The most renowned of my predecessors in this chair, in planning that
History of Rome which unhappily remained a fragment, but which gave
to the world in its last finished volume the very perfection of
historical narrative, designed to carry on his work to the coronation
of Charles the Great. The reading and thought of forty years have
ever more and more convinced me of the wisdom of Arnold’s choice. The
year 800 was not, any more than the year 476, the end of the Roman
Empire; it is not, any more than the year 476, a boundary between
“Ancient” and “Modern” History. But it is one of the most marked
turning-points in the history of the Empire and of the world, a
turning-point of immeasureably greater moment than the consulship of
Basiliscus and Armatus. The election of the first Charles changed the
face of the world far more than the deposition of the last Romulus.
Of a History of Rome such as Arnold planned, it was, as the wise
instinct of Arnold saw, the fitting ending. The election of Charles
did, in outward show, restore the Old Rome to her old position. She
again became, if not the dwelling-place, at least the crowning-place,
of Emperors. In truth the Old Rome had never before beheld the
ancient Hebrew rite which, from the fifth century onwards, had become
familiar in the New. For a thousand years longer the titles of her
Empire went on; for seven hundred years longer they could be won
only before the altar of the Vatican basilica. For full five hundred
years longer the Roman Empire of the West was, as such, a living
thing, a thing that influenced the minds and acts of men, a mighty
fact, a still mightier theory. But in the West the Emperor of the
Romans had less and less to do with the Old Rome. To his Imperial
capital he gradually became a stranger, and his capital became a
city of strangers to him. In short, the Roman power in the West
altogether passed away, not only from the Roman city, but from the
artificial Roman nation. When Rome again asserted her right to choose
her sovereign, she chose, she could not fail to choose, a man who
was not Roman even by adoption. She chose the Frankish king. Pippin
had been Patrician; so had Ricimer; so had Odowakar. But the son of
Pippin bore a loftier style. The long-abiding tradition was broken
through; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman Pontiff spoke
the words, and the Roman people echoed them--“Karolo Augusto, a Deo
coronato, magno et pacifico Romanorum Imperatori, vita et victoria.”
The German was at last Augustus. No greater witness could there be
to the moral conquest which each race had won over the other. The
Empire now in form received its greatest territorial enlargement.
Gaul was won back and Germany was added. Wherever the Frankish king
had before ruled as king, he now ruled as Emperor. Terminus advanced
to the Elbe and the Eider; he was ready to advance to the Oder and
the Vistula, or, if need should be, to the world’s end. All unreal,
all nominal, some objector will cry; an advance, not of Rome, but of
Germany, an advance, not of the Roman Augustus, but of the Frankish
king. And truly the Empire of Charles, much more the Empire of the
Henries and Fredericks, was unreal in this, that it was assuredly
a very different thing from the Empire of Trajan or of Diocletian.
It was assuredly not Roman in the sense in which the Empire even
of Theodosius was Roman. But here lies the greatest proof of the
influence of Rome, of her magic power over the minds of men, that a
power which had practically ceased to be Roman, should still be Roman
in men’s eyes, and, as Roman, should command a reverence, a devotion,
a bowing down as it were of the whole soul, which could be called
forth by no other name. A name may have lost its first meaning; but,
as long as men will fight and die for the name, the name is a fact
indeed.
The act of 800, it must always be borne in mind, was in one sense
the repetition, in another sense the undoing, of the act of 476; but
it was in no case the revival of the line of Emperors which came to
an end in 476. Charles, Emperor of the Romans, was not the successor
after a long interval either of Romulus Augustulus or of Julius
Nepos; he was the immediate successor of Constantine the Sixth.
The Emperors had lost all practical authority in Rome earlier in
the century; their power had passed to the Frank. Charles Augustus
received no powers which he had not already exercised as Patrician;
only hitherto the titles of sovereignty had been left to the Emperor
beyond the sea. The name now went with the reality; the titles and
badges of Empire were transferred to the new Emperor reigning at
Rome, at least crowned and anointed at Rome. There was no need to
depose any reigning sovereign. Rome had acknowledged Constantine;
she refused to acknowledge Eirênê; the Empire could not be held by a
woman, least of all by a woman who had deposed and blinded her own
son. There was again an interregnum, such as had followed the death
of Romulus and the death of Aurelian; that interregnum was ended by
the election of Charles. In Western theory no doubt, Charles himself,
and each of his successors, was elected to the sovereignty of the
whole Empire; he was to reign, if he could, over the New Rome as
well as over the Old. In Eastern theory no doubt the election and
coronation were null and void; the Emperor anointed in Saint Sophia
had a right which none could take away to reign over the Old Rome as
well as over the New. Each Emperor in short asserted himself to be
the one true Emperor and the other to be an impostor or a tyrant. The
dispute was for some centuries stirred up afresh from time to time at
some moment favourable for its discussion. To men zealous for Eastern
rights the Western claimant was a mere Ἀλαμανῶν ῥήξ; to men zealous
for Western rights the Eastern claimant was nothing loftier than
“Rex Græciæ.” The most curious piece of discussion on the subject
is the memorable controversy, waged by or invented for Basil of the
East and Lewis of the West, while the grounds of the dispute were
still fresh. It was a moment of pride for Charles the Great himself
when Nikêphoros waived his claim to universal rule, when he admitted
the Frankish king as his equal and bade his ambassadors adore him as
_Imperator_ and βασιλεύς. A conflict of claims like this, in which
each of the two greatest princes of Christendom gave himself out to
be the one head of Christendom, might have been expected to lead to
something more than constant disputes and jealousies; it might have
been expected to lead to constant wars. As a matter of fact, formal
wars between the two Empires were not common; there was little to
gain by them on either side. But rivalry and ill-feeling went on
between the princes of the West and of the East, between the men of
the West and of the East, to the great damage of Christendom in more
than one hour of need.
The truest view of the event of 800 is that the existing Empire was
split asunder, and that the western fragment, that which acknowledged
the Frankish king as its Emperor, was in form enlarged by the
addition of the territories of the Frankish king. The Empire was now
really split asunder; it was split asunder between two rivals, each
of whom held himself to be the one lawful representative of their
common predecessors. This state of things must not be confounded with
the state of things in the fifth century. The Empire was now divided
in quite another way from that in which it had been divided between
the sons of Theodosius. The division between the sons of Theodosius
did not differ in form from the division between the sons of
Constantine or the earlier division between Diocletian and Maximian.
The division between Arcadius and Honorius, and the Emperors who
followed them in the fifth century, was a division by consent; the
administration of a single Empire was divided, as it had often been
before, between two Imperial colleagues. But now it was divided
between two rival potentates, each of whom was in theory bound to
deny the rights of the other. Then the West was often willing to
accept the prince named by the Emperor who reigned over the East;
now assuredly no prince named by the lord of Constantinople, the
“rex Græciæ,” would have been admitted to royal and imperial unction
at Aachen, at Milan, and at Rome. But mark further that the Western
division, the Western Empire, was not only parted from the Eastern,
but was enlarged by the addition of new territories, over a great
part of which no Emperor had ever reigned before. If Charles had kept
his Frankish and Lombard kingdoms distinct from his Roman Empire,
the last would have consisted only of Rome and Ravenna and the lands
about those cities. No one so well deserved the somewhat grotesque
title of his later successors, “zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs,”
as the first Emperor who could have understood his own description
in any Teutonic tongue. Charles, as I said earlier in these
lectures, annexed the lands which Drusus and Germanicus had failed
to annex. But to what did he annex them? Assuredly to something very
different from the Empire of the first Augustus, to something very
different from that western half of the Empire of Augustus which
had been reigned over by Maximian and Valentinian. And the effect
of the annexation was widely different from what it would have been
if it had been made either by Drusus or by Valentinian. The main
difference lies in this, that whatever was annexed to the Empire at
either of the earlier times was forthwith added to the artificial
Roman nation that was growing up, while the inclusion of the whole
dominions of Charles within the Empire, though it still carried with
it an extension of Roman influences, in no way carried with it any
extension of an artificial Roman nation. The new subjects of the
Roman Empire, the inhabitants of Gaul and Germany, assuredly did not
feel that they had become Romans. The election of Charles to the
Empire, the annexation of all his dominions to the Empire, did far
more to make the Empire German than it did to make Germany Roman.
The Roman style of the Empire is still very much more than a name;
its Roman traditions are still very much more than mere words; it
is still by its abiding Roman character that it keeps its influence
over the minds of men. But it is now altogether divorced from any
practical connexion with the Roman city and with the Roman nation. It
was nothing new that Emperors should be made elsewhere than in Rome;
that discovery was made before the first century of the Empire ended.
But the Emperors so made were Romans, Roman in speech, Roman at one
stage by real citizenship, at another by artificial nationality. It
was something new that Rome should be the crowning-place, and only
the crowning-place, of Emperors who were Roman in no sense but that
of being Roman Emperors. The Emperor was _Romanorum Imperator_ to the
last; but who were the _Romani_? Were they the inhabitants of the
Empire as a body? The mass of them would assuredly have disclaimed
the Roman name. Or had the name fallen back on its elder and narrower
senses in which it meant only the people of the Roman city? But in
Rome itself the authority of the Roman Emperor passed away more
thoroughly and more formally than elsewhere. The _Imperator_ and
the _Pontifex Maximus_ had long ceased to be the same, and in Rome
the _Pontifex Maximus_ of the new faith had become the true local
sovereign. For ages the _Imperator_ came to Rome only to become
_Imperator_, and then to go away. At last, when the succession begun
by Charles was drawing near its thousandth year, an _Imperator
electus_ came to Rome, and went away without winning the right to
cast aside his qualifying adjective.
The truest description of the Western Empire during the thousand
years from the first Charles to the last Francis is that which
sounds so like a contradiction, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation.” It remained by the strictest continuity a Roman Empire;
once accept the position of the Western Emperors as against the
Eastern, and no flaw can be found in the whole succession. But the
Roman Empire had become a possession of the German nation; German
electors chose a German king, and the German king had a right to
receive his consecration as Roman Emperor without any further
questions being asked.
“Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum,
Hostibus expulsis, ad nos justissimus ordo
Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni
Nos penes est: quemcumque sibi Germania regem
Præficit, hunc dives submisso vertice Roma
Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.”
An older form of the same idea is found in the phrase which spoke
of the translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks.
Translated to the Franks, the Empire, as concerns the West, assuredly
was; and, on the Western theory, it may in a sense be said to be
translated from the Greeks. A line of Emperors whose native speech
was German succeeded, in Western ideas, a line of Emperors whose
native speech was Greek. Yet the phrase will not stand every test.
The words “Greek” and “Frank,” as used in the formula, do not exactly
answer to one another. A man of the East, if he could have brought
himself to allow that the Empire had been translated at all from his
own side of Hadria, would have said that the formula should rather
speak of a translation of the Empire from the Romans to the Franks.
But no one in the West would have thought of saying that the Empire
was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. We have just heard
the Western Empire called, with national pride, a Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation. But no national pride could have been called
up by speaking of the Eastern Empire as a Holy Roman Empire of the
Greek nation. For “German” was a national name in which the men of
the Western Empire gloried; “Greek” was a name which no man of the
Eastern Empire admitted to belong to him. It is perfectly true that
the two Empires did in the end become, the one a German, the other a
Greek state. But they became German and Greek in different senses and
by different processes. We see at once that the Western Empire became
German through the election of a German king to its crown. It seems
ridiculous to speak, even for the sake of pointing the contrast, of
the Eastern Empire becoming Greek by the election of a Greek king
to its crown. Something like that might happen in the nineteenth
century; it could not possibly happen in the ninth. We may here
bring in the analogy and the contrast of which I spoke at the end
of our last lecture. The nearest analogy to be found in the East to
the Empire of Charles the Frank would have been if Bulgarian Simeon
or Servian Stephen had been crowned Emperor of the Romans in Saint
Sophia and had from that moment reigned over Bulgaria or Servia in
his character of Emperor of the Romans. But the nearest approach to
this was when the Tzar Simeon and the Tzar Stephen took an Imperial
style without entering the walls of the Tzarigrad. That such was the
nearest approach in the East to the event of the year 800 is the most
marked point of difference between the positions of the Teuton in
the West and the Slave in the East. One main reason why it was the
nearest approach lies in the different positions held by the Old and
the New Rome in the two Empires. For another main reason we must look
a little further.
I said a few minutes back that a man in the East might perhaps have
said that the Empire was translated to the Franks from the Romans,
but that no man in the West would ever have said that the Empire
was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. I said also in my
last lecture that one great cause of the different position held by
the Teutons in the West and by the Slaves in the East was that the
Eastern Empire spoke with two tongues, while the Western Empire spoke
with one tongue only. The cause of that difference has to be sought
for in far earlier stages of our subject; it is the continuation of
the difference which I pointed out long ago between the position of
Rome in the East and in the West; the difference that, while in both
alike Rome was a ruler, in the West she was also a teacher, while
in the East she was herself a learner. In the West Latin displaced
the native languages. We may say that no Roman ever learned Celtic
or Iberian. If any Roman ever did, it could have been only for some
immediate practical purpose. But in the East Latin never displaced
Greek; it was not likely to displace, there was no wish that it
should displace, a tongue which every educated Roman learned as a
matter of course. The tendency was rather the other way. At one
stage, as I pointed out in another set of lectures, Greek went far
to displace Latin as a literary tongue even in Rome; the later
Latin writers, like Ammianus and Claudian, mark in truth a Latin
reaction against Greek influences. In the Greek East Greek lived
on and flourished; Latin was simply set up by its side for certain
purposes. The Roman Empire of course, whether in East or West, knew
no official tongue but Latin. Latin therefore remained for ages the
tongue of government and warfare in the Roman East, while Greek was
the language of ordinary speech, of literature, and of religion. That
is to say, the position which belonged to Latin alone in the West
was in the East divided between Latin and Greek. It was impossible
therefore that either of those tongues should make the same way
among other nations which Latin, with its undivided supremacy, made
in the West. In those parts of Eastern Europe where Greek had not
already established itself, the phænomena of Western Europe showed
themselves. In inland Thrace and Mœsia, just as in Gaul and Spain, a
Romance speech did spring up, and in the wilder lands of Illyricum,
the Skipetar, the modern Albanian, still kept his own speech, like
the Basque and the Breton of the West. Thus to the invading Teuton,
the culture of the Empire presented itself only in a single shape,
a Latin shape, while the invading Slave, if he wished to adopt
the culture of the Empire, must have been puzzled by the twofold
shape, Greek and Latin, in which it stood before him. It was an
almost necessary consequence that neither element ever had the same
influence on the Slavonic conquerors of the East which the single
Latin element had on the Teutonic conquerors of the West.
I have said that the Roman Empire of the West became by degrees a
German power, and that the Roman Empire of the East became by degrees
a Greek power. But I have said also that they became so in different
ways. We have seen that the Western Empire became German by the
process of choosing German kings to its Emperors, and by extending
the name of Roman Empire over their German dominions. The Eastern
Empire became Greek in quite another way. There was no transfer of
Roman power to Greek princes, no extension of the Roman name over
Greek lands. Either process might have happened with Slavonic princes
and Slavonic lands; neither could happen with Greek princes or
Greek lands, for the simple reason that Greek princes and lands, as
distinguished from Roman, were not in being. In the Romania of the
East, in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, Greek and Roman meant the
same thing. We have spoken of an artificial Greek nation and of an
artificial Roman nation; in the Eastern Romania they were the same
thing. Of the two tongues of the East-Roman world, the tongue which
was native to the soil proved the stronger. Latin gradually died out
even in its own range; it died out, that is, as a separate speech,
though not till it had poured a vast infusion of Latin words into
the official Greek vocabulary. Greek became the one language of the
Roman Empire of the East; as in the West the Romance languages grew
up, while Latin long abode beside them as an official, a literary,
and a religious speech, so in the East men spoke a more modern form
of the Greek tongue, while its older shape went on as the official,
the literary, and the religious speech. But down to the coming of the
Ottoman, nay down to the movement of our own century which in some
lands has thrown off his yoke, the Roman name lived on. What name in
short should supplant it? The name of _Hellên_ had passed away; it
had become synonymous with _pagan_. The Greek name had never been
used in the Hellenic lands; it was the name by which the Hellênes
were known in the West, exactly as the _Deutschen_ and the _Cymry_
are known among other nations by other names than those by which they
call themselves. In truth the people whom the Latins called _Græci_
called themselves at one stage Ἕλληνες and at another Ῥωμαῖοι. The
Roman name lived on, and well it might; there was nothing to change
it. While the Western part of the Empire was first united to the
Eastern and then separated from it, while it was separated from it to
pass to one who was first Patrician of the Romans and then Emperor
of the Romans, but who would hardly have called himself personally a
Roman, the Eastern lands of Rome were ruled in unbroken succession
by princes following one another in the same Imperial seat, any
one of whom would have been amazed indeed if his right to the Roman
name had been disputed. Prince and people alike clave to that name
and knew no other; and Romans they were, not in the same sense as
the first settlers on the Palatine, not even in the same sense as
the Volscian Cicero and the Spaniard Trajan; but in the sense in
which their forefathers had become Romans by the edict of Antoninus.
They were Romans by the same right as Theodosius when he came as a
second Trajan from Spain, as Jovius himself when he came from the
land that should be Tzernagora. It would have been hard to find a
Roman pedigree for Justinian; but neither would it have been easy to
find one for Aurelian. The Greek--not the pure Hellên of old but the
Greek of the artificial nation formed by Macedonian conquest--had the
same right to the Roman name which the Gaul had; so to be sure had
the Syrian and the Egyptian. But then the Syrian and the Egyptian
could hardly be said to accept the gift; under the guise of national
creeds, creeds that were deemed heretical by the orthodoxy of either
Rome, they clave to an elder national being which was neither Greek
nor Roman, and they fell away from their Roman allegiance to become
not wholly unwilling subjects of the Saracen. The very losses of the
Empire, the cutting off of its Eastern provinces, helped, not indeed
to make the Empire more Roman, but to make Roman and Greek more
thoroughly words of the same meaning within its Eastern provinces.
In the course of the seventh century, the Oriental lands of Syria
and Egypt, the Latin lands of Spain and Africa, were finally torn
away from the Empire. Part of Latin Italy had already passed to the
Lombard; the rest now followed it to form the kernel of the new
Roman Empire of the West. The result of all this was that, from
Sicily to Tauros, the subjects left to the Empire, the Romans of the
East, were almost wholly men of Greek speech and of what we have
called artificial Greek nationality. Within the Eastern Empire the
artificial Greek nation and the artificial Roman nation seemed to
have become the same thing. Every Greek was a Roman; it seemed as
if every Roman was a Greek. It was not wholly so; even within the
Eastern peninsula the Albanian and the Rouman nationalities were
still to show themselves. But to all appearance the Roman lands of
the East were as purely Greek-speaking lands as the Roman lands of
the West were Latin-speaking lands. If the Western Empire became
German, it was by choosing a German king and in some sort adopting
his German subjects. If the Eastern Empire became Greek, it was
because the un-Greek parts were lopped off from it. To this process
the finishing stroke was put by the event of 800. Latin Italy then
parted, even in name, from its allegiance to the Eastern Rome. The
prince who reigned at Constantinople was by the truest political
succession Emperor of the Romans; but the Romans who were left for
him to rule over were well nigh wholly Greek.
In this way therefore, and largely by virtue of the same act, the
Eastern Empire became Greek, while the Western Empire became German.
The one became Greek through one of its old elements obtaining an
exclusive predominance; the other became German by bringing in an
element altogether new. But in becoming severally German and Greek,
neither ceased to be Roman. The Roman spirit might die out; but the
Roman succession went on; the Roman tradition was never broken. In
the East the tie to the Roman past was never snapped; if it passed
away, it was because the Romans of the East seemed almost to forget
that there had ever been any Romans but themselves or any Rome but
their own. In the West, on the other hand, the tie to the Roman
past was never formally snapped any more than in the East; but it
passed away because it was overshadowed and stifled by the un-Roman
institutions that grew up by the side of it. The Augustus of the East
was Emperor of the Romans and nothing more; it was strange that the
diadem of Jovius should be conferred by a Christian unction, but what
the Christian unction of the East did confer was the diadem of Jovius
and none other. The Augustus of the West was also King of Germany,
of Italy, and of Burgundy; Aachen, Milan, Arles, had their share in
making him as well as the Eternal City. Take away the German, the
Italian, and the Burgundian realms, and it might be hard to find on
the map the lands over which Cæsar ruled purely in his character of
Cæsar. Again, in the East, wherever the Emperor reigned at all, he
truly reigned. Did the Empire reach once more from Ister to Orontes,
from Ararat to Ætna? Was it shut up within a corner of Thrace and a
fragment of the coast of Asia? In either case, be the Empire great
or small, be its sovereign the mighty Macedonian or the trembling
Palaiologos, wherever he was sovereign at all, he was βασιλεύς and
αὐτοκράτωρ in the fullest sense. In the West, through the growth of a
new set of ideas and institutions, the Emperor, still keeping all his
titles, all his formal dignity, still worshipped with a ceremonial
only less stately than that of his Eastern brother, gradually sank
into a mere chief of unruly feudatories, into a mere President, it
might seem, of a Confederation in which every member was stronger
than the head. An Eastern Emperor might expect to be slain or blinded
to make room for another; but, while he kept his life and his eyes,
his will was undisputed. A Western Emperor was commonly free from
such extreme changes of fortune. A few only died on the battle-field
or by private murder, and those few at least enjoyed the light of
heaven till their last moments. But while they reigned, while men
called them Lords of the World, Vicars of the Almighty, if they loved
the truth of power rather than its show, they might have been tempted
to envy the smallest of their vassals who within a few roods of
ground did without let or hindrance that which was right in his own
eyes.
* * * * *
I have been drawn on, almost in spite of myself, to paint somewhat
of a picture of the main features which distinguished the Eastern
and Western Empires after they were finally split asunder by the act
of the year 800. But a lecture on the Divided Empire ought to do
something more. It ought not to shrink from the more prosaic task of
sketching the main facts of the story in their order and of speaking
a word of warning against a few notions and forms of speech which
are likely to mislead. But it may not be useless to run with a swift
step through the revolutions of several centuries, and here and
there to throw in a needful caution. And to understand the Divided
Empire, it is first needful to cast a glance at the Empire before
it was divided. We have to hasten as far as the thirteenth century,
a century almost as full of destiny as the fifth, but to the fifth
we must first again look back. We have seen that at its beginning
the formal boundaries of the Empire had hardly given way; Theodosius
had reigned over at least as wide a dominion as Jovian; and his
dominion had passed to his sons reigning as Imperial colleagues at
Constantinople and at Ravenna. In the course of that century the
Vandal passes through Gaul into Spain; he founds a Spanish realm,
and presently forsakes it for a somewhat more lasting dominion in
Africa. The Alan, marching at his side, founds a yet more momentary
dominion in Spain and presently vanishes from the face of the earth.
The third in that great march, the Suevian, founds his Spanish realm
also and keeps it longer than either. At the end of the century he
still holds his north-west corner; but the rest of the peninsula is
in the hands of the West-Goth, whose mighty kingdom stretches over
Gaulish and Spanish ground from the Loire to the pillars of Hercules.
The Burgundian has spread himself from his old seat on the Rhine to
the mouths of the Rhone and the haven of Massalia. But the Roman name
has but lately died away from central and northern Gaul. Cut off from
either centre of Imperial rule, a Roman land, some say, strange as
the title sounds, a Roman kingdom, has lingered on between Seine and
Loire, to yield at last to the advance of a Teutonic people who have
long played a secondary part in the affairs of Gaul, but who are now,
in the short life-time of a single enterprising king, to spring to
a place in the world alongside of the Roman and the Goth. The Frank
has begun his march, eastward, westward, southward, northward. For
a moment he is the heathen lord of Catholic subjects who preferred
the worshipper of Woden to the follower of Arius; he is presently to
change into the one Catholic power of the whole world, the eldest
son of the Church, looked to through all Gaul as the deliverer of
Catholic lands from heretical rulers. And, what concerns us more than
all, while Gaul, Spain, Africa, have passed away from the Empire,
Italy and Rome itself have, in all but name, passed away with them.
One barbarian patrician has yielded to another; Theodoric watches
over Italy as no Cæsar had watched over it for many a year. A few
years more, and his rule stretches, under one title or another, over
the whole western half of the Mediterranean lands of Europe. Yet the
Roman name, the Roman power, lives on in its Eastern half; the one
Emperor of the Romans still holds his throne in the Eastern Rome,
keeping but the shadow of a barren title over his elder capital, but
biding his time to make that shadow a reality at the first favourable
moment.
So far have we followed the memorable fifth century, the century, I
repeat, in whose first years, if at any time, modern history begins,
the century at whose end the existing nations of Europe are still
not in being, but at whose beginning they have taken, so to speak,
the first feeble steps towards coming into being. Let us now glance
at the hardly less memorable sixth century, memorable in another
way from the fifth. The sixth century is not a creative, but rather
a reactionary age, an age which does much to hinder the growth of
new elements, and much to bring back old elements to a place and a
power which they had lost. Of all ages in history the sixth is the
one in which the doctrine that the Roman Empire came to an end at
some time in the fifth sounds most grotesque. Again the Roman armies
march to victory, to more than victory, to conquest, to conquests
more precious than the conquests of Cæsar or of Trajan, to conquests
which gave back Rome herself to her own Augustus. We may again be
met with the argument that we have ourselves used so often; that the
Empire had to win back its lost provinces does indeed prove that it
had lost them; but no one seeks to prove that the provinces had
not been lost; what the world is loth to understand is that there
was still life enough in the Roman power to win them back again. I
say the Roman power; what if I said the Roman commonwealth? It may
startle some to hear that in the sixth century, nay in the seventh,
the most common name for the Empire of Rome is still “respublica.”
No epithet is needed; there is no need to say that the “respublica”
spoken of is “respublica Romana.” It is the Republic which wins back
Italy, Africa, and Southern Spain from their Teutonic masters. It is
the Republic which beats back from the ransomed lands the new attacks
of the Frank and the Alaman. If Gregory the Great stoops to flatter
the murderer Phocas, he warns him also--strange as the words sound
to us--that, while the kings of the nations rule over slaves, the
Emperors of the Republic rule over freemen. We must indeed beware of
bringing in ideas which belong wholly to modern controversy; there is
nothing in the word “respublica,” nothing in the word “commonwealth,”
nothing in the use of those words down to a very recent date, which
shuts out the possibility of a commonwealth having a prince, Emperor
or king, as its chief ruler. The point of the employment of the word
lies in this, that it marks the unbroken being of the Roman state; in
the eyes of the men of the sixth century the power which won back the
African province in their own day was the same power which had first
won it well nigh seven hundred years before. The consul Belisarius
was the true successor of the consul Scipio. Again the Roman power
stretches from the Ocean to the Euphrates; the mighty volume of the
Roman law is unrolled alike for the Syrian and the Spaniard. The
whole Mediterranean coast is again the seaboard of Rome, save where
the West-Goth still keeps his hold on Septimania and Northern Spain,
save where the Empire has itself yielded the coast from Rhone to
the Alps to the Frankish lords of Gaul who have wiped out the power
of the Burgundian and cut short the West-Goth on Gaulish soil. The
common teaching on these matters is so wretched that I believe we all
of us feel--I still feel myself--a certain feeling of strangeness and
incongruity at the mere picture of the revived Empire of the sixth
century. Or if strangeness and incongruity are words too strong, we
at least feel that it is a truth which needs asserting, asserting, it
may be, till times seventy times seven, in the ears of the unlearned
and unbelieving. To look on it, as the men of the time looked on, as
the restoration of a lawful order of things which had been violently
interrupted is one of the hardest of historic lessons.
But there is no popular delusion which does not contain some measure
of truth, however disguised and distorted. No way of speaking can
be more misleading than that which is still employed, even by some
eminent scholars, of speaking of the Empire of Justinian, of the
armies of Justinian, as Greek. It is not only formally wrong, but it
does not in any way express the facts. Even before the reconquest
of the West, the Greek element was far indeed from being the
exclusive, it was hardly the predominant element in the Empire; and
to apply the name to the enlarged Empire, largely inhabited by a
Latin population, which Justinian passed on to his successors is more
misleading still. And in the army above all, made up from all manner
of warlike tribes within and without the Empire, the proportion of
men who were in any sense of Greek birth, even the proportion of men
to whom Greek was their native speech, must have been small indeed.
Yet we have the memorable fact, showing itself in the narrative of
Procopius and in the very beginnings of English literature, that
both on Gothic and on English lips the subjects of the Emperor who
reigned at Constantinople were spoken of as Greeks. No wonder; the
Goths, marching to and fro in the eastern peninsula, must have
heard more Greek spoken than any other tongue; so must the first of
English travellers, be the travels of the singer of the song real or
imaginary. And the name was given almost by a prophetic instinct, as
if the Goth, unfettered by Roman traditions, saw that an Empire of
which Byzantium was the head, if not Greek already, must some day
become such. What if Justinian had seen that fact and had acted on
it? What if he had grasped his position as before all things lord of
the great eastern peninsula of Europe and the great western peninsula
of Asia, lord that is of lands still partly Latin, but far more
widely Greek? What if he had given his whole mind to the defence of
his northern frontier against Slavonic and Hunnish invaders, and had
left the Teutonic and Latin elements in Italy, Spain, and Africa to
settle themselves as they settled themselves in Gaul? It may well be
that such a course would have been the wiser; looking at the matter
with the light of thirteen later centuries, we are strongly tempted
to say that so it would have been. But we must remember that the
light of those thirteen later centuries could give no help to the
minds of men whose destiny had fixed them in the sixth century. As
Justinian or any man of his age must have looked on the world of the
sixth century, an Emperor of the Romans, reigning in the New Rome
but shut out from the Old, must not only have been tempted by every
feeling of ambition, he must have honestly felt it as the highest of
his Imperial duties, to win back the lost lands of Rome, to win back
Rome herself, for the Roman commonwealth of which he found himself
the head.
The great revival of the Empire in the sixth century was but the
first of a long series of revivals which marked the history of the
power whose head was at Constantinople down to its latest stages.
In its long annals, the successors of Cæsar and Trajan, the men
who extend the borders of the Empire over new lands, are far from
wholly lacking; the successors of Valentinian and Belisarius, the
men who win back the lost lands, are never lacking down to the last
generation of the Palaiologoi. But the first and greatest burst
of this power of springing to new life was that which came while
the Empire still was one, when Belisarius, deliverer of Africa and
Sicily, sent the keys of ransomed Rome to her own Emperor. True,
as we have seen, a large part of Italy was lost again before the
century was out; the Spanish province passed away early in the next
century; but the successors of Justinian still ruled at Carthage till
the last years of the seventh century; they still ruled, in name at
least, at Rome till the last year of the eighth. No confusion can be
greater or more misleading than that which looks on the Empire of
Tiberius, Maurice, and Heraclius as something strange and anomalous,
something to be labelled as Eastern, Byzantine, perhaps Greek, to be
called anything in short but its true name of Roman. Never, I would
say to all of you, use the words “Eastern” or “Byzantine,” till
there is something Western to oppose to them. You may distinguish
Nikêphoros as the Eastern Emperor as opposed to the Western Emperor
Charles; but never speak of Maurice or Heraclius as anything but the
sole Roman Emperor that he was. Still in the days of Heraclius the
process begins which was to leave the Empire of Nikêphoros, if not
a Greek power, at least a power fast hastening to become Greek. The
mightiest of Imperial warriors, he who overleaped the fame of Trajan
to renew the fame of Alexander, the deliverer of Rome, the conqueror
of Persia, the man who brought back the holiest of Christian relics
from its heathen bondage, lived to be the man who saw Syria and
Egypt lopped away from his Empire, who saw the Holy City that he had
redeemed pass away into the hands of misbelievers yet more terrible
than those whom he had overthrown. It may be that the Empire gained
even by these fearful losses; it is plain that after its Oriental
and its Latin provinces are lost, it begins to put on somewhat of the
strength of a national power, even though that power had no thought
of its own nationality. It may even be that the great Isaurian
Emperors of the eighth century let the remnant of Latin Italy slip
from their hands almost without an effort, because they saw that a
dominion which was becoming foreign to the great mass of the Empire
was no true source of strength. To reign from Hæmus to Tauros, to
be lord at Trebizond and at Syracuse, to beat back the Bulgarian in
Europe and the Saracen in Asia--it was no mean task, no easy task,
which fell to the lot of the “effete” “Greek of the Lower Empire;”
he might well deem that he had work enough to do in the lands which
naturally looked up to the New Rome, and that he might leave the Old
to set up again for itself, if such was its own good pleasure.
Set up for itself it did, as we have already seen; but it set up
for itself mainly to deck a German king and a German kingdom with
its own Roman memories. Charles, like Theodoric, had called into
being a system which it needed himself to work. He could be at once
German King and Roman Cæsar in deed as well as in name. His immediate
successors found it hard to be either. By the end of the ninth
century the great Frankish dominion was broken in pieces; the crown
of the Western Rome passed, now to a prince of Italy, now to a prince
of Germany, now to a prince of Gaul. Under the second Lewis Italy
came nearer to forming an united and separate realm than she did
at any other moment between Theodoric and Victor Emmanuel. For that
moment there seemed a chance--that is, we, a thousand years after the
time, see that there was a chance--that there might be, not a German,
but an Italian Empire of the Western Rome, to match the Greek Empire
of the Eastern Rome. But it was fated that the traditions of the
Western Rome should neither abide in Italy with Lewis and Berengar
nor pass into Gaul with Charles the Bald. The German King, the Saxon
King, the first of the Ottos, came down to receive the crown of Rome
as a deliverer, to pass it on to a grandson who seemed for a moment
to have the mission, not only of reviving the Roman power, but of
making the elder Rome herself once more the local seat of Imperial
dominion.
Vivo Ottone tertio,
Salus fuit populo.
But the “mirabilia mundi” passed to an early grave; the true work of
his house was, not to restore the local power of Rome, but to fix
that the Western Empire of Rome, the now Holy Roman Empire, should
be, down to the moment of its last shadowy being, a Roman Empire of
the German nation. It is that Empire, the Empire of the Ottos, the
Henries, and the Fredericks, the Empire to whose worthiest chief men
could pay their tribute of renewed Saturnian song;
Princeps terræ principum, Cæsar noster, ave,
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.