A new chapter of the history of the Empire fills the three centuries from 1273 to 1556—from the accession of Rudolph of Habsburg to the abdication of Charles V. Italy was now lost: the Empire had now no peculiar connexion The Empire from the election of Rudolph of Habsburg, 1273. with Rome, and far less touch with the Papacy. A new Germany had risen. The extinction of several royal stocks and the nomination of anti-kings in the course of civil wars had made the monarchy elective, and raised to the side of the emperor a college of electors (see [Electors]), which appears as definitely established soon after 1250. With Italy lost, and Germany thus transmuted, why should the Empire have still continued to exist? In the first place, it continued to exist because the Germans still found a king necessary and because, the German king having been called for three centuries emperor, it seemed necessary that he should still continue to bear the name. In this sense the Empire existed as the presidency of a Germanic confederation, and as something analogous to the modern German empire, with the one great difference that the Hohenzollerns now derive from Prussia a strength which enables them to make their imperial position a reality, while no Luxemburg or Habsburg was able to make his imperial position otherwise than honorary and nominal. In the second place, it continued to exist because the conception of the unity of western Europe still lingered, and was still conceived to need an exponent. In this sense the Empire existed as a presidency, still more honorary and still more nominal, of the nations of western Europe. In both capacities the emperor existed to a great extent because he was a legal necessity—because, in Germany, he was necessary for the investiture of princes with their principalities, and because, in Europe, he was necessary, as the source of all rights, to bestow crowns upon would-be kings, or to act as the head of the great orders of chivalry, or to give patents to notaries. With the history of the Empire regarded as a German confederation we are not here concerned. The reigns of the Habsburg, Luxemburg and Wittelsbach emperors belong to the history of Germany. Yet two of these emperors, Henry VII. and Louis IV., should not pass without notice, the one for his own sake, the other for the sake of his adherents, and both because, by interfering in Italy, and coming into conflict with the Papacy, they brought once more into prominence the European aspect of the Empire.
Henry VII., the contemporary and the hero of Dante, descended into Italy in 1310, partly because he had no power and no occupation in Germany, partly because he was deeply imbued with the sense of his imperial dignity. Coming as a peacemaker and mediator, he was driven by Guelph opposition into a Ghibelline rôle; and he came into conflict with Clement V., the first of the Avignonese popes, who under the pressure of France attempted to enforce upon Henry a recognition of his feudal subjection. Henry asserted his independence: he claimed Rome for his capital, and the lordship of the world for his right; but, just as a struggle seemed impending, he died, in 1313. During the reign of his successor, Louis IV., the struggle came. Louis had been excommunicated by John XXII. in 1324 for acting as emperor before he had received papal recognition. None the less, in 1328, he came to Rome for his coronation. He had gathered round him strange allies; on the one hand, the more advanced Franciscans, apostles of the cause of clerical disendowment, and inimical to a wealthy papacy; on the other hand, jurists like Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, who brought to the cause of Louis the spirit and the doctrines which had already been used in the struggle between Boniface VIII. and Philip IV. of France. Marsilius in particular, in a treatise called the Defensor Pacis, insisted on the majesty of the lay state, and even on its superiority to the Church. Perhaps it was Marsilius, learned as he was in Roman law, and remembering the lex regia by which the Roman people had of old conferred its power on the emperor, who suggested to Louis the policy, which he followed, of receiving the imperial crown by the decree and at the hands of the Roman people. The policy was remarkable: Louis embraced an alliance which Frederick Barbarossa had spurned, and recognized the medieval Romans as the source of imperial power. Not less remarkable was the new attitude of the German electors, who for the first time supported an emperor against the pope, because they now felt menaced in their own electoral rights; and the one permanent result which finally flowed from the struggle was the enunciation and definition of the rights and privileges of the electors in the Golden Bull of 1356 (see [Golden Bull]).
In this struggle with the Papacy the Empire had shown something of its old universal aspect. It had come into connexion with Italy, and into close connexion with Rome: it had enlisted in defence of its rights at once an Italian like Marsilius and an Englishman like Ockham. The same universal aspect appeared once more in the age of the conciliar movement, at the beginning of the 15th century. One of the essential duties of the emperor, as defender of the Church, was to help the assembling and the deliberations of general councils of the Church. This was the duty discharged by Sigismund, when he forced John XXIII. to summon a council at Constance in 1414, and sought, though in vain, to guide its deliberations. The journey which Sigismund undertook in the interests of the council (1415-1417) is particularly noteworthy. He sought to make peace throughout western Europe, acting as international arbitrator—in virtue of his presidency of western Europe—between England and France, between Burgundians and Armagnacs; but he failed in his aim, and when he returned to the council, it was only to witness the defeat of the party of reform which he championed. National The Empire and the rise of the idea of national states. feeling and national antipathies proved too strong for Sigismund’s attempt to revive the medieval empire for the purposes of international arbitration: the same feeling, the same antipathies, made inevitable the failure of the council itself, in which western Europe had sought to meet once more as a single religious commonwealth. Early in the 15th century, therefore, the conception of the unity of western Europe, as a single Empire-Church, was already waning in both its aspects. The unity of the Church Universal was dissolving, and the conception of the nation-church arising (as the separate concordats granted by Martin V. to the different nations prove); while the unity of the Empire was proved a dream, by the powerlessness of the emperor in the face of the struggle of England and France.
Renaissance and Reformation combined to complete the fall which the failure of Sigismund to guide the conciliar movement had already foreshadowed. The Renaissance, revolting against the medievalism of the studium and not Influence of the Reformation. sparing even the sacerdotium of the middle ages, had little respect for the medieval imperium; and, going back to pure Latin and original Greek, it went back beyond even the classical empire to find its ideals and inspirations. But it is the coming of the Reformation, and with it of the nation-church, which finally marks the epoch at which the last vestige of the old conception of the political unity of the world disappears before the nation-state. Externally indeed it seemed, at the time of the Reformation, as if the old Empire had been revived in the person of Charles V., who owned territories as vast as those of Charlemagne. But Charles’s dominions were a dynastic agglomeration, knit together by no vivifying conception; and, though Charles was a champion of the one Catholic Church against the Reformation, he did not in any way seek to revive the power of the medieval empire. Meanwhile the reforming monarchs, while they cast off the Roman Church, cast off with it the Roman empire. Henry VIII. declared himself free, not only of the pope, but of all other foreign power; not only so, but as he sought to take the place of the pope with regard to his own church, so he sought to take the place of the emperor with regard to his kingdom, and spoke of his “imperial” crown, a style which recurs in later Tudor reigns.[11] The conception of one Empire passed out of Europe, or, if it remained, it remained only in an honorary precedence accorded by other sovereigns to the king of Germany, who still entitled himself emperor. In Germany itself the honorary presidency which the emperor enjoyed over the princes came to mean still less than before, when religious differences divided the country, and the principle of cujus regio ejus religio accentuated the local autonomy of the prince. When Charles abdicated in 1556, the change which the accession of Rudolph of Habsburg had already marked was complete: there was no empire except in Germany, and in Germany the Empire was nothing more than a convenient legal conception. The Reformation, by sweeping away the spiritual unity of western Christendom, had swept away any real conception of its political unity, and with that conception it had swept away the Empire; while it had also, by splitting Germany into two religious camps, and making the emperor at the most the head of a religious faction, dissipated the last vestiges of a real Empire in the country which had, since 962, been its peculiar home.
From 1556 to 1806 the Empire means a loose federation of the different princes of Germany, lay and ecclesiastical, under the presidency, elective in theory but hereditary in practice, of the house of Habsburg. It is an empire The Empire as a German confederation. much in the same sense as the modern German empire, with a diet somewhat analogous to the modern Bundesrat, and a cumbrous imperial chamber for purposes of justice, hardly at all analogous to the highly organized system of federal justice which prevails in Germany to-day. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire into this loose federation had already been anticipated by the concessions made to the princes by Frederick II. in 1220 and 1231; but the final organization of Germany on federal lines was only attained in the treaty of Westphalia of 1648. The attempt of Ferdinand II., in the course of the Thirty Years’ War, to assert a practically monarchical authority over the princes of Germany, only led to the regular vindication by the princes of their own monarchical authority. The emperor, who had tried in the 15th century to be the international authority of all Europe, now sank to the position of less than inter-state arbitrator in Germany. That the Empire and the emperor were retained at all, when the princes became so many independent sovereigns, was due partly to a lingering sense of quasi-national sentiment for a magni nominis umbra, partly to the need of some authority which should combine in one whole principalities of very different sizes and strengths, and should protect the weak from the strong, and all from France. But this authority only found its symbol in the emperor. Such real federal authority as there was remained with the diet, a congress of sovereign princes through their accredited representatives; and the emperor’s sole rights, as emperor, were those of granting titles and confirming tolls. The Habsburgs, emperors in each successive generation, never pursued an imperial, but always a dynastic policy; and they were perfectly ready to sacrifice to the aggrandizement of their house the honour of the Empire, as when they ceded Lorraine to France in return for Tuscany (1735).
It needed the cataclysm of the French Revolution finally to overthrow the Empire. Throughout the 18th century it lasted, a thing of long-winded protocols and never-ending lawsuits, “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire.” End of the Holy Roman Empire. But with Napoleon came its destroyer. As far back as the end of the 13th century, French kings had been scheming to annex the title or at any rate absorb the territories of the Empire: at the beginning of the 19th century the annexation of the title by Napoleon seemed very imminent. Posing as the New Charlemagne (“because, like Charlemagne, I unite the crown of France to that of the Lombards, and my Empire marches with the East”), he resolved in 1806, during the dissolution and recomposition of Germany which followed the peace of Lunéville, to oust Francis II. from his title, and to make the Holy Roman Empire part and parcel of the “Napoleonic idea.” He was anticipated, however, by the prompt action of the proud Habsburg, who was equally resolved that no other should wear the crown which he himself was powerless to defend, and accordingly, on the 6th of August 1806, Francis resigned the imperial dignity. So perished the Empire. Out of its ashes sprang the Austrian Empire, for Francis, in 1804, partly to counter Napoleon’s assumption of the title of Emperor of the French, partly to prepare for the impending dissolution of the old Empire, had assumed the title of “Hereditary Emperor of Austria.” And in yet more recent times the German empire may be regarded, in a still more real sense than Austria, as the descendant and representative of the old Empire of the German nation.
What had been the results of the Holy Roman Empire, in the course of its long history, upon Germany and upon Europe? It has been a vexata quaestio among German historians, whether or no the Empire ruined Germany. Some General influence of the Empire. have argued that it diverted the attention of the German kings from their own country to Italy, and that, by bringing them into conflict with the popes, and by thus strengthening the hands of their rebellious baronage with a papal alliance, it prevented the development of a national German monarchy, such as other sovereigns of western Europe were able to found. Others again have emphasized the racial division of Saxon and Frank, of High German and Low German, as the great cause of the failure of Germany to grow into a united national whole, and have sought to ascribe to the influence of the Empire such unity as was achieved; while they have attributed the learning, the trade, the pre-eminence of medieval Germany to the Italian connexion and the prestige which the Empire brought. It is difficult to pronounce on either side; but one feels that the old localism and individualism which characterized the early German, and had never, on German soil, been combined with and counteracted by a large measure of Roman population and Roman civilization, as they were in Gaul and Spain, would in any case have continued to divide and disturb Germany till late in her history, even if the Empire had never come to reside within her borders. Of the larger question of the influence of the Empire on Europe we can here only say that it worked for good. An Empire which represented, as a Holy Empire, the unity of all the faithful as one body in their secular, no less than in their religious life—an Empire which, again, as a Roman Empire, represented with an unbroken continuity the order of Roman administration and law—such an empire could not but make for the betterment of the world. It was not an empire resting on force, a military empire; it was not, as in modern times empires have sometimes been, an autocracy warranted and stamped by the plébiscite of the mob. It was an empire resting neither on the sword nor on the ballot-box, but on two great ideas, taught by the clergy and received by the laity, that all believers in Christ form one body politic, and that the one model and type for the organization of that body is to be found in the past of Rome. It was indeed the weakness of the Empire that its roots were only the thoughts of men; for the lack of material force, from which it always suffered, hindered it from doing work it might well have done—the work, for instance, of international arbitration. Yet, on the other hand, it was the strength and glory of the Empire that it lived, all through the middle ages, an unconquerable idea of the mind of man. Because it was a being of their thought, it stirred men to reflection: the Empire, particularly in its clash with the Papacy, produced a political consciousness and a political speculation reflected for us in the many libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum, and in the pages of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Roman, it perpetuated the greatest monument of Roman thought—that ordered scheme of law, which either became, as in England, the model for the building of a native system, or, as in Germany from the end of the 15th century onwards, was received in its integrity and administered in the courts. Holy, it fortified and consolidated Christian thought, by giving a visible expression to the kingdom of God upon earth; and not only so, but it maintained, however imperfectly, some idea of international obligation, and some conception of a commonwealth of Europe.[12]
The Holy Roman Empire of western Europe had in its own day a contemporary and a rival—that east Roman empire of which we have already spoken. From Arcadius to John Palaeologus, from A.D. 395 to 1453, the Roman empire was continued at Constantinople—not as a theory and an idea, but as a simple and daily reality of politics and administration. In one sense the East Roman Empire was more lineally and really Roman than the West: it was absolutely continuous from ancient times. In another sense the Western Empire was the most Roman; for its capital—in theory at least—was Rome itself, and the Roman Church stood by its side, while Constantinople was Hellenic and even Oriental. Between the two Empires there was fixed an impassable gulf; and they were divided by deep differences of thought and temper, which appeared most particularly in the sphere of religion, and expressed themselves in the cleavage between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. Yet, as when Rome fell, the Catholic Church survived, and ultimately found for itself a new Empire of the West, so, when Constantinople fell, the Orthodox Church continued its life, and found for itself a new Empire of the East—the Empire of Russia. Under Ivan the Great (1462-1505) Moscow became the metropolis of Orthodoxy; Byzantine law influenced his code; and he took for his cognizance the double-headed eagle. Ivan the Terrible, his grandson, finally assumed in 1547 the title of Tsar; and henceforth the Russian emperor is, in theory and very largely in fact, the successor of the old East Roman emperor,[13] the head of the Orthodox Church, with the mission of vengeance on Islam for the fall of Constantinople.
In the 19th century the word “empire” has had a large and important bearing in politics. In France it has been the apanage of the Bonapartes, and has meant a centralized system of government by an efficient Caesar, resting immediately Modern Empires. on the people, and annihilating the powers of the people’s representatives. Under Napoleon I. this conception had a Carolingian colour: under Napoleon III. there is less of Carolingianism, and more of Caesarism—more of a popular dictatorship. While in modern France Empire has meant autocracy instead of representative government, in Germany it has meant a greater national unity and a federal government in the place of a confederation. The modern German empire is at once like and unlike the old Holy Roman Empire. It is unlike the old medieval Empire; for it has no connexion with the Catholic Church, and no relation to Rome. But it is like the Holy Roman Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries—for it represents a federation, but a more real and more unitary federation, of the several states of Germany. The likeness is perhaps more striking than the dissimilarity; and in virtue of this likeness, and because the memory of the old German Kaiserzeit was a driving force in 1870, we may speak of the modern German empire as the successor of the old Holy Roman Empire, if we remember that we are speaking of that Empire in its last two centuries of existence. The modern “Empire of Austria,” on the other hand, does not connote an empire in the sense of a federation, but is a convenient designation for the sum of the territories ruled by a single sovereign under various titles (king of Bohemia, archduke of Austria, &c.) and unified in a single political system.[14] The title of Emperor was assumed, as we have seen, through an historical accident; and, though the Habsburgs of to-day are personally the lineal descendants of the old Holy Roman emperors, they do not in any way possess an empire that represents the old Holy Empire. In England, of recent years, the term “Empire” and the conception of imperialism have become prominent and crucial. To Englishmen to-day, as to Germans before 1870, the term and the conception stand for the greater unity and definitely federal government of a number of separate states. For the German, indeed, Empire has meant, in great measure, the strengthening of a loose federal institution by the addition of a common personal superior: to us it means the turning of a loose union of separate states already under a common personal superior—the King—into a federal commonwealth living under some common federal institutions. But the aim is much the same; it is the integration of a people under a single scheme which shall be consistent with a large measure of political autonomy. We speak of imperial federation; and indeed our modern imperialism is closely allied to federalism. Yet we do well to cling to the term empire rather than federation; for the one term emphasizes the whole and its unity, the other the part and its independence. This imperialism, which is federalism viewed as making for a single whole, is very different from that Bonapartist imperialism, which means autocracy; for its essence is free co-ordination, and the self-government of each co-ordinated part. The British Empire (q.v.) is, in a sense, an aspiration rather than a reality, a thought rather than a fact; but, just for that reason, it is like the old Empire of which we have spoken; and though it be neither Roman nor Holy, yet it has, like its prototype, one law, if not the law of Rome—one faith, if not in matters of religion, at any rate in the field of political and social ideals.
Authorities.—See, in the first place, J. Bryce, Holy Roman Empire (1904 edition); J. von Döllinger, article on “The Empire of Charles the Great” (in Essays on Historical and Literary Subjects, translated by Margaret Warre, 1894); H. Fisher, The Medieval Empire (1898); E. Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, edited by J.B. Bury. It would be impossible to refer to all the books bearing on the article, but one may select (i.) for the period down to 476, Stuart Jones, The Roman Empire (1908), an excellent brief sketch; H. Schiller, Geschichte der römischen Kaiserzeit (1883-1888); O. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt (Band I., Berlin, 1897-1898, Band II., 1901) (a remarkable and stimulating book); and the two excellent articles on “Imperium” and “Princeps” in Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities (1890); (ii.) for the period from 476 down to 888, T. Hodgkin, Italy and her Invaders (1880-1900); F. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter (1886-1894; Eng. trans., London, 1894-1900); E. Lavisse, Histoire de France, II. i. (1901); J.B. Bury, History of the Later Roman Empire (1889); (iii.) for the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, W. von Giesebrecht, Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit (1881-1890); J. Zeller, Histoire d’Allemagne (1872-1891); R.L. Poole, Illustrations of Medieval Thought (1884); S. Riezler, Die literarischen Widersacher der Päpste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers (1874); J. Jannsen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (1885-1894); L. von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1839-1847), and Zur deutschen Geschichte. Vom Religionsfrieden bis zum dreissigjährigen Krieg (1869); and T. Carlyle, Frederick the Great (1872-1873). On the fall of the Roman Empire and the transition to the modern German Empire see Sir J.R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein (1878); H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte (1879-1894); and H. von Sybel, Die Begründung des deutschen Reichs (1890-1894, Eng. trans., The Founding of the Germ. Emp., New York, 1890-1891). For institutional history, see R. Schröder, Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (1894). On the influence of the Holy Roman Empire upon the history of Germany, see J. Ficker, Das deutsche Kaiserreich (1861), and Deutsches Königtum und Kaisertum (1862); and H. von Sybel, Die deutsche Nation und das Kaiserreich (1861).