THE ROMAN EMPIRE AND THE GERMAN KINGDOM.
[Sidenote: Union of the Roman Empire with the German kingdom.]
This was the office which Otto the Great assumed in A.D. 962. But it
was not his only office. He was already a German king; and the new
dignity by no means superseded the old. This union in one person of
two characters, a union at first personal, then official, and which
became at last a fusion of the two into something different from
either, is the key to the whole subsequent history of Germany and the
Empire.
[Sidenote: Germany and its monarchy.]
Of the German kingdom little need be said, since it differs in no
essential respect from the other kingdoms of Western Europe as they
stood in the tenth century. The five or six great tribes or
tribe-leagues which composed the German nation had been first brought
together under the sceptre of the Carolingians; and, though still
retaining marks of their independent origin, were prevented from
separating by community of speech and a common pride in the great
Frankish Empire. When the line of Charles the Great ended in A.D. 911,
by the death of Lewis the Child (son of Arnulf), Conrad, duke of the
Franconians, and after him Henry (the Fowler), duke of the Saxons, was
chosen to fill the vacant throne. By his vigorous yet conciliatory
action, his upright character, his courage and good fortune in
repelling the Hungarians, Henry laid deep the foundations of royal
power: under his more famous son it rose into a stable edifice. Otto's
coronation feast at Aachen, where the great nobles of the realm did
him menial service, where Franks, Bavarians, Suabians, Thuringians,
and Lorrainers gathered round the Saxon monarch, is the inauguration
of a true Teutonic realm, which, though it called itself not German
but East Frankish, and claimed to be the lawful representative of the
Carolingian monarchy, had a constitution and a tendency in many
respects different.
[Sidenote: Feudalism.]
There had been under those princes a singular mixture of the old
German organization by tribes or districts (the so-called
Gauverfassung), such as we find in the earliest records, with the
method introduced by Charles of maintaining by means of officials,
some fixed, others moving from place to place, the control of the
central government. In the suspension of that government which
followed his days, there grew up a system whose seeds had been sown as
far back as the time of Clovis, a system whose essence was the
combination of the tenure of land by military service with a peculiar
personal relation between the landlord and his tenant, whereby the one
was bound to render fatherly protection, the other aid and obedience.
This is not the place for tracing the origin of feudality on Roman
soil, nor for shewing how, by a sort of contagion, it spread into
Germany, how it struck firm root in the period of comparative quiet
under Pipin and Charles, how from the hands of the latter it took the
impress which determined its ultimate form, how the weakness of his
successors allowed it to triumph everywhere. Still less would it be
possible here to examine its social and moral influence. Politically
it might be defined as the system which made the owner of a piece of
land, whether large or small, the sovereign of those who dwelt
thereon: an annexation of personal to territorial authority more
familiar to Eastern despotism than to the free races of primitive
Europe. On this principle were founded, and by it are explained,
feudal law and justice, feudal finance, feudal legislation, each
tenant holding towards his lord the position which his own tenants
held towards himself. And it is just because the relation was so
uniform, the principle so comprehensive, the ruling class so firmly
bound to its support, that feudalism has been able to lay upon society
that grasp which the struggles of more than twenty generations have
scarcely shaken off.
[Sidenote: The feudal king.]
[Sidenote: The nobility.]
[Sidenote: The Germanic feudal polity generally.]
Now by the middle of the tenth century, Germany, less fully committed
than France to feudalism's worst feature, the hopeless bondage of the
peasantry, was otherwise thoroughly feudalized. As for that equality
of all the freeborn save the sacred line which we find in the Germany
of Tacitus, there had been substituted a gradation of ranks and a
concentration of power in the hands of a landholding caste, so had the
monarch lost his ancient character as leader and judge of the people,
to become the head of a tyrannical oligarchy. He was titular lord of
the soil, could exact from his vassals service and aid in arms and
money, could dispose of vacant fiefs, could at pleasure declare war or
make peace. But all these rights he exercised far less as sovereign of
the nation than as standing in a peculiar relation to the feudal
tenants, a relation in its origin strictly personal, and whose
prominence obscured the political duties of prince and subject. And
great as these rights might become in the hands of an ambitious and
politic ruler, they were in practice limited by the corresponding
duties he owed to his vassals, and by the difficulty of enforcing them
against a powerful offender. The king was not permitted to retain in
his own hands escheated fiefs, must even grant away those he had held
before coming to the throne; he could not interfere with the
jurisdiction of his tenants in their own lands, nor prevent them from
waging war or forming leagues with each other like independent
princes. Chief among the nobles stood the dukes, who, although their
authority was now delegated, theoretically at least, instead of
independent, territorial instead of personal, retained nevertheless
much of that hold on the exclusive loyalty of their subjects which had
belonged to them as hereditary leaders of the tribe under the ancient
system. They were, with the three Rhenish archbishops, by far the
greatest subjects, often aspiring to the crown, sometimes not unable
to resist its wearer. The constant encroachments which Otto made upon
their privileges, especially through the institution of the Counts
Palatine, destroyed their ascendancy, but not their importance. It was
not till the thirteenth century that they disappeared with the rise of
the second order of nobility. That order, at this period far less
powerful, included the counts, margraves or marquises and landgraves,
originally officers of the crown, now feudal tenants; holding their
lands of the dukes, and maintaining against them the same contest
which they in turn waged with the crown. Below these came the barons
and simple knights, then the diminishing class of freemen, the
increasing one of serfs. The institutions of primitive Germany were
almost all gone; supplanted by a new system, partly the natural result
of the formation of a settled from a half-nomad society, partly
imitated from that which had arisen upon Roman soil, west of the Rhine
and south of the Alps. The army was no longer the Heerban of the whole
nation, which had been wont to follow the king on foot in distant
expeditions, but a cavalry militia of barons and their retainers,
bound to service for a short period, and rendering it unwillingly
where their own interest was not concerned. The frequent popular
assemblies, whereof under the names of the Mallum, the Placitum, the
Mayfield, we hear so much under Clovis and Charles, were now never
summoned, and the laws that had been promulgated there were, if not
abrogated, practically obsolete. No national council existed, save the
Diet in which the higher nobility, lay and clerical, met their
sovereign, sometimes to decide on foreign war, oftener to concur in
the grant of a fief or the proscription of a rebel. Every district had
its own rude local customs administered by the court of the local
lord: other law there was none, for imperial jurisprudence had in
these lately civilized countries not yet filled the place left empty
by the disuse of the barbarian codes.
[Sidenote: The Roman Empire and the German kingdom.]
This condition of things was indeed better than that utter confusion
which had gone before, for a principle of order had begun to group and
bind the tossing atoms; and though the union into which it drove men
was a hard and narrow one, it was something that they should have
learnt to unite themselves at all. Yet nascent feudality was but one
remove from anarchy; and the tendency to isolation and diversity
continued, despite the efforts of the Church and the Carolingian
princes, to be all-powerful in Western Europe. The German kingdom was
already a bond between the German races, and appears strong and united
when we compare it with the France of Hugh Capet, or the England of
Ethelred II; yet its history to the twelfth century is little else
than a record of disorders, revolts, civil wars, of a ceaseless
struggle on the part of the monarch to enforce his feudal rights, a
resistance by his vassals equally obstinate and more frequently
successful. What the issue of the contest might have been if Germany
had been left to take her own course is matter of speculation, though
the example of every European state except England and Norway may
incline the balance in favour of the crown. But the strife had
scarcely begun when a new influence was interposed: the German king
became Roman Emperor. No two systems can be more unlike than those
whose headship became thus vested in one person: the one centralized,
the other local; the one resting on a sublime theory, the other the
rude offspring of anarchy; the one gathering all power into the hands
of an irresponsible monarch, the other limiting his rights and
authorizing resistance to his commands; the one demanding the equality
of all citizens as creatures equal before Heaven, the other bound up
with an aristocracy the proudest, and in its gradations of rank the
most exact, that Europe had ever seen. Characters so repugnant could
not, it might be thought, meet in one person, or if they met must
strive till one swallowed up the other. It was not so. In the fusion
which began from the first, though it was for a time imperceptible,
each of the two characters gave and each lost some of its attributes:
the king became more than German, the Emperor less than Roman, till,
at the end of six centuries, the monarch in whom two 'persons' had
been united, appeared as a third different from either of the former,
and might not inappropriately be entitled 'German Emperor[150].' The
nature and progress of this change will appear in the after history of
Germany, and cannot be described here without in some measure
anticipating subsequent events. A word or two may indicate how the
process of fusion began.
[Sidenote: Results of this union in one person.]
It was natural that the great mass of Otto's subjects, to whom the
imperial title, dimly associated with Rome and the Pope, sounded
grander than the regal, without being known as otherwise different,
should in thought and speech confound them. The sovereign and his
ecclesiastical advisers, with far clearer views of the new office and
of the mutual relation of the two, found it impossible to separate
them in practice, and were glad to merge the lesser in the greater.
For as lord of the world, Otto was Emperor north as well as south of
the Alps. When he issued an edict, he claimed the obedience of his
Teutonic subjects in both capacities; when as Emperor he led the
armies of the gospel against the heathen, it was the standard of their
feudal superior that his armed vassals followed; when he founded
churches and appointed bishops, he acted partly as suzerain of feudal
lands, partly as protector of the faith, charged to guide the Church
in matters temporal. Thus the assumption of the imperial crown brought
to Otto as its first result an apparent increase of domestic
authority; it made his position by its historical associations more
dignified, by its religious more hallowed; it raised him higher above
his vassals and above other sovereigns; it enlarged his prerogative in
ecclesiastical affairs, and by necessary consequence gave to
ecclesiastics a more important place at court and in the
administration of government than they had enjoyed before. Great as
was the power of the bishops and abbots in all the feudal kingdoms, it
stood nowhere so high as in Germany. There the Emperor's double
position, as head both of Church and State, required the two
organizations to be exactly parallel. In the eleventh century a full
half of the land and wealth of the country, and no small part of its
military strength, was in the hands of Churchmen: their influence
predominated in the Diet; the archchancellorship of the Empire,
highest of all offices, belonged of right to the archbishop of Mentz,
as primate of Germany. It was by Otto, who in resuming the attitude
must repeat the policy of Charles, that the greatness of the clergy
was thus advanced. He is commonly said to have wished to weaken the
aristocracy by raising up rivals to them in the hierarchy. It may have
been so, and the measure was at any rate a disastrous one, for the
clergy soon approved themselves not less rebellious than those whom
they were to restrain. But in accusing Otto's judgment, historians
have often forgotten in what position he stood to the Church, and how
it behoved him, according to the doctrine received, to establish in
her an order like in all things to that which he found already
subsisting in the State.
[Sidenote: Changes in title.]
The style which Otto adopted shewed his desire thus to merge the king
in the Emperor[151]. Charles had called himself 'Imperator Cæsar
Carolus rex Francorum invictissimus;' and again, 'Carolus serenissimus
Augustus, Pius, Felix, Romanorum gubernans Imperium, qui et per
misericordiam Dei rex Francorum atque Langobardorum.' Otto and his
first successors, who until their coronation at Rome had used the
titles of 'Rex Francorum,' or 'Rex Francorum Orientalium,' or oftener
still 'Rex' alone, discarded after it all titles save the highest of
'Imperator Augustus;' seeming thereby, though they too had been
crowned at Aachen and Milan, to claim the authority of Cæsar through
all their dominions. Tracing as we are the history of a title, it is
needless to dwell on the significance of the change[152]. Charles, son
of the Ripuarian allies of Probus, had been a Frankish chieftain on
the Rhine; Otto, the Saxon, successor of the Cheruscan Arminius, would
rule his native Elbe with a power borrowed from the Tiber.
[Sidenote: Imperial power feudalized.]
Nevertheless, the imperial element did not in every respect
predominate over the royal. The monarch might desire to make good
against his turbulent barons the boundless prerogative which he
acquired with his new crown, but he lacked the power to do so; and
they, disputing neither the supremacy of that crown nor his right to
wear it, refused with good reason to let their own freedom be
infringed upon by any act of which they had not been the authors. So
far was Otto from embarking on so vain an enterprise, that his rule
was even more direct and more personal than that of Charles had been.
There was no scheme of mechanical government, no claim of absolutism;
there was only the resolve to make the energetic assertion of the
king's feudal rights subserve the further aims of the Emperor. What
Otto demanded he demanded as Emperor, what he received he received as
king; the singular result was that in Germany the imperial office was
itself pervaded and transformed by feudal ideas. Feudality needing, to
make its theory complete, a lord paramount of the world, from whose
grant all ownership in land must be supposed to have emanated, and
finding such a suzerain in the Emperor, constituted him liege lord of
all kings and potentates, keystone of the feudal arch, himself, as it
was expressed, 'holding' the world from God. There were not wanting
Roman institutions to which these notions could attach themselves.
Constantine, imitating the courts of the East, had made the
dignitaries of his household great officials of the State: these were
now reproduced in the cup-bearer, the seneschal, the marshal, the
chamberlain of the Empire, so soon to become its electoral princes.
The holding of land on condition of military service was Roman in its
origin: the divided ownership of feudal law found its analogies in the
Roman tenure of emphyteusis. Thus while Germany was Romanized the
Empire was feudalized, and came to be considered not the antagonist
but the perfection of an aristocratic system. And it was this
adaptation to existing political facts that enabled it afterwards to
assume an international character. Nevertheless, even while they
seemed to blend, there remained between the genius of imperialism (if
one may use a now perverted word) and that of feudalism a deep and
lasting hostility. And so the rule of Otto and his successors was in a
measure adverse to feudal polity, not from knowledge of what Roman
government had been, but from the necessities of their position,
raised as they were to an unapproachable height above their subjects,
surrounded with a halo of sanctity as protectors of the Church. Thus
were they driven to reduce local independence, and assimilate the
various races through their vast territories. It was Otto who made the
Germans, hitherto an aggregate of tribes, a single people, and welding
them into a strong political body taught them to rise through its
collective greatness to the consciousness of national life, never
thenceforth to be extinguished.
[Sidenote: The Commons.]
One expedient against the land-holding oligarchy which Roman
traditions as well as present needs might have suggested, it was
scarcely possible for Otto to use. He could not invoke the friendship
of the Third Estate, for as yet none existed. The Teutonic order of
freemen, which two centuries earlier had formed the bulk of the
population, was now fast disappearing, just as in England all who did
not become thanes were classed as ceorls, and from ceorls sank for the
most part, after the Conquest, into villeins. It was only in the
Alpine valleys and along the shores of the ocean that free democratic
communities maintained themselves. Town-life there was none, till
Henry the Fowler forced his forest-loving people to dwell in
fortresses that might repel the Hungarian invaders; and the burgher
class thus beginning to form was too small to be a power in the state.
But popular freedom, as it expired, bequeathed to the monarch such of
its rights as could be saved from the grasp of the nobles; and the
crown thus became what it has been wherever an aristocracy presses
upon both, the ally, though as yet the tacit ally, of the people.
More, too, than the royal could have done, did the imperial name
invite the sympathy of the commons. For in all, however ignorant of
its history, however unable to comprehend its functions, there yet
lived a feeling that it was in some mysterious way consecrated to
Christian brotherhood and equality, to peace and law, to the restraint
of the strong and the defence of the helpless.
FOOTNOTES:
[150] Although this was of course never his legal title. Till 1806 he
was 'Romanorum Imperator semper Augustus;' 'Römischer Kaiser.'
[151] Pütter, _Dissertationes de Instauratione Imperii Romani_; cf.
Goldast's _Collection of Constitutions_; and the proclamations and
other documents collected in Pertz, _M. G. H._ legg. I.
[152] Pütter (_De Instauratione Imperii Romani_) will have it that
upon this mistake, as he calls it, of Otto's, the whole subsequent
history of the Empire turned; that if Otto had but continued to style
himself 'Francorum Rex,' Germany would have been spared all her
Italian wars.