CHAPTER VIII.
THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM.
Union of the Roman Empire with the German kingdom.
This was the office which Otto the Great assumed in A.D. 962. But it was not his only office. He was already a German king; and the new dignity by no means superseded the old. This union in one person of two characters, a union at first personal, then official, and which became at last a fusion of the two into something different from either, is the key to the whole subsequent history of Germany and the Empire.
Germany and its monarchy.
Of the German kingdom little need be said, since it differs in no essential respect from the other kingdoms of Western Europe as they stood in the tenth century. The five or six great tribes or tribe-leagues which composed the German nation had been first brought together under the sceptre of the Carolingians; and, though still retaining marks of their independent origin, were prevented from separating by community of speech and a common pride in the great Frankish Empire. When the line of Charles the Great ended in A.D. 911, by the death of Lewis the Child (son of Arnulf), Conrad, duke of the Franconians, and after him Henry (the Fowler), duke of the Saxons, was chosen to fill the vacant throne. By his vigorous yet conciliatory action, his upright character, his courage and good fortune in repelling the Hungarians, Henry laid deep the foundations of royal power: under his more famous son it rose into a stable edifice. Otto's coronation feast at Aachen, where the great nobles of the realm did him menial service, where Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, Thuringians, and Lorrainers gathered round the Saxon monarch, is the inauguration of a true Teutonic realm, which, though it called itself not German but East Frankish, and claimed to be the lawful representative of the Carolingian monarchy, had a constitution and a tendency in many respects different.
Feudalism.
There had been under those princes a singular mixture of the old German organization by tribes or districts (the so-called Gauverfassung), such as we find in the earliest records, with the method introduced by Charles of maintaining by means of officials, some fixed, others moving from place to place, the control of the central government. In the suspension of that government which followed his days, there grew up a system whose seeds had been sown as far back as the time of Clovis, a system whose essence was the combination of the tenure of land by military service with a peculiar personal relation between the landlord and his tenant, whereby the one was bound to render fatherly protection, the other aid and obedience. This is not the place for tracing the origin of feudality on Roman soil, nor for shewing how, by a sort of contagion, it spread into Germany, how it struck firm root in the period of comparative quiet under Pipin and Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the impress which determined its ultimate form, how the weakness of his successors allowed it to triumph everywhere. Still less would it be possible here to examine its social and moral influence. Politically it might be defined as the system which made the owner of a piece of land, whether large or small, the sovereign of those who dwelt thereon: an annexation of personal to territorial authority more familiar to Eastern despotism than to the free races of primitive Europe. On this principle were founded, and by it are explained, feudal law and justice, feudal finance, feudal legislation, each tenant holding towards his lord the position which his own tenants held towards himself. And it is just because the relation was so uniform, the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly bound to its support, that feudalism has been able to lay upon society that grasp which the struggles of more than twenty generations have scarcely shaken off.
The feudal king.
Now by the middle of the tenth century, Germany, less fully committed than France to feudalism's worst feature, the hopeless bondage of the peasantry, was otherwise thoroughly feudalized. As for that equality of all the freeborn save the sacred line which we find in the Germany of Tacitus, there had been substituted a gradation of ranks and a concentration of power in the hands of a landholding caste, so had the monarch lost his ancient character as leader and judge of the people, to become the head of a tyrannical oligarchy. He was titular lord of the soil, could exact from his vassals service and aid in arms and money, could dispose of vacant fiefs, could at pleasure declare war or make peace. But all these rights he exercised far less as sovereign of the nation than as standing in a peculiar relation to the feudal tenants, a relation in its origin strictly personal, and whose prominence obscured the political duties of prince and subject. And great as these rights might become in the hands of an ambitious and politic ruler, they were in practice limited by the corresponding duties he owed to his vassals, and by the difficulty of enforcing them against a powerful The nobility. offender. The king was not permitted to retain in his own hands escheated fiefs, must even grant away those he had held before coming to the throne; he could not interfere with the jurisdiction of his tenants in their own lands, nor prevent them from waging war or forming leagues with each other like independent princes. Chief among the nobles stood the dukes, who, although their authority was now delegated, theoretically at least, instead of independent, territorial instead of personal, retained nevertheless much of that hold on the exclusive loyalty of their subjects which had belonged to them as hereditary leaders of the tribe under the ancient system. They were, with the three Rhenish archbishops, by far the greatest subjects, often aspiring to the crown, sometimes not unable to resist its wearer. The constant encroachments which Otto made upon their privileges, especially through the institution of the Counts Palatine, destroyed their ascendancy, but not their importance. It was not till the thirteenth century that they disappeared with the rise of the second order of nobility. That order, at this period far less powerful, included the counts, margraves or marquises and landgraves, originally officers of the crown, now feudal tenants; holding their lands of the dukes, and maintaining against them the same contest which they in turn waged with the crown. Below these came the barons and simple knights, then the diminishing class of freemen, the increasing one of serfs. The Germanic feudal polity generally. The institutions of primitive Germany were almost all gone; supplanted by a new system, partly the natural result of the formation of a settled from a half-nomad society, partly imitated from that which had arisen upon Roman soil, west of the Rhine and south of the Alps. The army was no longer the Heerban of the whole nation, which had been wont to follow the king on foot in distant expeditions, but a cavalry militia of barons and their retainers, bound to service for a short period, and rendering it unwillingly where their own interest was not concerned. The frequent popular assemblies, whereof under the names of the Mallum, the Placitum, the Mayfield, we hear so much under Clovis and Charles, were now never summoned, and the laws that had been promulgated there were, if not abrogated, practically obsolete. No national council existed, save the Diet in which the higher nobility, lay and and clerical, met their sovereign, sometimes to decide on foreign war, oftener to concur in the grant of a fief or the proscription of a rebel. Every district had its own rude local customs administered by the court of the local lord: other law there was none, for imperial jurisprudence had in these lately civilized countries not yet filled the place left empty by the disuse of the barbarian codes.
This condition of things was indeed better than that utter confusion which had gone before, for a principle of order had begun to group and bind the tossing atoms; and though the union into which it drove men was a hard and narrow one, it was something that they should have learnt to unite themselves at all. Yet nascent feudality was but one remove from anarchy; and the tendency to isolation and diversity continued, despite the efforts of the Church and the Carolingian princes, to be all-powerful in Western Europe. The German kingdom was already a bond between the German races, and appears strong and united when we compare it with the France of Hugh Capet, or the England of Ethelred II; yet its history to the twelfth century is little else than a record of disorders, revolts, civil wars, of a ceaseless struggle on the part of the monarch to enforce his feudal rights, a resistance by The Roman Empire and the German kingdom. his vassals equally obstinate and more frequently successful. What the issue of the contest might have been if Germany had been left to take her own course is matter of speculation, though the example of every European state except England and Norway may incline the balance in favour of the crown. But the strife had scarcely begun when a new influence was interposed: the German king became Roman Emperor. No two systems can be more unlike than those whose headship became thus vested in one person: the one centralized, the other local; the one resting on a sublime theory, the other the rude offspring of anarchy; the one gathering all power into the hands of an irresponsible monarch, the other limiting his rights and authorizing resistance to his commands; the one demanding the equality of all citizens as creatures equal before Heaven, the other bound up with an aristocracy the proudest, and in its gradations of rank the most exact, that Europe had ever seen. Characters so repugnant could not, it might be thought, meet in one person, or if they met must strive till one swallowed up the other. It was not so. In the fusion which began from the first, though it was for a time imperceptible, each of the two characters gave and each lost some of its attributes: the king became more than German, the Emperor less than Roman, till, at the end of six centuries, the monarch in whom two 'persons' had been united, appeared as a third different from either of the former, and might not inappropriately be entitled 'German Emperor[150].' The nature and progress of this change will appear in the after history of Germany, and cannot be described here without in some measure anticipating subsequent events. A word or two may indicate how the process of fusion began.