Cujus jugum omnibus bonis est suave;
the Empire whose true power and glory was buried in the grave of “Fridericus stupor mundi,” but whose shadow lived on to inspire the heart of Dante, whose traditions lived on to win for the Imperial name one flash of seeming might in the days of Henry of Luxemburg, one flash more dazzling still in the days of that Charles who was the last to take its crown, though not in the old crowning-place of the first—it is this great fact of all European history, the fact whose greatness has been so well proclaimed by a scholar and statesman of whom this University is proud, which has now to divide our thoughts with that other side of the divided Roman power whose annals, for some ages at least as glorious, were wound up by a far more glorious end. As the warrior’s death of the last Constantine is another tale from the self-abasement of the last Francis, so in the brighter days of either power we may claim for the Empire of the Macedonians at least an equal place in the world alongside of the Empire of the Old-Saxons. While the third Otto was dreaming of the coming glories of the Old Rome, the second Basil was filling the New with the trophies of all lands from the Danube to the Orontes, from the Pharos of Messana to the roots of Caucasus. And let us pause for a moment to think once more what might have been. What if the Slayer of the Bulgarians had failed in his sternest struggle, when he and his Empire strove, year after year, locked tight in the death-grapple with rivals worthy of them? What if Samuel of Ochrida, and not Baldwin of Bruges or Mahomet of Brusa, had made his way within the walls of Constantinople, on an errand matching the errand of the first Otto in the West, to make the Imperial city abide for ever a seat of Christian rule, as the head of a Roman Empire of the Slavonic Nation?
One question now comes which might well have come sooner. In the days of the Divided Empire, when Europe and Christendom had two rival heads, how did either bear itself towards the greatest work of all, the special calling of Europe and of Christendom? How did the Cæsars of East and West bear themselves in the Eternal Question of the world’s history? The Persian victories of Heraclius were the last work, the last glories, we might almost say the greatest and noblest glories, of the undivided Empire. The next moment the Eternal Question put on that more fearful and more abiding shape which it still bears in our own day. The two Semitic creeds, the most antagonistic of all creeds simply because they have so much in common, the creed of Rome and the West, the creed of Arabia and the East, stood forth as new badges for each side, badges under which each side drew new life for the eternal struggle. Syria and Egypt, which had little to lose by falling away, fell away, as we have seen, in a moment; Latin Africa, which had much to lose, fought on for sixty years; the Roman strove more manfully for Carthage than the Goth strove for Spain and Septimania. But Africa was lost for ever; the unconquerable lands of northern Spain, the Tzernagora of the West, bred up a line of heroes to win back their own land from the intruder. The Frank, Hammer in hand, crashed the enemy before he crossed the border stream of Loire; and the first king of the new line won a higher glory than that of Frankish king and Roman patrician by ending the short rule of the Mussulman around the temple and the arena of Nîmes and on the tower-crowned hill of Carcassonne. Nor did the New Rome fail in the work; vainly did the last companions of the Prophet strive to win the fulfilment of his promise that the sins of the first believing army that entered the city of the Cæsars should be forgiven. As the Persian had been beaten back in the days of Heraclius, so was the Arab beaten back in the days of his descendants. Again he came; but the strong arm of the Isaurian Leo again saved the New Rome and the whole world of Christendom. The strife of the old days came again in Sicily; again Europe and Africa, again Aryan and Semitic man—Aryan men who spoke the tongue of Greece and Semitic men who ruled where Carthage had twice been—strove, in the cycle of the ages, for the island that was called on to be the meeting-place, the battle-field, of creeds and tongues and nations. Sicily was lost, yet Tauromenion on its height, looking down on the Ebbsfleet of Hellenic Sicily, held out for almost a hundred years; short indeed were the two intervals when the Infidel could boast himself master of the whole of that memorable island. If Tauromenion and Rametta fell at last, the sword of George Maniakês was soon to be sharpening; if Syracuse was won and lost again, the sword of Norman Roger was already sharpening for a deliverance more abiding.
Long and stern indeed was the strife which the Romans of the East had to wage to guard Tauros against the Saracen, while they had to wage a strife no less abiding to guard Hæmus against the Bulgarian. But as long as the Saracen alone had to be striven against, the work was done. Then came the day of reconquest, the days of Nikêphoros Phokas, of John Tzimiskês, of the awful Basil himself. The eleventh century begins as the greatest century of Byzantine history; before its end a new enemy has come; the Asiatic side of the Eternal Question has passed to a new champion; what the Arab failed to do, the Turk has begun to do indeed. The Romania of Asia has ceased to be a Christian land of the Empire; but a Roman land it seems hardly to cease to be, while Nikaia, birthplace of Christian orthodoxy, destined in after times to be the seat of the most vigorous of Eastern survivals of the Roman power, holds the throne of a Mussulman, the throne of a Turk, but a Mussulman and a Turk whose style is Sultan of Rome.
Hurried indeed is the glance that is all that we can take of the Empire thus split asunder between two rivals. The true power and greatness of both come to an end in the great age of creation and destruction, the thirteenth century of our æra. In the West, the Roman Empire and the German kingdom do not indeed come to a formal end, but they lose their ancient place beside the grave of Frederick the Second. In the East, the Empire, as a local power, gains a new lease of national strength, but it loses its œcumenical position when the Latin reigns at Constantinople, when the Ῥωμαῖος, however we translate his name, reigns beyond the Bosporos at Nikaia. Thus far we have had still to deal with the true and ancient substance of the Empire, even if parted asunder into two bodies. We shall have next to speak of powers which kept on its name and its traditions, but which in sober truth we can hardly look on as more than its shadows and survivals.
LECTURE V.
SURVIVALS OF EMPIRE.
I drew a distinction in my last lecture between two stages in the dying out of the Roman power and its traditions. There were times when the two Empires of East and West, however changed their character from what it had been in earlier times, however far they had gone, the one to become Greek, the other to become German, might still be held to keep the essence of their old Roman being. And there were later times when the names and traditions of Rome still lingered on, but when they could not be looked on as more than shadows and survivals. I wish it of course to be understood that this division between these times is an arbitrary line of my own drawing. In the West at least it does not answer to any such marked epoch as the event of 800, the event of 1453, the event of 1806. I drew the line at the death of Frederick the Second. We shall, I think, all allow that, if Frederick the Second represents a state of things which had become very unlike the state of things under Trajan or even under Constantine, Francis the Second represents a state of things at least as unlike the state of things under Frederick. But it does not follow that, if a line is to be drawn, every one would draw it at the death of Frederick. It might be said that the Empire had become a mere German state before his day, that the position of Frederick was exceptional, that his importance in Italian affairs really belonged to the King of Sicily and not to the Emperor of the Romans, that the career even of his grandfather showed that in his time the Roman claims of the German kings had become thoroughly unreal, and rested wholly on the strength of their German armies. Another might draw the line much later; he might say that the true Empire passed away when an Emperor, a third Frederick most unlike the First and Second, took his crown for the last time before the altar of old Saint Peter’s. He might draw it when that Frederick’s son took an Imperial style, though to be sure with a qualifying adjective, without any show of Imperial crowning. Or he might draw it when the last Imperator, successor of the first Imperator electus, took the crown of the Empire, not before the altar of Saint Peter at Rome, but before the altar of Saint Petronius at Bologna. The last is indeed an epoch-making moment; Charles the Fifth does seem to wind up with some fitting dignity that Imperial line which began with Charles the Great. And as the last Emperor, as distinguished from Emperors-elect, he does truly wind it up. The gap between Charles and Ferdinand is in truth a wide one. But surely there is a still wider gap between Frederick the Wonder of the World and princes like William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and even, when looked on from the Imperial side, as Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf is indeed different from William and Richard; he is great and famous as German King; but the line of Emperors knows him not. The fact that the man whom we may call the restorer of the German kingdom never sought the Imperial crown seems of itself to point to the reign of the last Emperor before him, even if that Emperor had not been Frederick the Second, as the time when the Empire, as a power in itself, and not simply as a lofty title, a mighty memory, came to an end. Under Charles the Fifth the Empire seems to spring again to the fulness of its ancient power; but his abdication and death revealed a truth. When his titles of Empire passed to Ferdinand and his European position passed to Philip, it became clear that, however the titles of Empire might make the position of Charles more brilliant, his might had not really been the might of the Empire, but the might of Burgundy and Castile. The line, wherever we draw it, is an arbitrary one, unmarked either by formal changes or by events of the first greatness. I think we shall all agree that the Peace of Constanz and the Peace of Westfalia are the acts of a power which in the earlier time still kept much of a really Roman position, while in the later time all truly Roman character had passed from it. The change between the two states of things is gradual; at what point between the two we choose to draw the line is largely matter of opinion, one might say rather matter of taste or of feeling.