had alone delivered them from the lombards: the same strong arm, they found, was needed to deliver them from the wild nobility of their own city. so they turned to the power which was strong enough to undertake the task which they could not themselves attempt, and they invited the frankish king to become the representative of the imperial conception they cherished.[4] in the year 800 central italy ceased to date its documents by the regnal years of the eastern emperors; for charlemagne was crowned emperor in their stead. the king of the franks was well fitted for the position which he was chosen to fill. he was king of a stock which had been from the first athanasian, and had never been tainted, like most of the germanic tribes, by the adoption of arian tenets. his grandfather, charles martel, had saved europe from the danger of a mahommedan conquest by his victory at poitiers (732); his father, pippin the short, had helped the english missionary boniface to achieve the conversion of germany. the popes themselves had turned to the frankish kings for support again and again in the course of the 8th century. gregory iii., involved in bitter hostilities with the iconoclastic reformers of the east, appealed to charles martel for aid, and even offered the king, it is said, the titles of consul and patrician. zacharias pronounced the deposition of the last of the merovingians, and gave to pippin the title of king (751); while his successor, stephen ii., hard pressed by the lombards, who were eager to replace the eastern emperors in the possession of central italy, not only asked and received the aid of the new king, but also acquired, in virtue of pippin's donation (754), the disputed exarchate itself. thus was laid the foundation of the states of the church; and the grateful pope rewarded the donation by the gift of the title of _patricius romanorum_, which conferred on its recipient the duty and the privilege of protecting the roman church, along with some undefined measure of authority in rome itself.[5] finally, in 773, pope adrian i. had to appeal to charles, the successor of pippin, against the aggressions of the last of the lombard kings; and in 774 charles conquered the lombard kingdom, and himself assumed its iron crown. thus by the end of the 8th century the frankish king stood on the very steps of the imperial throne. he ruled a realm which extended from the pyrenees to the harz, and from hamburg to rome--a realm which might be regarded as in itself a _de facto_ empire. he bore the title of _patricius_, and he had shown that he did not bear it in vain by his vigorous defence of the papacy in 774. here there stood, ready to hand, a natural representative of the conception of empire; and leo iii., finding that he needed the aid of charlemagne to maintain himself against his own romans, finally took the decisive step of crowning him emperor, as he knelt in prayer at st peter's, on christmas day, 800. theory of the carolingian empire. the coronation of charlemagne in 800 marks the coalescence into a single unity of two facts, or rather, more strictly speaking, of a fact and a theory. the fact is german and secular: it is the wide _de facto_ empire, which the frankish sword had conquered, and frankish policy had organized as a single whole. the theory is latin and ecclesiastical: it is a theory of the necessary political unity of the world, and its necessary representation in the person of an emperor--a theory half springing from the unity of the old roman empire, and half derived from the unity of the christian church as conceived in the new testament. if we seek for the force which caused this fact and this theory to coalesce in the carolingian empire, we can only answer--the papacy. the idea of empire was in the church; and the head of the church translated this idea into fact. if, however, we seek to conceive the event of 800 from a political or legal point of view, and to determine the residence of the right of constituting an emperor, we at once drift into the fogs of centuries of controversy. three answers are possible from three points of view; and all have their truth, according to the point of view. from the ecclesiastical point of view, the right resides with the pope. this theory was not promulgated (indeed no theory was promulgated) until the struggles of papacy and empire in the course of the middle ages; but by the time of innocent iii. it is becoming an established doctrine that a _translatio imperii_ took place in 800, whereby the pope transferred the roman empire from the greeks to the germans in the person of the magnificent charles.[6] one can only say that, as a matter of fact, the popes ceased to recognize the eastern emperors, and recognized charles instead, in the year 800; that, again, this recognition alone made charles emperor, as nothing else could have done; but that no question arose, at the time, of any right of the pope to give the empire to charlemagne, for the simple reason that neither of the actors was acting or thinking in a legal spirit. if we now turn to study the point of view of the civil lawyer, animated by such a spirit, and basing himself on the code of justinian, we shall find that an emperor must derive his institution and power from a _lex regia_ passed by the _populus romanus_; and such a view, strictly interpreted, will lead us to the conclusion that the citizens of rome had given the crown to charlemagne in 800, and continued to bestow it on successive emperors afterwards. there is indeed some speech, in the contemporary accounts of charlemagne's coronation, of the presence of "ancients among the romans" and of "the faithful people"; but they are merely present to witness or applaud, and the conception of the roman people as the source of empire is one that was only championed, at a far later date, by antiquarian idealists like arnold of brescia and cola di rienzi. the _faex romuli_, a population of lodging-house keepers, living upon pilgrims to the papal court, could hardly be conceived, except by an ardent imagination, as heir to the _quirites_ of the past. finally, from the point of view of the german tribesman, we must admit that the empire was something which, once received by his king (no matter how), descended in the royal family as an heirloom; or to which (when the kingship became elective) a title was conferred, along with the kingship, by the vote of electors.[7] relations of the carolingian to the eastern empire. but apart from these questions of origin, two difficulties have still to be faced with regard to the nature and position of the carolingian empire. did charlemagne and his successors enter into a new relation with their subjects, in virtue of their coronation? and what was the nature of the relation between the new emperor now established in the west and the old emperor still reigning in the east? it is true that charlemagne exacted a new oath of allegiance from his subjects after his coronation, and again that he had a revision of all the laws of his dominions made in 802. but the revision did not amount to much in bulk: what there was contained little that was roman; and, on the whole, it hardly seems probable that charlemagne entered into any new relation with his subjects. the relation of his empire to the empire in the east is a more difficult and important problem. in 797 the empress irene had deposed and blinded her son, constantine vi., and usurped his throne. now it would seem that charlemagne, whose thoughts were already set on empire, hoped to depose and succeed irene, and thus to become sole representative of the conception of empire, both for the east and for the west. suddenly there came, in 800, his own coronation as emperor, an act apparently unpremeditated at the moment, taking him by surprise, as one gathers from einhard's _vita karoli_, and interrupting his plans. it left him representative of the empire for the west only, confronting another representative in the east. such a position he did not desire: there had been a single empire vested in a single person since 476, and he desired that there should still continue to be a single empire, vested only in his own person. he now sought to achieve this unity by a proposal of marriage to irene. the proposal failed, and he had to content himself with a recognition of his imperial title by the two successors of the empress. this did not, however, mean (at any rate in the issue) that henceforth there were to be two conjoint rulers, amicably ruling as colleagues a single empire, in the manner of arcadius and honorius. the dual government of a single empire established by diocletian had finally vanished in 476; and the unity of the empire was now conceived, as it had been conceived before the days of diocletian, to demand a single representative. henceforth there were two rulers, one at aix-la-chapelle and one at constantinople, each claiming, whatever temporary concessions he might make, to be the sole ruler and representative of the roman empire. on the one hand, the western emperors held that, upon the deposition of constantine vi., charlemagne had succeeded him, after a slight interval, in the government of the whole empire, both in the east and in the west; on the other hand, the eastern emperors, in spite of their grudging recognition of charlemagne at the moment, regarded themselves as the only lawful successors of constantine vi., and viewed the carolings and their later successors as upstarts and usurpers, with no right to their imperial pretensions. henceforth two halves confronted one another, each claiming to be the whole; two finite bodies touched, and each yet claimed to be infinite. character of the carolingian empire. break-up of the carolingian empire. attitude of the papacy. if, as has been suggested, charlemagne did not enter into any fundamentally new relations with his subjects after his coronation, it follows that the results of his coronation, in the sphere of policy and administration, cannot have been considerable. the empire added a new sanction to a policy and administration already developed. charlemagne had already showed himself _episcopus episcoporum_, anxious not only to suppress heresy and supervise the clergy within his borders, but also to extend true christianity without them even before the year when his imperial coronation gave him a new title to supreme governorship in all cases ecclesiastical. he had already organized his empire on a new uniform system of counties, and the _missi dominici_ were already at work to superintend the action of the counts, even before the _renovatio imperii romani_ came to suggest such uniformity and centralization. charlemagne had a new title; but his subjects still obeyed the king of the franks, and lived by frankish law, in the old fashion. in their eyes, and in the eyes of charlemagne's own descendants, the empire was something appendant to the kingship of the franks, which made that kingship unique among others, but did not radically alter its character. true, the kingship might be divided among brothers by the old germanic custom of partition, while the empire must inhere in one person; but that was the one difference, and the one difficulty, which might easily be solved by attaching the name of emperor to the eldest brother. such was the conception of the carolings: such was not, however, the conception of the church. to the popes the empire was a solemn office, to which the kings of the franks might most naturally be called, in view of their power and the traditions of their house, but which by no means remained in their hands as a personal property. by thus seeking to dissociate the empire from any indissoluble connexion with the carolingian house, the popes were able to save it. civil wars raged among the descendants of charlemagne: partitions recurred: the empire was finally dissolved, in the sense that the old realm of charlemagne fell asunder, in 888. but the empire, as an office, did not perish. during the 9th century the popes had insisted, as each emperor died, that the new emperor needed coronation at their hands; and they had thus kept alive the conception of the empire as an office to which they invited, if they did not appoint, each successive emperor. the quarrels of the carolingian house helped them to make good their claim. john viii. was able to select charles the bald in preference to other claimants in 875; and before the end of his pontificate he could write that "he who is to be ordained by us to the empire must be by us first and foremost invited and elected." thus was the unity of the empire preserved, and the conception of a united empire continued, in spite of the eventual dissolution of the realm of charlemagne. when the carolingian emperors disappeared, benedict iv. could crown louis of provence (901) and john x. could invite to the vacant throne an italian potentate like berengar of friuli (915); and even when berengar died in 924, and the empire was vacant of an emperor, they could hold, and hold with truth, that the empire was not dead, but only suspended, until such time as they should invite a new ruler to assume the office. the german kingdom and the empire. the holy roman empire. various causes had contributed to the dissolution of the realm of charlemagne. partitions had split it; feudalism had begun to honeycomb it; incessant wars had destroyed its core, the fighting franks of austrasia. but, above all, the rise of divisions within the realm, which, whether animated by the spirit of nationality or no, were ultimately destined to develop into nations, had silently undermined the structure of pippin and charlemagne. already in 842 the oath of strassburg shows us one caroling king swearing in french and another in german: already in 870 the partition of mersen shows us the kings of france and germany dividing the middle kingdom which lay between the two countries by the linguistic frontier of the meuse and moselle. the year 888 is the birth-year of modern europe. france, germany, italy, stood distinct as three separate units, with burgundy and lorraine as debatable lands, as they were destined to remain for centuries to come. if the conception of empire was still to survive, the pope must ultimately invite the ruler of the strongest of these three units to assume the imperial crown; and this was what happened when in 962 pope john xii. invited otto i. of germany to renew once more the roman empire. as the imperial strength of the whole frankish tribe had given them the empire in 800, so did the national strength of the east frankish kingdom, now resting indeed on a saxon rather than a frankish basis, bring the empire to its ruler in 962. the centre of political gravity had already been shifting to the east of the rhine in the course of the 9th century. while the northmen had carried their arms along the rivers and into the heart of france, louis the german had consolidated his kingdom in a long reign of sixty years (817-876); and at the end of the 9th century two kings of germany had already worn the imperial crown. early in the 10th century the kingship of germany had come to the vigorous saxon dukes (919); and strong in their saxon basis henry i. and his son otto had built a realm which, disunited as it was, was far more compact than that which the carolings of the west ruled from laon. henry i. had thought in his later years of going to rome for the imperial crown: under otto i. the imperial idea becomes manifest. on the one hand, he established a semi-imperial position in the west: by 946 louis iv. d'outremer is his protege, and it is his arms which maintain the young conrad of burgundy on his throne. on the other hand, he showed, by his policy towards the german church, that he was the true heir of the carolingian traditions. he made churchmen his ministers; he established missionary bishoprics on the elbe which should spread christianity among the wends; and his dearest project was a new archbishopric of magdeburg. the one thing needful was that he should, like charlemagne, acquire the throne of italy; and the dissolute condition of that country during the first half of the 10th century made its acquisition not only possible, but almost imperative. begun in 952, the acquisition was completed ten years later; and all the conditions were now present for otto's assumption of the imperial throne. he was crowned by john xii. on candlemas day 962, and thus was begun the holy roman empire, which lasted henceforth with a continuous life until 1806.[8] the empire and feudalism. the same ideas underlay the new empire which had underlain that of charlemagne, strengthened and reinforced by the fact that they had already found a visible expression before in that earlier empire. historically, there was the tradition of the old roman empire, preserved by the church as an idea, and preserved in the church, and its imperial organization, as an actual fact. ecclesiastically, there was the pauline conception of a single christian church, one in subjection to christ as its head, and needing (so men still thought) a secular counterpart of its indivisible unity.[9] to these two sanctions philosophy later added a third; and the doctrine of realism, that the one universal is the true abiding substance--the doctrine which pervades the _de monarchia_ of dante,--reinforced the feeling which demanded that europe should be conceived as a single political unity. but if the holy roman empire of the german nation has the old foundations, it is none the less a thing _sui generis_. externally, it meant far less than the empire of charlemagne; it meant simply a union of germany and northern italy (to which, after 1032, one must also add burgundy, though the addition is in reality nominal) under a single rule. historians of the 19th century, during the years in which the modern german empire was in travail, disputed sorely on the advantages of this union; but whatever its advantages or disadvantages, the fact remains that the union of teutonic germany and latin italy was, from an external point of view, the essential fact in the structure of the medieval empire. internally, again, the empire of the ottos and their successors was new and unprecedented. if latin imperialism had been combined with frankish tribalism in the empire of charlemagne, it now met and blended with feudalism. the holy roman emperor of the middle ages, as frederick i. proudly told the roman envoys, found his senate in the diet of the german baronage, his _equites_ in the ranks of the german knights. feudalism, indeed, came in time to invade the very conception of empire itself. the emperors began to believe that their position of emperor made them feudal overlords of other kings and princes; and they came to be regarded as the topmost summit of the feudal pyramid, from whom kings held their kingdoms, while they themselves held directly of god. in this way the old conception of the world as a single political society entered upon a new phase: but the translation of that conception into feudal terms, which might have made diocletian gasp, only gave it the greater hold on the feudal society of the middle ages. yet in one way the feudal conception was a source of weakness to the empire; for the popes, from the middle of the 12th century onwards, began to claim for themselves a feudal overlordship of the world, and to regard the emperor as the chief of their vassals. the theory of the _translatio_ buttressed their claim to be overlords of the empire; and the emperors found that their very duty to defend the papacy turned them into its vassals--for was not the _advocatus_ who defended the lands of an abbey or church its tenant by feudal service, and might not analogy extend the feudal relation to the imperial advocate himself? the empire and the papacy. the relation of the empire to the papacy is indeed the cardinal fact in its history for the three centuries which followed the coronation of otto i. (962-1250). for a century (962-1076) the relation was one of amity. the pope and the emperor stood as co-ordinate sovereigns, ruling together the commonwealth of europe.[10] if either stood before the other, the emperor stood before the pope. the romans had sworn to otto i. that they would never elect or ordain a pope without his consent; and the rights over papal elections conceived to belong to the office of _patricius_, which they generally held, enabled the emperors, upon occasion, to nominate the pope of their choice. the partnership of otto