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.
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 Roman empire. 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.
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 Development under Diocletian and Constantine. 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 Division of the Empire. 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.”
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 Influence of Christianity. 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 πόλις 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]).
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, Barbarian invasions. 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.
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 The Church and the Empire. 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 Growing divergence between East and West.
The popes. 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.
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 Coronation of Charlemagne as emperor of the West. 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.