THE RENAISSANCE: CHANGE IN THE CHARACTER OF THE EMPIRE.
[Sidenote: Wenzel, 1378-1400.]
[Sidenote: Rupert, 1400-1410.]
[Sidenote: Sigismund, 1410-1438.]
[Sidenote: Council of Constance.]
In Frederick the Third's reign the Empire sank to its lowest point. It
had shot forth a fitful gleam under Sigismund, who in convoking and
presiding over the council of Constance had revived one of the highest
functions of his predecessors. The precedents of the first great
œcumenical councils, and especially of the council of Nicæa, had
established the principle that it belonged to the Emperor, even more
properly than to the Pope, to convoke ecclesiastical assemblies from
the whole Christian world[352]. The tenet commended itself to the
reforming party in the church, headed by Gerson, the chancellor of
Paris, whose aim it was, while making no changes in matters of faith,
to correct the abuses which had grown up in discipline and government,
and limit the power of the Popes by exalting the authority of general
councils, to whom there was now attributed an immunity from error
superior even to that which resided in the successor of Peter. And
although it was only the sacerdotal body, not the whole Christian
people, who were thus made the exponents of the universal religious
consciousness, the doctrine was nevertheless a foreshadowing of that
fuller freedom which was soon to follow. The existence of the Holy
Empire and the existence of general councils were, as has been already
remarked, necessary parts of one and the same theory[353], and it was
therefore more than a coincidence that the last occasion on which the
whole of Latin Christendom met to deliberate and act as a single
commonwealth[354] was also the last on which that commonwealth's
lawful temporal head appeared in the exercise of his international
functions. Never afterwards was he, in the eyes of Europe, anything
more than a German monarch.
[Sidenote: Weakness of Germany as compared with the other states of
Europe.]
[Sidenote: Albert II. 1438-1440. Frederick III. 1440-1493.]
It might seem doubtful whether he would long remain a monarch at all.
When in A.D. 1493 the calamitous reign of Frederick the Third ended,
it was impossible for the princes to see with unconcern the condition
into which their selfishness and turbulence had brought the Empire.
The time was indeed critical. Hitherto the Germans had been protected
rather by the weakness of their enemies than by their own strength.
From France there had been little to fear while the English menaced
her on one side and the Burgundian dukes on the other: from England
still less while she was torn by the strife of York and Lancaster. But
now throughout Western Europe the power of the feudal oligarchies was
broken; and its chief countries were being, by the establishment of
fixed rules of succession and the absorption of the smaller into the
larger principalities, rapidly built up into compact and aggressive
military monarchies. Thus Spain became a great state by the union of
Castile and Aragon, and the conquest of the Moors of Granada. Thus in
England there arose the popular despotism of the Tudors. Thus France,
enlarged and consolidated under Lewis the Eleventh and his successors,
began to acquire that predominant influence on the politics of Europe
which her commanding geographical position, the martial spirit of her
people, and, it must be added, the unscrupulous ambition of her
rulers, have secured to her in every succeeding century. Meantime
there had appeared in the far East a foe still more terrible. The
capture of Constantinople gave Turks a firm hold on Europe, and
inspired them with the hope of effecting in the fifteenth century what
Abderrahman and his Saracens had so nearly effected in the eighth--of
establishing the faith of Islam through all the provinces that obeyed
the Western as well as the Eastern Cæsars. The navies of the Ottoman
Sultans swept the Mediterranean; their well-appointed armies pierced
Hungary and threatened Vienna.
[Sidenote: Loss of imperial territories.]
Nor was it only that formidable enemies had arisen without: the
frontiers of Germany herself were exposed by the loss of those
adjoining territories which had formerly owned allegiance to the
Emperors. Poland, once tributary, had shaken off the yoke at the
interregnum, and had recently wrested Prussia and Lusatz from the
Teutonic knights. Bohemia, where German culture had struck deeper
roots, remained a member of the Empire; but the privileges she had
obtained from Charles the Fourth, and the subsequent acquisition of
Silesia and Moravia, made her virtually independent. The restless
Hungarians avenged their former vassalage to Germany by frequent
inroads on her eastern border.
[Sidenote: Italy.]
Imperial power in Italy ended with the life of Henry the Seventh.
Rupert did indeed cross the Alps, but it was as the hireling of
Florence; Frederick the Third received the Lombard crown, but it no
longer conveyed the slightest power. In the beginning of the
fourteenth century Dante still hopes the renovation of his country
from the action of the Teutonic Emperors. Some fifty years later
Matthew Villani sees clearly that they do not and cannot reign to any
purpose south of the Alps[355]. Nevertheless the phantom of imperial
authority lingers on for a time. It is put forward by the Ghibeline
tyrants of the cities to justify their attacks on their Guelfic
neighbours: even resolute republicans like the Florentines do not yet
venture altogether to reject it, however unwilling to permit its
exercise. Before the middle of the fifteenth century, the names of
Guelf and Ghibeline had ceased to have any sense or meaning; the Pope
was no longer the protector nor the Emperor the assailant of municipal
freedom, for municipal freedom itself had well-nigh disappeared. But
the old war-cries of the Church and the Empire were still repeated as
they had been three centuries before, and the rival principles that
had once enlisted the noblest spirits of Italy on one or other side
had now sunk into a pretext for wars of aggrandizement or of mere
unmeaning hate. That which had been remarked long before in Greece was
seen to be true here; the spirit of faction outlived the cause of
faction, and became itself the new and prolific source of a useless,
endless strife.
[Sidenote: Burgundy.]
After Frederick the Third no Emperor was crowned in Rome, and almost
the only trace of that connection between Germany and Italy to
maintain which so much had been risked and lost, was to be found in
the obstinate belief of the Hapsburg Emperors, that their own claims,
though often purely dynastic and personal, could be enforced by an
appeal to the imperial rights of their predecessors. Because
Barbarossa had overrun Lombardy with a Transalpine host they fancied
themselves entitled to demand duchies for themselves and their
relatives, and to entangle the Empire in wars wherein no interest but
their own was involved.
The kingdom of Arles, if it had never added much strength to the
Empire, had been useful as an outwork against France. And thus its
loss--Dauphiné passing over, partly in A.D. 1350, finally in 1457,
Provence in 1486--proved a serious calamity, for it brought the French
nearer to Switzerland, and opened to them a tempting passage into
Italy. The Emperors did not for a time expressly renounce their feudal
suzerainty over these lands, but if it was hard to enforce a feudal
claim over a rebellious landgrave in Germany, how much harder to
control a vassal who was also the mightiest king in Europe.
On the north-west frontier, the fall in A.D. 1477 of the great
principality which the dukes of French Burgundy were building up, was
seen with pleasure by the Rhinelanders whom Charles the last duke had
incessantly alarmed. But the only effect of its fall was to leave
France and Germany directly confronting each other, and it was soon
seen that the balance of strength lay on the side of the less numerous
but better organized and more active nation.
[Sidenote: Switzerland.]
Switzerland, too, could no longer be considered a part of the Germanic
realm. The revolt of the Forest Cantons, in A.D. 1313, was against the
oppressions practised in the name of Albert count of Hapsburg, rather
than against the legitimate authority of Albert the Emperor. But
although several subsequent sovereigns, and among them conspicuously
Henry the Seventh and Sigismund, favoured the Swiss liberties, yet
while the antipathy between the Confederates and the territorial
nobility gave a peculiar direction to their policy, the accession of
new cantons to their body, and their brilliant success against Charles
the Bold in A.D. 1477, made them proud of a separate national
existence, and not unwilling to cast themselves loose from the
stranded hulk of the Empire. Maximilian tried to reconquer them, but
after a furious struggle, in which the valleys of Western Tyrol were
repeatedly laid waste by the peasants of the Engadin, he was forced to
give way, and in A.D. 1500 recognized them by treaty as practically
independent. Not, however, till the peace of Westphalia, in A.D. 1648,
was the Swiss Confederation in the eye of public law a sovereign
state, and even after that date some of the towns continued to stamp
their coins with the double eagle of the Empire.
[Sidenote: Internal weakness.]
If those losses of territory were serious, far more serious was the
plight in which Germany herself lay. The country had now become not so
much an empire as an aggregate of very many small states, governed by
sovereigns who would neither remain at peace with each other nor
combine against a foreign enemy, under the nominal presidency of an
Emperor who had little lawful authority, and could not exert what he
had[356].
[Sidenote: Influence of the theory of the Empire as an international
power upon the Germanic constitution.]
[Sidenote: Position of the Emperor in Germany, compared with that of
his predecessors in Europe.]
There was another cause, besides those palpable and obvious ones
already enumerated, to which this state of things must be ascribed.
That cause is to be found in the theory which regarded the Empire as
an international power, supreme among Christian states. From the day
when Otto the Great was crowned at Rome, the characters of German king
and Roman Emperor were united in one person, and it has been shewn how
that union tended more and more to become a fusion. If the two
offices, in their nature and origin so dissimilar, had been held by
different persons, the Roman Empire would most probably have soon
disappeared, while the German kingdom grew into a robust national
monarchy. Their connection gave a longer life to the one and a feebler
life to the other, while at the same time it transformed both. So long
as Germany was only one of the many countries that bowed beneath their
sceptre it was possible for the Emperors, though we need not suppose
they troubled themselves with speculations on the matter, to
distinguish their imperial authority, as international and more than
half religious, from their royal, which was, or was meant to be,
exclusively local and feudal. But when within the narrowed bounds of
Germany these international functions had ceased to have any meaning,
when the rulers of England, Spain, France, Denmark, Hungary, Poland,
Italy, Burgundy, had in succession repudiated their control, and the
Lord of the World found himself obeyed by none but his own people, he
would not sink from being lord of the world into a simple Teutonic
king, but continued to play in the more contracted theatre the part
which had belonged to him in the wider. Thus did Germany instead of
Europe become the sphere of his international jurisdiction; and her
electors and princes, originally mere vassals, no greater than a Count
of Champagne in France, or an Earl of Chester in England, stepped into
the place which it had been meant that the several monarchs of
Christendom should fill. If the power of their head had been what it
was in the eleventh century, the additional dignity so assigned to
them might have signified very little. But coming in to confirm and
justify the liberties already won, this theory of their relation to
the sovereign had a great though at the time scarcely perceptible
influence in changing the German Empire, as we may now begin to call
it, from a state into a sort of confederation or body of states,
united indeed for some of the purposes of government, but separate and
independent for others more important. Thus, and that in its
ecclesiastical as well as its civil organization, Germany became a
miniature of Christendom[357]. The Pope, though he retained the wider
sway which his rival had lost, was in an especial manner the head of
the German clergy, as the Emperor was of the laity: the three Rhenish
prelates sat in the supreme college beside the four temporal electors:
the nobility of prince-bishops and abbots was as essential a part of
the constitution and as influential in the deliberations of the Diet
as were the dukes, counts, and margraves of the Empire. The
world-embracing Christian state was to have been governed by a
hierarchy of spiritual pastors, whose graduated ranks of authority
should exactly correspond with those of the temporal magistracy, who
were to be like them endowed with worldly wealth and power, and to
enjoy a jurisdiction co-ordinate although distinct. This system, which
it was in vain attempted to establish in Europe during the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, was in its main features that which prevailed
in the Germanic Empire from the fourteenth century onwards. And
conformably to the analogy which may be traced between the position of
the archdukes of Austria in Germany and the place which the four Saxon
and the two first Franconian Emperors had held in Europe, both being
recognized as leaders and presidents in all that concerned the common
interest, in the one case of the Christian, in the other of the whole
German people, while neither of them had any power of direct
government in the territories of local kings and lords; so the plan by
which those who chose Maximilian emperor sought to strengthen their
national monarchy was in substance that which the Popes had followed
when they conferred the crown of the world on Charles and Otto. The
pontiffs then, like the electors now, finding that they could not give
with the title the power which its functions demanded, were driven to
the expedient of selecting for the office persons whose private
resources enabled them to sustain it with dignity. The first Frankish
and the first Saxon Emperors were chosen because they were already the
mightiest potentates in Europe; Maximilian because he was the
strongest of the German princes. The parallel may be carried one step
further. Just as under Otto and his successors the Roman Empire was
Teutonized, so now under the Hapsburg dynasty, from whose hands the
sceptre departed only once thenceforth, the Teutonic Empire tends more
and more to lose itself in an Austrian monarchy.
[Sidenote: Beginning of the Hapsburg influence in Germany.]
Of that monarchy and of the power of the house of Hapsburg, Maximilian
was, even more than Rudolph his ancestor, the founder[358]. Uniting in
his person those wide domains through Germany which had been dispersed
among the collateral branches of his house, and claiming by his
marriage with Mary of Burgundy most of the territories of Charles the
Bold, he was a prince greater than any who had sat on the Teutonic
throne since the death of Frederick the Second. But it was as archduke
of Austria, count of Tyrol, duke of Styria and Carinthia, feudal
superior of lands, in Swabia, Alsace, and Switzerland, that he was
great, not as Roman Emperor. For just as from him the Austrian
monarchy begins, so with him the Holy Empire in its old meaning ends.
That strange system of doctrines, half religious half political, which
had supported it for so many ages, was growing obsolete, and the
theory which had wrought such changes on Germany and Europe, passed
ere long so completely from remembrance that we can now do no more
than call up a faint and wavering image of what it must once have
been.
[Sidenote: Character of the epoch of Maximilian.]
[Sidenote: The discovery of America.]
For it is not only in imperial history that the accession of
Maximilian is a landmark. That time--a time of change and movement in
every part of human life, a time when printing had become common, and
books were no longer confined to the clergy, when drilled troops were
replacing the feudal militia, when the use of gunpowder was changing
the face of war--was especially marked by one event, to which the
history of the world offers no parallel before or since, the discovery
of America. The cloud which from the beginning of things had hung
thick and dark round the borders of civilization was suddenly lifted:
the feeling of mysterious awe with which men had regarded the firm
plain of earth and her encircling ocean ever since the days of Homer,
vanished when astronomers and geographers taught them that she was an
insignificant globe, which, so far from being the centre of the
universe, was itself swept round in the motion of one of the least of
its countless systems. The notions that had hitherto prevailed
regarding the life of man and his relations to nature and the
supernatural, were rudely shaken by the knowledge that was soon gained
of tribes in every stage of culture and living under every variety of
condition, who had developed apart from all the influences of the
Eastern hemisphere. In A.D. 1453 the capture of Constantinople and
extinction of the Eastern Empire had dealt a fatal blow to the
prestige of tradition and an immemorial name: in A.D. 1492 there was
disclosed a world whither the eagles of all-conquering Rome had never
winged their flight. No one could now have repeated the arguments of
the _De Monarchia_.
[Sidenote: The Renaissance.]
Another movement, too, widely different, but even more momentous, was
beginning to spread from Italy beyond the Alps. Since the barbarian
tribes settled in the Roman provinces, no change had come to pass in
Europe at all comparable to that which followed the diffusion of the
new learning in the latter half of the fifteenth century. Enchanted by
the beauty of the ancient models of art and poetry, more particularly
those of the Greeks, men came to regard with aversion and contempt all
that had been done or produced from the days of Trajan to those of
Pope Nicholas the Fifth. The Latin style of the writers who lived
after Tacitus was debased: the architecture of the Middle Ages was
barbarous: the scholastic philosophy was an odious and unmeaning
jargon: Aristotle himself, Greek though he was, Aristotle who had been
for three centuries more than a prophet or an apostle, was hurled from
his throne, because his name was associated with the dismal quarrels
of Scotists and Thomists. That spirit, whether we call it analytical
or sceptical, or earthly, or simply secular, for it is more or less
all of these--the spirit which was the exact antithesis of mediæval
mysticism, had swept in and carried men away, with all the force of a
pent-up torrent. People were content to gratify their tastes and their
senses, caring little for worship, and still less for doctrine: their
hopes and ideas were no longer such as had made their forefathers
crusaders or ascetics: their imagination was possessed by associations
far different from those which had inspired Dante: they did not revolt
against the church, but they had no enthusiasm for her, and they had
enthusiasm for whatever was fresh and graceful and intelligible. From
all that was old and solemn, or that seemed to savour of feudalism or
monkery, they turned away, too indifferent to be hostile. And so, in
the midst of the Renaissance, so, under the consciousness that former
things were passing from the earth, and a new order opening, so, with
the other beliefs and memories of the Middle Age, the shadowy rights
of the Roman Empire melted away in the fuller modern light. Here and
there a jurist muttered that no neglect could destroy its universal
supremacy, or a priest declaimed to listless hearers on its duty to
protect the Holy See; but to Germany it had become an ancient device
for holding together the discordant members of her body, to its
possessors an engine for extending the power of the house of Hapsburg.
[Sidenote: Empire henceforth German.]
Henceforth, therefore, we must look upon the Holy Roman Empire as lost
in the German; and after a few faint attempts to resuscitate
old-fashioned claims, nothing remains to indicate its origin save a
sounding title and a precedence among the states of Europe. It was not
that the Renaissance exerted any direct political influence either
against the Empire or for it; men were too busy upon statues and coins
and manuscripts to care what befel Popes or Emperors. It acted rather
by silently withdrawing the whole system of doctrines upon which the
Empire had rested, and thus leaving it, since it had previously no
support but that of opinion, without any support at all.
[Sidenote: Attempts to reform the Germanic Constitution.]
[Sidenote: Causes of the failure of the projects of reform.]
During Maximilian's eventful reign several efforts were made to
construct a new constitution, but it is to German, rather than to
imperial history that they properly belong. Here, indeed, the history
of the Holy Empire might close, did not the title unchanged beckon us
on, and were it not that the events of these later centuries may in
their causes be traced back to times when the name of Roman was not
wholly a mockery. It may be enough to remark that while the
preservation of peace and the better administration of justice were in
some measure attained by the Public Peace and Imperial Chamber,
established in A.D. 1495, schemes still more important failed through
the bad constitution of the Diet, and the unconquerable jealousy of
the Emperor and the Estates. Maximilian refused to have his
prerogative, indefinite though weak, restricted by the appointment of
an administrative council[359], and when the Estates extorted it from
him, did his best to ensure its failure. In the Diet, which consisted
of three colleges, electors, princes, and cities, the lower nobility
and knights of the Empire were unrepresented, and resented every
decree that affected their position, refusing to pay taxes in voting
which they had no voice. The interests of the princes and the cities
were often irreconcilable, while the strength of the crown would not
have been sufficient to make its adhesion to the latter of any effect.
The policy of conciliating the commons, which Sigismund had tried,
succeeding Emperors seldom cared to repeat, content to gain their
point by raising factions among the territorial magnates, and so to
stave off the unwelcome demand for reform. After many earnest attempts
to establish a representative system, such as might resist the
tendency to local independence and cure the evils of separate
administration, the hope so often baffled died away. Forces were too
nearly balanced: the sovereign could not extend his personal control,
nor could the reforming party limit him by a strong council of
government, for such a measure would have equally trenched on the
independence of the states. So ended the first great effort for German
unity, interesting from its bearing on the events and aspirations of
our own day; interesting, too, as giving the most convincing proof of
the decline of the imperial office. For the projects of reform did not
propose to effect their objects by restoring to Maximilian the
authority his predecessors had once enjoyed, but by setting up a body
which would resemble far more nearly the senate of a federal state
than the administrative council which surrounds a monarch. The
existing system developed itself further: relieved from external
pressure, the princes became more despotic in their own territories:
distinct codes were framed, and new systems of administration
introduced: the insurgent peasantry were crushed down with more
confident harshness. Already had leagues of princes and cities been
formed[360] (that of Swabia was one of the strongest forces in
Germany, and often the monarch's firmest support); now alliances begin
to be contracted with foreign powers, and receive a direction of
formidable import from the rivalry which the pretensions on Naples and
Milan of Charles the Eighth and Lewis the Twelfth of France kindled
between their house and the Austrian. It was no slight gain to have
friends in the heart of the enemy's country, such as French intrigue
found in the Elector Palatine and the count of Würtemberg.
[Sidenote: Germanic nationality.]
[Sidenote: Change of Titles.]
[Sidenote: The title 'Imperator Electus.']
Nevertheless this was also the era of the first conscious feeling of
German nationality, as distinct from imperial. Driven in on all hands,
with Italy and the Slavic lands and Burgundy hopelessly lost,
Teutschland learnt to separate itself from Welschland[361]. The Empire
became the representative of a narrower but more practicable national
union. It is not a mere coincidence that at this date there appear
several notable changes of style. 'Nationis Teutonicæ' (Teutscher
Nation) is added to the simple 'sacrum imperium Romanum.' The title of
'Imperator electus,' which Maximilian obtains leave from Pope Julius
the Second to assume, when the Venetians prevent him from reaching his
capital, marks the severance of Germany from Rome. No subsequent
Emperor received his crown in the ancient capital (Charles the Fifth
was indeed crowned by the Pope's hands, but the ceremony took place at
Bologna, and was therefore of at least questionable validity); each
assumed after his German coronation[362] the title of Emperor
Elect[363], and employed this in all documents issued in his name. But
the word 'elect' being omitted when he was addressed by others, partly
from motives of courtesy, partly because the old rules regarding the
Roman coronation were forgotten, or remembered only by antiquaries, he
was never called, even when formality was required, anything but
Emperor. The substantial import of another title now first introduced
is the same. Before Otto the First, the Teutonic king had called
himself either 'rex' alone, or 'Francorum orientalium rex,' or
'Francorum atque Saxonum rex:' after A.D. 962, all lesser dignities
had been merged in the 'Romanorum Imperator[364].' To this Maximilian
appended 'Germaniæ rex,' or, adding Frederick the Second's
bequest[365], 'König in Germanien und Jerusalem.' It has been thought
that from a mixture of the title King of Germany, and that of Emperor,
has been formed the phrase 'German Emperor,' or less correctly,
'Emperor of Germany[366].' But more probably the terms 'German
Emperor' and 'Emperor of Germany' are nothing but convenient
corruptions of the technical description of the Germanic
sovereign[367].
That the Empire was thus sinking into a merely German power cannot be
doubted. But it was only natural that those who lived at the time
should not discern the tendency of events. Again and again did the
restless and sanguine Maximilian propose the recovery of Burgundy and
Italy,--his last scheme was to adjust the relations of Papacy and
Empire by becoming Pope himself: nor were successive Diets less
zealous to check private war, still the scandal of Germany, to set
right the gear of the imperial chamber, to make the imperial officials
permanent, and their administration uniform throughout the country.
But while they talked the heavens darkened, and the flood came and
destroyed them all.
FOOTNOTES:
[352] See Dean Stanley's _Lectures on the History of the Eastern
Church_, Lecture II.
[353] It is not without interest to observe that the council of Basel
shewed signs of reciprocating imperial care by claiming those very
rights over the Empire to which the Popes were accustomed to pretend.
[354] The councils of Basel and Florence were not recognized from
first to last by all Europe, as was the council of Constance. When the
assembly of Trent met, the great religious schism had already made a
general council, in the true sense of the word, impossible.
[355] 'E pero venendo gl'imperadori della Magna col supremo titolo, e
volendo col senno e colla forza della Magna reggiere gli Italiani, non
lo fanno e non lo possono fare.'--M. Villani, iv. 77.
Matthew Villani's etymology of the two great faction names of Italy is
worth quoting, as a fair sample of the skill of mediævals in such
matters:--'La Italia tutta e divisa mistamente in due parti, l'una che
seguita ne' fatti del mondo la santa chiesa--e questi son dinominati
Guelfi; cioè, guardatori di fè. E l'altra parte seguitano lo 'mperio o
fedele o enfedele che sia delle cose del mondo a santa chiesa. E
chiamansi Ghibellini, quasi guida belli; cioè, guidatori di
battaglie.'
[356] 'Nam quamvis Imperatorem et regem et dominum vestrum esse
fateamini, precario tamen ille imperare videtur: nulla ei potentia
est; tantum ei paretis quantum vultis, vultis autem minimum.'--Æneas
Sylvius to the princes of Germany, quoted by Hippolytus a Lapide.
[357] See Ægidi, _Der Fürstenrath nach dem Luneviller Frieden_; a book
which throws more light than any other with which I am acquainted on
the inner nature of the Empire.
[358] The two immediately preceding Emperors, Albert II (1438-1439)
and Frederick III, father of Maximilian (1439-1493), had been
Hapsburgs. It is nevertheless from Maximilian that the ascendancy of
that family must be dated.
[359] Reichsregiment.
[360] Wenzel had encouraged the leagues of the cities, and incurred
thereby the hatred of the nobles.
[361] The Germans, like our own ancestors, called foreign, _i. e._
non-Teutonic nations, Welsh. Yet apparently not all such nations, but
only those which they in some way associated with the Roman Empire,
the Cymry of Roman Britain, the Romanized Kelts of Gaul, the Italians,
the Roumans or Wallachs of Transylvania and the Principalities. It
does not appear that either the Magyars or any Slavonic people were
called by any form of the name Welsh.
[362] The German crown was received at Aachen, the ancient Frankish
capital, where may still be seen, in the gallery of the basilica, the
marble throne on which the Emperors from the days of Charles to those
of Ferdinand I were crowned. It was upon this chair that Otto III had
found the body of Charles seated, when he opened his tomb in A.D.
1001. After Ferdinand I, the coronation as well as the election took
place at Frankfort. An account of the ceremony may be found in
Goethe's _Wahrheit und Dichtung_. Aachen, though it remained and
indeed is still a German town, lay in too remote a corner of the
country to be a convenient capital, and was moreover in dangerous
proximity to the West Franks, as stubborn old Germans continue to call
them. As early as A.D. 1353 we find bishop Leopold of Bamberg
complaining that the French had arrogated to themselves the honours of
the Frankish name, and called themselves 'reges Franciæ,' instead of
'reges Franciæ occidentalis.'--Lupoldus Bebenburgensis, apud
Schardium, _Sylloge Tractatuum_.
[363] Erwählter Kaiser. See Appendix, Note C.
[364] Romanorum rex (after Henry II) till the coronation at Rome.
[365] But the Emperor was only one of many claimants to this kingdom;
they multiplied as the prospect of regaining it died away.
[366] The latter does not occur, even in English books, till
comparatively recent times. English writers of the seventeenth century
always call him 'The Emperor,' pure and simple, just as they
invariably say 'the French king.' But the phrase 'Empereur d'Almayne'
may be found in very early French writers.
[367] See Moser, _Römische Kayser_; Goldast's and other collections of
imperial edicts and proclamations.