I drew a distinction in my last lecture between two stages in
the dying out of the Roman power and its traditions. There were
times when the two Empires of East and West, however changed their
character from what it had been in earlier times, however far they
had gone, the one to become Greek, the other to become German, might
still be held to keep the essence of their old Roman being. And there
were later times when the names and traditions of Rome still lingered
on, but when they could not be looked on as more than shadows and
survivals. I wish it of course to be understood that this division
between these times is an arbitrary line of my own drawing. In the
West at least it does not answer to any such marked epoch as the
event of 800, the event of 1453, the event of 1806. I drew the line
at the death of Frederick the Second. We shall, I think, all allow
that, if Frederick the Second represents a state of things which had
become very unlike the state of things under Trajan or even under
Constantine, Francis the Second represents a state of things at
least as unlike the state of things under Frederick. But it does not
follow that, if a line is to be drawn, every one would draw it at the
death of Frederick. It might be said that the Empire had become a
mere German state before his day, that the position of Frederick was
exceptional, that his importance in Italian affairs really belonged
to the King of Sicily and not to the Emperor of the Romans, that the
career even of his grandfather showed that in his time the Roman
claims of the German kings had become thoroughly unreal, and rested
wholly on the strength of their German armies. Another might draw the
line much later; he might say that the true Empire passed away when
an Emperor, a third Frederick most unlike the First and Second, took
his crown for the last time before the altar of old Saint Peter’s.
He might draw it when that Frederick’s son took an Imperial style,
though to be sure with a qualifying adjective, without any show of
Imperial crowning. Or he might draw it when the last _Imperator_,
successor of the first _Imperator electus_, took the crown of the
Empire, not before the altar of Saint Peter at Rome, but before
the altar of Saint Petronius at Bologna. The last is indeed an
epoch-making moment; Charles the Fifth does seem to wind up with
some fitting dignity that Imperial line which began with Charles the
Great. And as the last Emperor, as distinguished from Emperors-elect,
he does truly wind it up. The gap between Charles and Ferdinand is
in truth a wide one. But surely there is a still wider gap between
Frederick the Wonder of the World and princes like William of
Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and even, when looked on from the
Imperial side, as Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf is indeed different
from William and Richard; he is great and famous as German King; but
the line of Emperors knows him not. The fact that the man whom we may
call the restorer of the German kingdom never sought the Imperial
crown seems of itself to point to the reign of the last Emperor
before him, even if that Emperor had not been Frederick the Second,
as the time when the Empire, as a power in itself, and not simply as
a lofty title, a mighty memory, came to an end. Under Charles the
Fifth the Empire seems to spring again to the fulness of its ancient
power; but his abdication and death revealed a truth. When his titles
of Empire passed to Ferdinand and his European position passed to
Philip, it became clear that, however the titles of Empire might make
the position of Charles more brilliant, his might had not really
been the might of the Empire, but the might of Burgundy and Castile.
The line, wherever we draw it, is an arbitrary one, unmarked either
by formal changes or by events of the first greatness. I think we
shall all agree that the Peace of Constanz and the Peace of Westfalia
are the acts of a power which in the earlier time still kept much
of a really Roman position, while in the later time all truly Roman
character had passed from it. The change between the two states of
things is gradual; at what point between the two we choose to draw
the line is largely matter of opinion, one might say rather matter of
taste or of feeling.
In the East our case is much clearer. The event of 1204 is one that
stands out with far greater distinctness than the event of 1250.
No years in the Byzantine annals are more honourable than those in
which they for a while cease to be Byzantine. It is when the Ῥωμαῖοι
again become Byzantine that they again degenerate. If the name of
Roman is to be held as an epithet of honour, at no time did prince
and people better deserve that name than when they were banished from
the New Rome. Adversity brought out vigorous qualities indeed in the
Emperors of Nikaia and their subjects. Yet the fact that they were
Emperors of Nikaia and not of Constantinople puts a wide barrier
between them and their predecessors. The life of the Eastern Empire
had been so thoroughly bound up in the possession of the Eastern Rome
that no change could seem so great as that which gave the Eastern
Rome to a Latin stranger. The Empire of Nikaia proved in the end the
most vigorous and abiding among its fellows; but it had fellows. It
was only one of a crowd of states, Greek and Latin, into which the
Roman Empire of the East was broken in pieces. That the old Empire
was utterly broken in pieces, that its old position had wholly passed
away, is shown by unavoidable changes in language. It is now indeed
hard to avoid using the word _Greek_. To be sure no Orthodox speaker
of the Greek tongue--that is now the definition of the artificial
Greek nation--dreamed of calling himself Ἕλλην; the Greeks, the
Griffons, of Western speakers were still everywhere Ῥωμαῖοι in their
own eyes. Strange indeed is the opposition of names in these days.
When we find Ῥωμαῖοι and Λατῖνοι opposed, we seem to be carried back
to the consulship of Manlius and Decius; when somewhat earlier we
find a strife between Ῥωμαῖοι and Ἀλβανοί, we seem to be carried
back from the pages of Anna to the pages of Dionysios, from the
reign of Alexios to the reign of Tullus. But now that Emperors,
Kings, Despots, Dukes, Grand-Sires, outlying possessions of Italian
commonwealths and Italian families, have become thick on the ground
and still thicker on the waters, we can hardly use any other name
than _Greek_ to distinguish a prince or a people speaking the later
shape of the tongue of Hellas from princes and people speaking the
later shapes of the tongue of Latium. When we step within the range
of theological controversy, our difficulties become greater still. If
we keep to our elder language, the special badge of the Roman will be
that he denies the authority of the Roman Church. The Roman name, as
the formal name of a power, ceased only in 1453, or rather in 1461.
The Roman name, as the name of a people, can hardly be said to have
even now passed away. But from 800 onwards we may fairly use such
distinguishing forms as “Eastern” and “Byzantine”; from 1204 onwards
we can hardly help adopting the Western language of the time, and
speaking of those scattered fragments of the Eastern Empire which
were still held by its own people as “Greek.”
The Empire of Nikaia may seem to have well proved its right to be
looked on as the true successor of the old Empire by the great
exploit of winning back the Imperial city. For eight hundred years we
have had to deal with powers that win back oftener than with powers
that can be strictly said to advance; but to win back Constantinople
in the thirteenth century was to gain a richer prize than even to
win back Rome in the sixth. Without Constantinople an East-Roman
or Greek Empire might seem to have no position in the face of the
world. In possession of Constantinople, it might seem to be brought
back to something like its old place among powers and nations. Still
the Empire of the Palaiologoi was but a feeble representative, a
mere shadow and survival, not only of the Empire of the Macedonians,
but of the Empire of the Komnênoi. For a while it was an advancing
power in Europe; even when its northern frontiers had fallen back
before the Bulgarian, the Servian, the Ottoman himself, it could
still advance in the old Greek lands. It showed the Byzantine
power of revival in its last and strangest form, when the whole of
Peloponnêsos, bating the points held by Venice, was again united
under a Greek prince. In those days it was something for the Roman
Empire to outlive the principality of Achaia, days when the Isle
of Pelops formed the main body of an Empire of which the city of
Constantine was the distant head. If the last Emperor of the West
took his crown at Bologna, the last Emperor of the East took his on
the spot which had been Sparta. But “Emperor of the East” I should
not say. That is one of the many conventional ways of describing the
princes of the Eastern Rome, the use of which may sometimes help to
turn a sentence. But no prince reigning at Constantinople ever called
himself Emperor of the East, and there was another prince who did. In
those days Empires arose and fell with speed in the Eastern world.
Even before 1204, a stranger born on English soil, a Count of Poitou
whom a strange chance made also King of England, had the privilege
of overthrowing an Emperor of the Romans whose Empire was bounded by
the isle of Cyprus. Master of that island, that old battle-field of
Aryan and Semitic man, he had the wisdom to get rid of an useless
possession, and to bestow it as a kingdom on a vassal of his own
who had lately been King of Jerusalem. So, after the great crash of
the Latin conquest, momentary Emperors had reigned in Epeiros and
at Thessalonikê. But there was yet another Imperial claimant whose
power, like that of him of Nikaia, was more than momentary. It should
never be forgotten that the last fragment of Greek-speaking Roman
power that the world saw lingered on, not in Megarian Byzantium
but at Arkadian Trebizond. As the northern shore of the Euxine saw
the last Greek commonwealth, so its southern shore saw the last
Greek Empire. For Greek we must call it. The Komnênos at Trebizond,
admitting the superiority of the Palaiologos at Constantinople, cast
aside his Roman style, and called himself among other titles Emperor
of the East. The West had long before heard of an Emperor of Britain
and of an Emperor of the Spains; but now for the first time in the
East a man was found calling himself βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ, but
βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ of something else and not Ῥωμαίων. But an
Emperor of the East, an Emperor of all the East, πάσης τῆς ἀνατολῆς,
still keeps about him something of the sublimity of vagueness; his
Imperial style has a better sound than the Imperial style of a German
duchy or a negro island; an Emperor of the East does not seem to
be cabined, cribbed, confined, within quite such a paltry space as
an Emperor of Hayti or an Emperor of Austria. Still a prince who
called himself Emperor, but did not dare to call himself Emperor of
the Romans, proclaimed himself by his very style to be, to use the
most civil words, a shadow and a survival. Indeed there is a curious
analogy between the survival at Trebizond and the survival at Vienna.
The Komnênos and the Lotharingian each cast aside his Roman style, to
carry on the business, as our own expounder of things Imperial puts
it, under another name.
But, if we cannot allow the so-called Empires of Cyprus, Epeiros, and
Trebizond, or even the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi,
to be more than shadows and survivals of the old Roman Empire of the
East, they did at least continue it in the sense in which any whole
may be said to be continued in its fragments. We can hardly say that
that Empire was in the same sort continued either in the Turkish
Sultanate of _Roum_ or in the Latin Empire of _Romania_. Truly
they are shadows and survivals of the old Empire; but shadows and
survivals of a different kind from those at Epeiros and Trebizond.
That the Seljuk lords of Nikaia should have been called Sultans
of _Roum_, that the Ottoman lord of Constantinople and his people
should bear the same Roman name among the nations of the further
East, that, before the Ottoman was lord of Constantinople, Bajazet
should have been addressed by Timour as the _Keiser of Roum_, all
these things are strange and startling tributes to the abiding life
of the Roman name, but of little more than the name. The Latin Empire
of Romania is more remarkable. Two or three centuries earlier, if
a band of Western warriors had made their way into Constantinople,
their most obvious legal pretext, if they had sought for a legal
pretext, would have been the establishment of the authority of the
Emperor crowned at Rome over the Eastern as well as the Western
portion of the Empire. To German crusaders such a thought might
possibly have presented itself even in the thirteenth century;
Constantinople might have been claimed for the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation with more show of reason than Prussia or Livonia.
But the thought was not likely to come into the minds of Frenchmen,
of Flemings, of Venetians so lately themselves vassals of the Eastern
Emperor, of Italians other than the most zealous Ghibelins. Earlier
crusaders had consented to become liegemen of Alexios Komnênos, and
if some refused or delayed, it was certainly not out of loyalty to
Henry of Franconia. The men of Pisa, firm stay of Cæsar in the
West, did not scruple to fight for his Eastern rival against the
Latin invaders. That the chief of the conquerors took the title of
Emperor was in itself a confession that Constantinople was a lawful
seat of Empire; but difficulties on either side might hinder the
authors of the new Imperial style from literally translating Ῥωμαίων
βασιλεύς as the description of a Latin potentate. The style became
territorial; Baldwin and Henry shrank, not unreasonably, from calling
themselves Emperors of the Roman people, but they did not shrink from
proclaiming themselves Emperors of a Roman land. A strange position
it was that the Latin Emperors of Romania held during the two
generations of their rule in Constantinople. Almost more strange is
the long cleaving of Western opinion to their supposed rights after
the Greek princes and people again held their old home.
We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1204 as
the time when the true Roman Empire of the East came to an end.
The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only
as fragments; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself,
however cut short. But they are genuine fragments; if not the very
thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East Ῥωμαῖοι had become
the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial,
and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered
fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later,
its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue the
national existence of any people that could be called even artificial
Romans. It continues Roman titles and memories; as so doing, it is
a true survival of the Roman power, but it has passed away from all
Roman national life to become no small element in the national life
of another people. It became the Holy Roman Empire of the German
Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the
Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that
there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The
personal dignity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he
was not like the Franks and the Swabians; Lewis of Bavaria is rather
the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial
deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third; the
crowning of Charles at Rome may be bracketted with his crowning at
Arles, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of
lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and _Pater Patriæ_
and something like _Pontifex_ as well, in that strange gathering
of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at
Innsbrück. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the
Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called
Roman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage
of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break
between 800 and 1806. The difference is the difference between a
thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment
keeps, so far as a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a
thing which lives on, which never loses its personality, which is
never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to
speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes
us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is
a wider difference between the Empire of the first Cæsars and the
Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the
Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the
Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors;
whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible,
they were still Imperial objects, objects that reached far beyond
the bounds of Swabia or of Germany. Among the other princes of the
West they held something more than a mere precedency. The kings of
France, of Britain, of Spain, might deny their supremacy, but they
denied it as a thing which needed to be denied; they might refuse
to acknowledge the Emperor as their lord, but they still felt that
the one Emperor was a being of another class from the kings around
him who might or might not be his men. Their whole position was not
German but European; if not the sovereigns, they were at least the
chiefs, of all Western Christendom. But the Austrian Emperors sank
to be Kings of Germany keeping the titles of Empire, and Kings of
Germany who had much less authority in their own kingdom than other
kings. For in truth the German kingdom had given way beneath the
weight of the Roman Empire. The Imperial tradition had first split
the kingdom in pieces, and had then kept the pieces from altogether
falling apart. The Emperor was set too high in formal dignity to
exercise the ordinary authority of lesser kings. We cannot speak of
the Austrian Emperors as chiefs of Western Christendom, though, in
a character which was not Imperial, they might sometimes become its
champions. The Swabian Emperors were, if not above, at least before,
all other princes; the Austrians can barely maintain their right to
be the first among them. They keep at most a barren precedency, and
even that is not always undisputed. Their policy is not European; it
is hardly German; it seeks only the advancement of their own house
in Germany and out of it. At last they seem altogether to forget
who and what they are. When an Emperor-elect of the Romans, King of
Germany and Jerusalem, could cast aside his Roman and German style,
his Roman and German speech, and could describe himself as “Empereur
d’Allemagne et d’Autriche” in a treaty with one who called himself
“Empereur des Français,” it was time that the ancient titles should
yet be used in one document more, in that which should announce to
the world that, as the titles had now ceased to have a meaning, the
thing which they described had ceased to be.
Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions,
signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he
was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first
Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a-days, use the
words “Emperor” and “Empire” simply to sound fine. When he called
himself “Emperor of the French,” he knew perfectly well what he meant
by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical
misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very
convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and
Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not
hang badly together. The lordship of the world, at the lowest the
supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Rome and Germany
to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which
the rulers of Rome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact; the
style of 1804 did but put that fact into very emphatic words. There
was again an Emperor, a βασιλεύς with ῥῆγες around him; only that
βασιλεύς was no longer Roman, Greek, or German, but, by conquest at
least, French. It might even add a malicious sweetness to the new
Imperial position to reckon Rome and Germany among the subject lands
of France. The first French Empire was not a mere survival of the
Roman Empire in any of its stages; nor was it a mere analogy, as when
we apply the Imperial name to barbarian princes who hold an Imperial
position in their own world. The Empire of the Moguls in many things
repeated the Empire of the Cæsars; but it repeated it unconsciously.
But about the French Empire everything was conscious; every detail of
imposture had a meaning. It was not in any sense a survival, neither
was it a true revival; it was in some sort a mockery, in some sort
an imitation, a spurious branch of the same stock, a parody of the
old Empire set up in a kind of strange rivalry on the ground of the
old Empire. But the old Empire was not made but grew; it took a long
time even to crumble in pieces. The new Empire, made by one man, grew
mightily for a few years, and then broke asunder in a moment. Still
the new Civilis, the man who made the Empire of the Gauls, must be
allowed the doubtful pre-eminence of being, if κακοπράγμων, at least
μεγαλοπράγμων also. Of the grotesque imitation of his work to which
some bowed down not twenty years back, it is needless to speak.
I spoke just now of a document, the treaty of Pressburg, which was
signed by two personages described as the “Emperor of the French” and
the “Emperor of Germany and Austria.” It must never be forgotten that
the title of “Emperor of Austria” dates, not from 1806 but from 1804.
The King of Germany, Emperor-elect of the Romans, while he still held
the highest place on earth, thought good to call himself “Hereditary
Emperor of Austria”--_Erbkaiser von Oesterreich_. What the two titles
meant side by side, no man can tell; but when the Roman and German
titles were dropped, the so-called “Empire of Austria” went on as a
distinct survival of the old Empire, and a very memorable survival
too. For it is the most successful imposture on record. This use
of an Imperial style has caused a power which is in its own nature
modern, upstart, and revolutionary, to be looked on as ancient,
venerable, and conservative. A power of yesterday, which has lived
only by trampling on every historic right and every national memory,
has somehow come to be looked on as the very embodiment of dignified
and conservative antiquity. But the particular way in which the
imposture has succeeded is the most wonderful thing of all. In the
last century among ourselves Smithson thought good to call himself
Percy, and the world believes that he is Percy. But the world
believes that Smithson is Percy; it does not believe that the old
Percies were Smithsons. This last is what is believed in the Austrian
case. Nobody believes that the present King of Hungary and Archduke
of Austria is Emperor of the Romans and King of Germany. But many
believe that real Emperors of the Romans and Kings of Germany were,
what he calls himself, Emperors of Austria. I have seen Frederick
Barbarossa called “Emperor of Austria;” half the world believes
that the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles the Sixth settled an Empire
of Austria on Maria Theresa; I have seen a book of the eighteenth
century in which Joseph the Second was of course spoken of simply
as “the Emperor,” but in which the editor in the nineteenth century
thought it needful to explain that the “Emperor” spoken of was
“Emperor of Austria.” I have found natives of Switzerland on their
ground who believed that the Imperial eagle carved on this or that
ancient building was the badge of Austria and not of Rome. Yes;
never was imposture more successful; never was the truth of history
more thoroughly turned round. It would be somewhat hard to bear if
Francis of Lorraine were thought to be something like Frederick of
Hohenstaufen; but the dead may turn in their graves when Frederick of
Hohenstaufen is thought to be something like Francis of Lorraine.
The truth is that the strange neglect into which the Imperial history
has fallen, the general incapacity or unwillingness to grasp the
leading fact in the whole history of Europe, is largely owing to
the existence and the success of the great Austrian imposture. But
there are two other European powers which also take to themselves the
Imperial style, and each of which is in a certain sense a revival
of the old Empire. Neither the Russian nor the German Empire can be
allowed to be more than a survival of the true Empire; but neither
of them is a sheer imposture like the so-called Empire of Austria.
The German Empire called yesterday into being is a real new birth
of the old German kingdom. Its head, with no claim to represent the
Imperial position of Charles and Otto, is a real representative of
Henry of Saxony and Rudolf of Habsburg. But so many Kings of Germany
had been Emperors that it might have seemed strange to make a King of
Germany and not to call him Emperor. And it would have been hard to
find any lower title for the head of a Confederation which numbers
other kings among its members. Such an one in truth has in some sort
an Imperial position; he too, like Agamemnôn or Æthelstan, is a
βασιλεύς with his ῥῆγες round him. The elder Empire of Russia stands
on quite another ground. So far as it is an Imperial survival, it
is a survival of the Empire of the East. The Tzar of Moscow belongs
to the same class as the Tzars of Bulgaria and Servia. We have seen
how the Slavonic powers which, while assaulting the Empire, bowed
down before the greatness of the Empire, took to themselves its
Imperial titles, and bore outside the Tzarigrad the lofty style
which they would have been better pleased to bear within its walls.
And since the fall of Constantinople, the Russian princes, to say
nothing of some supposed kindred with the last Imperial house, have,
as the most powerful princes of the Eastern Church, stepped into
something like the general position in the world which had belonged
to the Eastern Emperors. With less of geographical connexion, they
certainly represent the Eastern Empire with far more of truth than
any modern Western power can claim to represent the Western Empire.
Only the title of “Emperor of all the Russias” can hardly be accepted
as a truth, as long as two Russian lands, the lands of Halicz and
Vladimir, are tied on to the Austrian duchy on the strength of having
been in far distant ages conquered by a Hungarian king.
In all these powers then which bear or have borne the Imperial
style, Russia, Germany, Austria, France under the first Buonaparte,
we can see a distinct connexion with the Roman power. The thought
of the Roman power in some of its forms and stages was present to
the minds of those by whom the Imperial style was taken. But the
application of that style to so many powers has gone far to take
from it any distinct meaning. I will not say that the words “Empire”
and “Imperial” were always in my younger days used with a conscious
reference to Rome and her memories; but I will say that they were
not used quite as they are now, simply to sound fine. A poet or an
orator might use them in some impassioned strain; men did not in
every day speech talk about “the Empire” as familiarly as they talk
about “the parish.” A little time back, in opposition to this new
insular whim, “Empire” always meant something specially French. Even
the cant phrase of “the Second Empire” to mean the dominion of the
last Buonaparte has, I suspect, done something to overshadow the
great truths of history; we all know that a man who has written many
volumes on a great historical subject took for granted that a “Prince
of the Empire,” above all a Prince of Orange, must mean something in
France. To those whose studies lead them to look on _Imperator_ and
βασιλεύς as words which translate each other, it does seem a pity if
the style of Emperor should come simply to be the English equivalent
for τύραννος.
* * * * *
But leaving smaller questions like these aside, there is indeed one
survival of the ancient Empire before whose mighty history all minds
must bend in awe, a survival well nigh greater and more memorable
than that of which it is the survival. When Gratian, the Christian
_Imperator_, laid aside the badges of the pagan _Pontifex Maximus_,
truly he did not foresee the day when a Christian _Pontifex Maximus_
should claim to place the crown of the _Imperator_ on his brow, and
should even claim the right to take away what he might in some sort
seem to have given. Christian Cæsars might indeed repeat what a pagan
Cæsar had said in unconscious prophecy, that he could better bear
the proclamation of a rival Emperor than the election of a Christian
Bishop in the Imperial city. A day was to come when, if men deemed
that two great lights were set in the Christian firmament, yet it
was Cæsar’s moon that shone with a feebler and reflected light,
a light that might suffice to rule the night of earthly things,
while the sun of the Pontiff shone with a light that came straight
from the Creator’s hand, a greater light to rule the day of man’s
spiritual being. It might still be held that God had two earthly
Vicars, that two swords were placed by His grant, each in the hand
chosen to wield it; but the sword that was wielded by the successor
of Augustus was held to be of baser metal and duller edge than the
sword that was wielded by the successor of Peter. Great and mighty
were those claims, and great and mighty were once the men who put
them forth. Even Ghibelins in heart, historic liegemen of Cæsar,
must stand by and wonder, if they cannot approve, when Cæsar stands
uncrowned, unclad, unheeded, at the Pontiff’s gate, cast down from
the throne of the world by a word sent forth from Rome in Rome’s
new character. At one moment the lord of fifty legions is left,
at the bidding of an unarmed man, without a single sword ready to
leave its scabbard at his call. At another moment he whose word has
wrought such wonders, himself in turn driven from his church and
throne, leaves the world with the protest that it is because he has
loved righteousness and hated iniquity that he dies in exile, and is
comforted in his dying hour by the answer that in exile he cannot
die, seeing God hath given him the nations for his inheritance and
the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. Rome again rules
the world, and again rules it by a moral power; she rules the world
so surely that she can again as it were turn her back upon herself;
the voice of her Pontiff can speak from Avignon as the voice of her
Augustus had once spoken from Ravenna. But we must bear in mind that
it was simply because her Emperors had come to speak from Ravenna
and from a crowd of other spots other than Rome, that a voice that
would have seemed as strange to Constantine as to Trajan had learned
to come forth, it might be from Rome, it might be from Clermont or
from Lyons. Let us look at the case with the calm gaze of history.
History knows nothing of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears
as the centre of spiritual unity, the divinely commissioned head of
the Universal Church. History knows just as little of theories in
which the Roman Bishop appears as Antichrist and the Man of Sin. It
may indeed be the business of history to trace the steps by which
either theory arose in men’s minds; but it is not by the light of
such theories as these that she will look at the facts of her own
science. In the eyes of history the power of the Roman Church grew up
simply because it was the Roman Church and the Church of no meaner
city. The church founded in the mother and head of all cities could
not fail to rank as the mother and head of all churches. Rome, the
local Rome, still had life in her to rule, and if her Emperor forsook
his calling in the local seat of rule, her Bishop was there to take
his place. When the sword of Valentinian was powerless against
the Hun, the voice of Leo was ready to charm with all its wisdom.
Claudius and Vespasian had brought the elder folk of Britain beneath
the earthly yoke of Rome; when their work of a moment had passed
away, it was for Gregory to bring another folk of Britain as more
abiding dwellers within her ghostly fold. Cæsar after Cæsar had given
and taken away the crowns of vassal kings; when Cæsar’s name had
become but a shadow in Western lands, it was for the Roman Pontiff
to bid shear the locks of the last degenerate Merwing, to pour for
the first time the kingly unction on a Frankish head. In all these
cases, in a hundred others, Rome still speaks as the head and teacher
of the nations; she is driven to speak through the voice of her
Bishop simply because her Emperor has forsaken her. How truly, how
wholly, it was the constant absence, the frequent weakness, of the
Emperor out of which the power of the Pontiff grew will be seen by
comparing the story of the Old Rome with the story of the New. At
Constantinople the Emperor was ever present, ever reigning; where he
dwelled and reigned there was no room for any other power to take to
itself the slightest fragment of Imperial rule. Never was any line
of princes more deeply impressed with a religious character than the
Eastern Cæsars; none more constantly made the Faith, the advancement
of the Faith, the humiliation of its enemies, the abiding objects
of their policy; their style was the “Faithful Emperor;” their cry
of battle was “Victory to the Cross.” Nowhere were Church and State
more truly one; but nowhere was the temporal ruler more distinctly
in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme. In
the West the present Patriarch had well nigh taken the place of the
absent Emperor; in the East the present Emperor had well nigh taken
on himself the functions of a Patriarch who in his presence was
but his creature. Like his pagan predecessors, it was he, and not
the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly _Pontifex
Maximus_ as well as _Pater Patriæ_. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh
century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus
crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no
father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the
men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the
court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his
cave, in Nikêphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for
the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with
his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot
all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome.
* * * * *
Mighty and wonderful indeed are those the most brilliant days in the
long annals of the Eastern Empire. Crete, Cyprus, Kilikia, won back
from the misbelievers--the Roman eagle again spreading her wings
over the Euphrates and the Tigris--the cross again planted in what
might seem to be its special home at Antioch and Edessa--all show the
part which the Eastern Rome in her proudest days could play in that
Eternal Question which is in truth the very substance of her whole
history. Seated at the junction of two worlds, called into being by
her founder as the special guardian of Europe and of those lands of
Asia which Europe had made her own, as soon as the strife of West and
East had changed into a strife of Christendom and Islam, the Eastern
Rome was bound to be the foremost in the strife, or she was untrue to
the cause of her own being. The Roman of the East, like the Spaniard
of the West, was of necessity a crusader before crusades were
preached; with both of them religion and patriotism were in truth
the same; men could not deal a blow on behalf of their country which
was not also a blow dealt on behalf of their faith. We have already
glanced at this greatest of all the many instances of Byzantine power
of revival, the great days of the Macedonian Emperors. I call back
your thoughts to them again in order to carry out more fully the
contrast between the East fighting for its very being against the
unbelieving foe, fighting under the leadership of its still present
Imperial head, and the West where the Imperial head fell away from
the common work of all, and left the leadership of the Empire and of
the kingdoms of the West to the spiritual power which stood ready to
do the highest of his duties for him. When the West first marched for
the deliverance of the East, it was not at the bidding of the Cæsar,
but at the bidding of the Pontiff. In earlier days, when the danger
was at their own gates, when new Attilas came, year after year, on
the old errand of havoc, Germany was indeed ready with men to do once
more the work of Aetius and the first Theodoric. The Saxon kings,
father and son, knew how to smite the Magyar with blows more crushing
than the Hun had tholed on the Catalaunian fields. So, ages after,
men were not lacking to smite the Mongol at Lignitz as the Hun and
the Magyar had been smitten before him. But in these wars men were
fighting for their homes and for their lives, for their faith only
as part of their homes and of their lives. When the great cry of
all came up, when to fight for the faith was not to fight for men’s
own homes and lives but for the homes and lives of others, then the
voice that spoke was the voice, not of Rome’s Emperor but of her
Bishop. Some months back I strove to draw for you a picture of the
great day on which that voice was raised, as part of the tale of the
memorable land and city that listened to it. By the Bright Mount of
the Arvernian land, in the home of Sidonius and Gregory, the word
was spoken, at whose bidding men of every calling short of kingship
marched forth to do battle for the sepulchre of Christ. The man to
speak the word should have been God’s Vicar in earthly things; he
who bade men draw the sword should have been he who could bid them
follow him as their loftiest leader; the call to the Holy War should
have been in the West, as in the East it ever was, a decree that went
forth from Cæsar Augustus. But the two swords had clashed in anger,
the two lights shone with hostile brilliancy; the days were passed
when the third Otto and the fifth Gregory might have stood side by
side at such a gathering; he who now drew the sword at the bidding
of Rome’s Emperor could do it only at the risk of the ban of Rome’s
oft-times banished Bishop. Alexios Komnênos, vigorous founder of a
vigorous dynasty, was still not a Heraclius or a Basil; but in the
East the Emperor was still ready in his own place to do his own work;
he had not vanished into some land beyond Mount Hæmus, and left a
Patriarch who acknowledged him not to do the foremost duty of Empire
in his stead.
In later stages of the crusading strife Kings and Emperors of the
Romans did indeed take their share; and the greatest success won by
any crusaders since the first fell to the lot of the Emperor who more
than any other drew down on his head the curses of the spiritual
Rome. Conrad went and came back; the elder Frederick died on his
march; but the second Frederick, alone of Emperors, alone of European
kings, made his way within the long-fought-for walls, and wore a
royal crown in the city of Godfrey and of David. Cursed first for
not going on the crusade, then cursed again for going, cursed most
of all for actually winning the prize of so many struggles, the King
of Salem had to fall back on traditions older than Godfrey, older
than David; he had to fall back on the kingdom of Melchizedek, to
place on his own head the crown which no priestly hand would set
there. That the Bishop of the Western Rome should strive to hinder
the Emperor of the Western Rome from winning the noblest prize that
any Emperor since Heraclius had won, shows more than any other tale
in history what a power had sprung up in the bosom of the Empire
to supplant the Empire itself. A King of France, a King’s son of
England, might go on the now hopeless errand; no Emperor, no German
king, was likely to go and seek the misbelievers in the Eastern lands
with the memory of Frederick before his eyes. A day was to come when
the misbelievers were to come and threaten Emperors and German kings
in their own realm. But before that day came, one Emperor, fighting
for the last fragment of Rome’s Eastern power, was to win by his fall
such glory as no Emperor had for ages won by his triumphs. And, even
in the moment of that glorious fall, he was doomed to show that the
Bishops of the Western Rome could be as deadly in their friendship
to the Cæsars of the East as they could be in their enmity to their
own sovereigns, whether on the throne of Charles or on the throne of
David.
* * * * *
I have already spoken of the event of the year 1204, the taking of
Constantinople by the Latins, as the point at which we must place
the end of the old and unbroken Empire of Rome in the East. High
indeed among the crimes and follies of recorded history must we rank
that exploit of princely freebooters in crusading garb which broke
in pieces the ancient bulwark of Christendom, and left only feeble
fragments which could not fail to be swallowed up one by one by the
advancing Infidel. Men with the cross on their shoulders, with their
swords hallowed to the service of the faith, turned aside from their
calling to carve out realms for themselves at the cost of their
fellow-Christians, and thereby to do the work of the misbeliever
more thoroughly than he could ever have done it for himself. At the
beginning of the thirteenth century the paths of the Eastern and
Western Emperors had parted so far asunder that the rival claims of
the Greek and the German representatives of Rome might well have died
out in oblivion. But the Western Rome had now another representative
whose claims could not die out. If her Emperor no longer cared to
assert his right to the dominion of the world, her Bishop was ever
ready to make the claim. The men of the West were taught to look on
the Christian East as a schismatic land to be won back to the true
obedience; they were taught that it was a worthy work to drive the
pastors of the Eastern Churches from their thrones and to instal in
their place dependents of the encroaching Bishop of the West. Vassals
of Rome in her new character, a spiritual Prusias, a spiritual Herod,
were to teach once more the lesson of bondage to Greece and Asia,
to bid all lands look once more to the elder Rome as the judge that
alone gave forth judgements which none might gainsay. It is indeed
due to the memory of the great Innocent to remember that it was not
at his bidding, but in direct disobedience to his straitest command,
that Frank and Venetian turned their swords against Constantinople
instead of wielding them for Jerusalem. It was not at his word or
with his approval that men whose calling it was to rescue the Temple
of the Lord from misbelieving masters, defiled the church of the
Divine Wisdom as no unbelieving master has ever defiled it. But
Innocent did not scruple to take advantage of the crimes which he had
forbidden, and to enlarge his spiritual dominion by the help of the
plunderers whom he had failed to call off from their work of plunder.
And so the disunited East, a Christendom in which Christians had
ceased to be brethren, stood a ready prey for the Infidel, strong in
his unity, strong in the guidance of the mightiest line of princes to
whom the championship of the Asiatic, now the Mussulman, side of the
Eternal Question had ever fallen.
For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom
had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than
Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West,
more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier
tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short;
but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces
which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it
for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The
Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but
could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a
wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it
there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed
that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the
kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman
was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and
his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion
on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed
the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern
masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier
invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge,
but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European
lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from
the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching;
he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national
being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had
kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the
fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss
of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had
come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far
off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship
over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman
was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk
had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome
itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an
European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of
European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople,
it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of
a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion
on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner
of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour.
The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the
Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And
he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest
wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the
Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys.
The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the
wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered
people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the
deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments
of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by
warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions
of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of
European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey
kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold
their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the
Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a
weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands
of the choicest of their own flesh and blood.
I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear
in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the
anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The
twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among
us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears
about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in
the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern
Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day
that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the Cæsars,
that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most
glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian
East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for
the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go
up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman
who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have
come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and
made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years
only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity--for the captivity of
the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom--has gone on
now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now,
as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest
regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian
faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land.
And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands
love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British
interests,” “imperial interests”--the interest perhaps of the usurer
wrung from the life-blood of his victim--demand that we should do
all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the
bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English
statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that
they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage
of the unbelieving stranger in their own land, the men, the women,
the children, for whom the swords of better men than they had wrought
deliverance. With shame like this done in our own day, we can hardly
turn round and throw stones even at the men of the Fourth Crusade.
They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is
something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in
the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light
of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which
that short glimpse of light has made more black.
[1] May 29, 1885.
Let us remember then, as our story brings the tale of the Eastern
Rome to its end, that it was as it were in the night that has just
passed that the last Christian worship was paid beneath the dome of
Saint Sophia, that it was as it were by the morning light of this
very day that the last Constantine took his post by the gate of
Saint Rômanos, to die, when to die was all that he could do, for his
Empire and for his faith. And yet there is one thought which casts a
shadow over the end of the hero and of his power. The last Christian
worship beneath the dome of Saint Sophia was a worship paid according
to foreign rites, a worship from which the men of the Christian East
shrank as from a defilement. So far had the ghostly power of the
Western Rome spread its shadow over all lands, that the temporal help
of the West could be won only, or rather could be promised only and
never won, by treason to the old religious traditions of the East. It
was a brighter moment in the memory of our fathers, a moment which
has no fellow in our own memory, when three of the great powers of
East and West, representing three of the great races of Europe, three
of the great divisions of Christendom, Orthodox Russia, Catholic
France, Protestant England, fought side by side to break the power of
the barbarian on the great day of Navarino.
From the last European survival of the Eastern Rome--for ever
remember that a more abiding survival still lingered for a while in
Asia--let us turn to another power which we can now look upon as no
more than a survival, the last direct survival of the Western Rome.
From Constantinople let us turn to Vienna, from the Palaiologos to
the Habsburg, from the last Constantine to the first Leopold. For two
hundred and thirty years the flood of Ottoman conquest had swept on;
it was at last to be stemmed. The Turk appeared, as he had appeared
already, before what we must now perchance call the Imperial city
of the West. But he fared in another sort from that in which he had
fared before the Imperial city of the East. He had made his way into
Constantinople; he could not make his way into Vienna. He made his
way into Constantinople over the corpse of a slaughtered Emperor;
from Vienna he was beaten back, but it was not by the arm of an
Emperor that he was beaten back. No king of another land came to the
help of Constantine; a king of another land did come to the help of
Leopold. Constantine fell by the sword of a foe that was too strong
for him; Leopold found a helper who was stronger than his foe, and
devoted the full turnings and searchings of an Imperial mind to find
out with how little sacrifice of Imperial dignity he could pay some
feeble thanks to the man who had saved his throne and life. Vienna
was saved for Christendom; it never shared the fate of Belgrade and
Buda. But it was the sword of the Slave, the sword of the Pole, that
saved it. Look on a hundred years, and the debt is paid in full.
Poland is wiped out from the list of nations, and the house that the
Pole had saved takes its share of the spoils of its deliverer.
* * * * *
I have ended my tale of Rome, my tale of Rome in her many shapes
and stages, in the last feeble survivals of her power, in the more
strange survivals of her mere style. Once more I have to meet you
before the year, as years in this place are reckoned, comes to its
end. As I began by speaking of a world on which Rome had not yet
risen, I must end by speaking of a world from which Rome has passed
away.