Chapter XX: Act 1890: , No. 1108, ss. 45-48: Tasmania, Landlord and Tenant Act 1874, (8)

The German kingdom and the empire.

The Holy Roman Empire.

Various causes had contributed to the dissolution of the realm of Charlemagne. Partitions had split it; feudalism had begun to honeycomb it; incessant wars had destroyed its core, the fighting Franks of Austrasia. But, above all, the rise of divisions within the realm, which, whether animated by the spirit of nationality or no, were ultimately destined to develop into nations, had silently undermined the structure of Pippin and Charlemagne. Already in 842 the oath of Strassburg shows us one Caroling king swearing in French and another in German: already in 870 the partition of Mersen shows us the kings of France and Germany dividing the middle kingdom which lay between the two countries by the linguistic frontier of the Meuse and Moselle. The year 888 is the birth-year of modern Europe. France, Germany, Italy, stood distinct as three separate units, with Burgundy and Lorraine as debatable lands, as they were destined to remain for centuries to come. If the conception of Empire was still to survive, the pope must ultimately invite the ruler of the strongest of these three units to assume the imperial crown; and this was what happened when in 962 Pope John XII. invited Otto I. of Germany to renew once more the Roman Empire. As the imperial strength of the whole Frankish tribe had given them the Empire in 800, so did the national strength of the East Frankish kingdom, now resting indeed on a Saxon rather than a Frankish basis, bring the Empire to its ruler in 962. The centre of political gravity had already been shifting to the east of the Rhine in the course of the 9th century. While the Northmen had carried their arms along the rivers and into the heart of France, Louis the German had consolidated his kingdom in a long reign of sixty years (817-876); and at the end of the 9th century two kings of Germany had already worn the imperial crown. Early in the 10th century the kingship of Germany had come to the vigorous Saxon dukes (919); and strong in their Saxon basis Henry I. and his son Otto had built a realm which, disunited as it was, was far more compact than that which the Carolings of the West ruled from Laon. Henry I. had thought in his later years of going to Rome for the imperial crown: under Otto I. the imperial idea becomes manifest. On the one hand, he established a semi-imperial position in the West: by 946 Louis IV. d'Outremer is his protege, and it is his arms which maintain the young Conrad of Burgundy on his throne. On the other hand, he showed, by his policy towards the German Church, that he was the true heir of the Carolingian traditions. He made churchmen his ministers; he established missionary bishoprics on the Elbe which should spread Christianity among the Wends; and his dearest project was a new archbishopric of Magdeburg. The one thing needful was that he should, like Charlemagne, acquire the throne of Italy; and the dissolute condition of that country during the first half of the 10th century made its acquisition not only possible, but almost imperative. Begun in 952, the acquisition was completed ten years later; and all the conditions were now present for Otto's assumption of the imperial throne. He was crowned by John XII. on Candlemas Day 962, and thus was begun the Holy Roman Empire, which lasted henceforth with a continuous life until 1806.[8]

The Empire and feudalism.

The same ideas underlay the new empire which had underlain that of Charlemagne, strengthened and reinforced by the fact that they had already found a visible expression before in that earlier empire. Historically, there was the tradition of the old Roman empire, preserved by the Church as an idea, and preserved in the Church, and its imperial organization, as an actual fact. Ecclesiastically, there was the Pauline conception of a single Christian Church, one in subjection to Christ as its Head, and needing (so men still thought) a secular counterpart of its indivisible unity.[9] To these two sanctions philosophy later added a third; and the doctrine of Realism, that the one universal is the true abiding substance--the doctrine which pervades the _De monarchia_ of Dante,--reinforced the feeling which demanded that Europe should be conceived as a single political unity. But if the Holy Roman empire of the German nation has the old foundations, it is none the less a thing _sui generis_. Externally, it meant far less than the empire of Charlemagne; it meant simply a union of Germany and northern Italy (to which, after 1032, one must also add Burgundy, though the addition is in reality nominal) under a single rule. Historians of the 19th century, during the years in which the modern German empire was in travail, disputed sorely on the advantages of this union; but whatever its advantages or disadvantages, the fact remains that the union of Teutonic Germany and Latin Italy was, from an external point of view, the essential fact in the structure of the medieval Empire. Internally, again, the Empire of the Ottos and their successors was new and unprecedented. If Latin imperialism had been combined with Frankish tribalism in the Empire of Charlemagne, it now met and blended with feudalism. The Holy Roman emperor of the middle ages, as Frederick I. proudly told the Roman envoys, found his senate in the diet of the German baronage, his _equites_ in the ranks of the German knights. Feudalism, indeed, came in time to invade the very conception of Empire itself. The emperors began to believe that their position of emperor made them feudal overlords of other kings and princes; and they came to be regarded as the topmost summit of the feudal pyramid, from whom kings held their kingdoms, while they themselves held directly of God. In this way the old conception of the world as a single political society entered upon a new phase: but the translation of that conception into feudal terms, which might have made Diocletian gasp, only gave it the greater hold on the feudal society of the middle ages. Yet in one way the feudal conception was a source of weakness to the Empire; for the popes, from the middle of the 12th century onwards, began to claim for themselves a feudal overlordship of the world, and to regard the emperor as the chief of their vassals. The theory of the _Translatio_ buttressed their claim to be overlords of the Empire; and the emperors found that their very duty to defend the Papacy turned them into its vassals--for was not the _advocatus_ who defended the lands of an abbey or church its tenant by feudal service, and might not analogy extend the feudal relation to the imperial advocate himself?

The Empire and the Papacy.

The relation of the Empire to the Papacy is indeed the cardinal fact in its history for the three centuries which followed the coronation of Otto I. (962-1250). For a century (962-1076) the relation was one of amity. The pope and the emperor stood as co-ordinate sovereigns, ruling together the commonwealth of Europe.[10] If either stood before the other, the emperor stood before the pope. The Romans had sworn to Otto I. that they would never elect or ordain a pope without his consent; and the rights over papal elections conceived to belong to the office of _patricius_, which they generally held, enabled the emperors, upon occasion, to nominate the pope of their choice. The partnership of Otto III., son of a Byzantine princess, and his nominee Silvester II. (already distinguished as Gerbert, _scholasticus_ of the chapter school of Reims) forms a remarkable page in the annals of Empire and Papacy. Otto, once the pupil of Silvester in classical studies, and taught by his mother the traditions of the Byzantine empire, dreamed of renewing the Empire of Constantine, with Rome itself for its centre; and this antiquarian idealism (which Arnold of Brescia and Cola di Rienzi were afterwards, though with some difference of aim, to share) was encouraged in his pupil by the pope. Tradition afterwards ascribed to the two the first project of a crusade, and the institution of the seven electors: in truth their faces were turned to the past rather than to the future, and they sought not to create, but to renovate. The dream of restoring the age of Constantine passed with the premature death of Otto; and after the death of Silvester II. the papacy was degraded into an appendage of the Tusculan family. From that degradation the Church was rescued by Henry III. (the second emperor of the new Salian house, which reigned from 1024 to 1125), when in 1046 he caused the deposition of three competing popes, and afterwards filled the papal chair with his own nominees; but it was rescued more effectually by itself, when in 1059 the celebrated bull _In nomine Domini_ of Nicholas II. reserved the right of electing the popes to the college of cardinals (see CONCLAVE). A new era of the Papacy begins with the decree, and that era found its exponent in Hildebrand. If under Henry III. the Empire stands in many respects at its zenith, and the emperor nominates to the Papacy, it sinks, under Henry IV., almost to the nadir of its fortunes, and a pope attempts, with no little success, to fight and defeat an emperor.

The Investiture contest.

The rise of the Papacy, which the action of Henry III. in 1046 had helped to begin, and the bull of 1059 had greatly promoted, was ultimately due to an ecclesiastical revival, which goes by the name of the Cluniac movement. The aim of that movement was to separate the Church from the world, and thus to make it independent of the laity and the lay power; and it sought to realize its aim first by the prohibition of clerical marriage and simony, and ultimately by the prohibition of lay investiture. A decree of Gregory VII. in 1075 forbade emperor, king or prince to "presume to give investiture of bishoprics," under pain of excommunication; and Henry IV., contravening the decree, fell under the penalty, and the War of Investitures began (1076-1122). Whether or no Henry humiliated himself at Canossa (and the opinion of German historians now inclines to regard the traditional account as exaggerated) the Empire certainly suffered in his reign a great loss of prestige. The emperor lost his hold over Germany, where the aid of the pope strengthened the hands of the discontented nobility: he lost his hold over Italy, where the Lombard towns gradually acquired municipal independence, and the donation of the Countess Matilda gave the popes the germ of a new and stronger _dominium temporale_. The First Crusade came, and the emperor, its natural leader, could not lead it; while the centre of learning and civilization, in the course of the fifty years' War of Investitures, gradually shifted to France. The struggle was finally ended by a compromise--the Concordat of Worms--in 1122; but the Papacy, which had fought the long War of Investitures and inspired the First Crusade, was a far greater power than it had been at the beginning of the struggle, and the emperor, shaken in his hold on Germany and Italy, had lost both power and prestige (see INVESTITURE). It is significant that a theory of the feudal subjection of the emperor to the pope, foreshadowed in the pontificate of Innocent II., and definitely enounced by the envoys of Adrian IV. at the diet of Besancon in 1157, now begins to arise. The popes, who had called the emperors to be heads of the European commonwealth in 800 and again in 962, begin to vindicate that headship for themselves. Gregory VII. had already claimed that the pope stood to the emperor, as the sun to the moon; and gradually the old co-ordination disappeared in a new subordination of the Empire to the papal _plenitudo potestatis_. The claim of ecclesiastical independence of the middle of the 11th century was rapidly becoming a claim of ecclesiastical supremacy in the middle of the 12th: the imperial claim to nominate popes, which had lasted till 1059, was turning into the papal claim to nominate emperors. Yet at this very time a new period of splendour dawned for the Empire; and the rule of the three Hohenstaufen emperors, Frederick I., Henry VI. and Frederick II. (1152-1250), marks the period of its history which attracts most sympathy and admiration.

The Hohenstaufen emperors.

Overthrow of the Empire in Italy.

Frederick I. regained a new strength in Germany, partly because he united in his veins the blood of the two great contending families, the Welfs and the Waiblingens; partly because he had acquired large patrimonial possessions in Swabia, which took the place of the last Saxon demesne; partly because he had a greater control over the German episcopate than his predecessors had enjoyed for many years past. At the same time the revival of interest in the study of Roman law gave the emperor, as source and centre of that law, a new dignity and prestige, particularly in Italy, the home and hearth of the revival. Confident in this new strength, he attempted to vindicate his claims on Italy, and sought, by uniting the two under his sway, to inspire with new life the old Ottonian Empire. He failed to crush Lombard municipal independence: defeated at Legnano in 1176, he had to recognize his defeat at the treaty of Constance in 1183. He failed to acquire control over the Papacy: a new struggle of Empire and Papacy, begun in the pontificate of Adrian IV. on the question of control over Rome, and continued in the pontificate of Alexander III., because Frederick recognized an anti-pope, ended in the emperor's recognition of his defeat at Venice in 1177. The one success was the acquisition of the Norman kingdom for Henry VI., who was married to its heiress, Constance. But the one success of Frederick's Italian policy proved the ruin of his house in the reign of his grandson Frederick II. On the one hand, the possession of Sicily induced Frederick II. to neglect Germany; and by two documents, one of 1220 and one of 1231, he practically abdicated his sovereign powers to the German princes in order to conciliate their support for his Italian policy. On the other hand, the possession of Sicily involved him in the third great struggle of Empire and Papacy. Strong in his Sicilian kingdom in the south, and seeking, like his grandfather, to establish his power in Lombardy, Frederick practically aimed at the unification of Italy, a policy which threatened to engulf the States of the Church and to reduce the Papacy to impotence. The popes excommunicated the emperor: they aided the Lombard towns to maintain their independence; finally, after Frederick's death (1250), they summoned Charles of Anjou into Sicily to exterminate his house. By 1268 he had done his work, and the medieval Empire was practically at an end. When Rudolph of Habsburg succeeded in 1273, he was only the head of a federation of princes in Germany, while in Italy he abandoned all claims over the centre and south, and only retained titular rights in the Lombard plain.

Thus ended the first great chapter in the history of the Holy Roman Empire which Otto had founded in 962. In those three centuries the great fact had been its relation to the Papacy: in the last two of those three centuries the relation had been one of enmity. The basis of the enmity had been the papal claim to supreme headship of Latin Christianity, and to an independent temporal demesne in Italy as the condition of that headship. Because they desired supreme headship, the popes had sought to reduce the emperor's headship to something lower than, and dependent upon, their own--to a mere fief held of St Peter: because they desired a temporal demesne, they had sought to expel him from Italy, since any imperial hold on Italy threatened their independence. They had succeeded in defeating the Empire, but they had also destroyed the Papacy; for the French aid which they had invoked against the Hohenstaufen developed, within fifty years of the fall of that house, into French control, and the captivity at Avignon (1308-1378) was the logical result of the final victory of Charles of Anjou at Tagliacozzo. The struggle seemed to have ended in nothing but the exhaustion of both combatants. Yet in many respects it had in reality made for progress. It had set men thinking of the respective limits of church and state, as the many _libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum_ show; and from that thought had issued a new conception of the state, as existing in its own right and supreme in its own sphere, a conception which is the necessary basis of the modern nation-state. If it had dislocated Germany into a number of territorial principalities, it had produced a college of electors to represent the cause of unity: if it had helped to prevent the unification of Italy, and had left to Italy the fatal legacy of Guelph and Ghibelline feuds, it had equally helped to produce Italian municipal independence.

The Empire from the election of Rudolph of Habsburg, 1273.

A new chapter of the history of the Empire fills the three centuries from 1273 to 1556--from the accession of Rudolph of Habsburg to the abdication of Charles V. Italy was now lost: the Empire had now no peculiar connexion with Rome, and far less touch with the Papacy. A new Germany had risen. The extinction of several royal stocks and the nomination of anti-kings in the course of civil wars had made the monarchy elective, and raised to the side of the emperor a college of electors (see ELECTORS), which appears as definitely established soon after 1250. With Italy lost, and Germany thus transmuted, why should the Empire have still continued to exist? In the first place, it continued to exist because the Germans still found a king necessary and because, the German king having been called for three centuries emperor, it seemed necessary that he should still continue to bear the name. In this sense the Empire existed as the presidency of a Germanic confederation, and as something analogous to the modern German empire, with the one great difference that the Hohenzollerns now derive from Prussia a strength which enables them to make their imperial position a reality, while no Luxemburg or Habsburg was able to make his imperial position otherwise than honorary and nominal. In the second place, it continued to exist because the conception of the unity of western Europe still lingered, and was still conceived to need an exponent. In this sense the Empire existed as a presidency, still more honorary and still more nominal, of the nations of western Europe. In both capacities the emperor existed to a great extent because he was a legal necessity--because, in Germany, he was necessary for the investiture of princes with their principalities, and because, in Europe, he was necessary, as the source of all rights, to bestow crowns upon would-be kings, or to act as the head of the great orders of chivalry, or to give patents to notaries. With the history of the Empire regarded as a German confederation we are not here concerned. The reigns of the Habsburg, Luxemburg and Wittelsbach emperors belong to the history of Germany. Yet two of these emperors, Henry VII. and Louis IV., should not pass without notice, the one for his own sake, the other for the sake of his adherents, and both because, by interfering in Italy, and coming into conflict with the Papacy, they brought once more into prominence the European aspect of the Empire.

Henry VII., the contemporary and the hero of Dante, descended into Italy in 1310, partly because he had no power and no occupation in Germany, partly because he was deeply imbued with the sense of his imperial dignity. Coming as a peacemaker and mediator, he was driven by Guelph opposition into a Ghibelline role; and he came into conflict with Clement V., the first of the Avignonese popes, who under the pressure of France attempted to enforce upon Henry a recognition of his feudal subjection. Henry asserted his independence: he claimed Rome for his capital, and the lordship of the world for his right; but, just as a struggle seemed impending, he died, in 1313. During the reign of his successor, Louis IV., the struggle came. Louis had been excommunicated by John XXII. in 1324 for acting as emperor before he had received papal recognition. None the less, in 1328, he came to Rome for his coronation. He had gathered round him strange allies; on the one hand, the more advanced Franciscans, apostles of the cause of clerical disendowment, and inimical to a wealthy papacy; on the other hand, jurists like Marsilius of Padua and John of Jandun, who brought to the cause of Louis the spirit and the doctrines which had already been used in the struggle between Boniface VIII. and Philip IV. of France. Marsilius in particular, in a treatise called the _Defensor Pacis_, insisted on the majesty of the lay state, and even on its superiority to the Church. Perhaps it was Marsilius, learned as he was in Roman law, and remembering the _lex regia_ by which the Roman people had of old conferred its power on the emperor, who suggested to Louis the policy, which he followed, of receiving the imperial crown by the decree and at the hands of the Roman people. The policy was remarkable: Louis embraced an alliance which Frederick Barbarossa had spurned, and recognized the medieval Romans as the source of imperial power. Not less remarkable was the new attitude of the German electors, who for the first time supported an emperor against the pope, because they now felt menaced in their own electoral rights; and the one permanent result which finally flowed from the struggle was the enunciation and definition of the rights and privileges of the electors in the Golden Bull of 1356 (see GOLDEN BULL).

The Empire and the rise of the idea of national states.

In this struggle with the Papacy the Empire had shown something of its old universal aspect. It had come into connexion with Italy, and into close connexion with Rome: it had enlisted in defence of its rights at once an Italian like Marsilius and an Englishman like Ockham. The same universal aspect appeared once more in the age of the conciliar movement, at the beginning of the 15th century. One of the essential duties of the emperor, as defender of the Church, was to help the assembling and the deliberations of general councils of the Church. This was the duty discharged by Sigismund, when he forced John XXIII. to summon a council at Constance in 1414, and sought, though in vain, to guide its deliberations. The journey which Sigismund undertook in the interests of the council (1415-1417) is particularly noteworthy. He sought to make peace throughout western Europe, acting as international arbitrator--in virtue of his presidency of western Europe--between England and France, between Burgundians and Armagnacs; but he failed in his aim, and when he returned to the council, it was only to witness the defeat of the party of reform which he championed. National feeling and national antipathies proved too strong for Sigismund's attempt to revive the medieval empire for the purposes of international arbitration: the same feeling, the same antipathies, made inevitable the failure of the council itself, in which western Europe had sought to meet once more as a single religious commonwealth. Early in the 15th century, therefore, the conception of the unity of western Europe, as a single Empire-Church, was already waning in both its aspects. The unity of the Church Universal was dissolving, and the conception of the nation-church arising (as the separate concordats granted by Martin V. to the different nations prove); while the unity of the Empire was proved a dream, by the powerlessness of the emperor in the face of the struggle of England and France.

Influence of the Reformation.

Renaissance and Reformation combined to complete the fall which the failure of Sigismund to guide the conciliar movement had already foreshadowed. The Renaissance, revolting against the medievalism of the _studium_ and not sparing even the _sacerdotium_ of the middle ages, had little respect for the medieval _imperium_; and, going back to pure Latin and original Greek, it went back beyond even the classical empire to find its ideals and inspirations. But it is the coming of the Reformation, and with it of the nation-church, which finally marks the epoch at which the last vestige of the old conception of the political unity of the world disappears before the nation-state. Externally indeed it seemed, at the time of the Reformation, as if the old Empire had been revived in the person of Charles V., who owned territories as vast as those of Charlemagne. But Charles's dominions were a dynastic agglomeration, knit together by no vivifying conception; and, though Charles was a champion of the one Catholic Church against the Reformation, he did not in any way seek to revive the power of the medieval empire. Meanwhile the reforming monarchs, while they cast off the Roman Church, cast off with it the Roman empire. Henry VIII. declared himself free, not only of the pope, but of all other foreign power; not only so, but as he sought to take the place of the pope with regard to his own church, so he sought to take the place of the emperor with regard to his kingdom, and spoke of his "imperial" crown, a style which recurs in later Tudor reigns.[11] The conception of one Empire passed out of Europe, or, if it remained, it remained only in an honorary precedence accorded by other sovereigns to the king of Germany, who still entitled himself emperor. In Germany itself the honorary presidency which the emperor enjoyed over the princes came to mean still less than before, when religious differences divided the country, and the principle of _cujus regio ejus religio_ accentuated the local autonomy of the prince. When Charles abdicated in 1556, the change which the accession of Rudolph of Habsburg had already marked was complete: there was no empire except in Germany, and in Germany the Empire was nothing more than a convenient legal conception. The Reformation, by sweeping away the spiritual unity of western Christendom, had swept away any real conception of its political unity, and with that conception it had swept away the Empire; while it had also, by splitting Germany into two religious camps, and making the emperor at the most the head of a religious faction, dissipated the last vestiges of a real Empire in the country which had, since 962, been its peculiar home.

The Empire as a German confederation.

From 1556 to 1806 the Empire means a loose federation of the different princes of Germany, lay and ecclesiastical, under the presidency, elective in theory but hereditary in practice, of the house of Habsburg. It is an empire much in the same sense as the modern German empire, with a diet somewhat analogous to the modern Bundesrat, and a cumbrous imperial chamber for purposes of justice, hardly at all analogous to the highly organized system of federal justice which prevails in Germany to-day. The dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire into this loose federation had already been anticipated by the concessions made to the princes by Frederick II. in 1220 and 1231; but the final organization of Germany on federal lines was only attained in the treaty of Westphalia of 1648. The attempt of Ferdinand II., in the course of the Thirty Years' War, to assert a practically monarchical authority over the princes of Germany, only led to the regular vindication by the princes of their own monarchical authority. The emperor, who had tried in the 15th century to be the international authority of all Europe, now sank to the position of less than inter-state arbitrator in Germany. That the Empire and the emperor were retained at all, when the princes became so many independent sovereigns, was due partly to a lingering sense of quasi-national sentiment for a _magni nominis umbra_, partly to the need of some authority which should combine in one whole principalities of very different sizes and strengths, and should protect the weak from the strong, and all from France. But this authority only found its _symbol_ in the emperor. Such real federal authority as there was remained with the diet, a congress of sovereign princes through their accredited representatives; and the emperor's sole rights, as emperor, were those of granting titles and confirming tolls. The Habsburgs, emperors in each successive generation, never pursued an imperial, but always a dynastic policy; and they were perfectly ready to sacrifice to the aggrandizement of their house the honour of the Empire, as when they ceded Lorraine to France in return for Tuscany (1735).

End of the Holy Roman Empire.

It needed the cataclysm of the French Revolution finally to overthrow the Empire. Throughout the 18th century it lasted, a thing of long-winded protocols and never-ending lawsuits, "neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire." But with Napoleon came its destroyer. As far back as the end of the 13th century, French kings had been scheming to annex the title or at any rate absorb the territories of the Empire: at the beginning of the 19th century the annexation of the title by Napoleon seemed very imminent. Posing as the New Charlemagne ("because, like Charlemagne, I unite the crown of France to that of the Lombards, and my Empire marches with the East"), he resolved in 1806, during the dissolution and recomposition of Germany which followed the peace of Luneville, to oust Francis II. from his title, and to make the Holy Roman Empire part and parcel of the "Napoleonic idea." He was anticipated, however, by the prompt action of the proud Habsburg, who was equally resolved that no other should wear the crown which he himself was powerless to defend, and accordingly, on the 6th of August 1806, Francis resigned the imperial dignity. So perished the Empire. Out of its ashes sprang the Austrian Empire, for Francis, in 1804, partly to counter Napoleon's assumption of the title of Emperor of the French, partly to prepare for the impending dissolution of the old Empire, had assumed the title of "Hereditary Emperor of Austria." And in yet more recent times the German empire may be regarded, in a still more real sense than Austria, as the descendant and representative of the old Empire of the German nation.

General influence of the Empire.

What had been the results of the Holy Roman Empire, in the course of its long history, upon Germany and upon Europe? It has been a _vexata quaestio_ among German historians, whether or no the Empire ruined Germany. Some have argued that it diverted the attention of the German kings from their own country to Italy, and that, by bringing them into conflict with the popes, and by thus strengthening the hands of their rebellious baronage with a papal alliance, it prevented the development of a national German monarchy, such as other sovereigns of western Europe were able to found. Others again have emphasized the racial division of Saxon and Frank, of High German and Low German, as the great cause of the failure of Germany to grow into a united national whole, and have sought to ascribe to the influence of the Empire such unity as was achieved; while they have attributed the learning, the trade, the pre-eminence of medieval Germany to the Italian connexion and the prestige which the Empire brought. It is difficult to pronounce on either side; but one feels that the old localism and individualism which characterized the early German, and had never, on German soil, been combined with and counteracted by a large measure of Roman population and Roman civilization, as they were in Gaul and Spain, would in any case have continued to divide and disturb Germany till late in her history, even if the Empire had never come to reside within her borders. Of the larger question of the influence of the Empire on Europe we can here only say that it worked for good. An Empire which represented, as a Holy Empire, the unity of all the faithful as one body in their secular, no less than in their religious life--an Empire which, again, as a Roman Empire, represented with an unbroken continuity the order of Roman administration and law--such an empire could not but make for the betterment of the world. It was not an empire resting on force, a military empire; it was not, as in modern times empires have sometimes been, an autocracy warranted and stamped by the plebiscite of the mob. It was an empire resting neither on the sword nor on the ballot-box, but on two great ideas, taught by the clergy and received by the laity, that all believers in Christ form one body politic, and that the one model and type for the organization of that body is to be found in the past of Rome. It was indeed the weakness of the Empire that its roots were only the thoughts of men; for the lack of material force, from which it always suffered, hindered it from doing work it might well have done--the work, for instance, of international arbitration. Yet, on the other hand, it was the strength and glory of the Empire that it lived, all through the middle ages, an unconquerable idea of the mind of man. Because it was a being of their thought, it stirred men to reflection: the Empire, particularly in its clash with the Papacy, produced a political consciousness and a political speculation reflected for us in the many _libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum_, and in the pages of Dante and Marsilius of Padua. Roman, it perpetuated the greatest monument of Roman thought--that ordered scheme of law, which either became, as in England, the model for the building of a native system, or, as in Germany from the end of the 15th century onwards, was received in its integrity and administered in the courts. Holy, it fortified and consolidated Christian thought, by giving a visible expression to the kingdom of God upon earth; and not only so, but it maintained, however imperfectly, some idea of international obligation, and some conception of a commonwealth of Europe.[12]

The Holy Roman Empire of western Europe had in its own day a contemporary and a rival--that east Roman empire of which we have already spoken. From Arcadius to John Palaeologus, from A.D. 395 to 1453, the Roman empire was continued at Constantinople--not as a theory and an idea, but as a simple and daily reality of politics and administration. In one sense the East Roman Empire was more lineally and really Roman than the West: it was absolutely continuous from ancient times. In another sense the Western Empire was the most Roman; for its capital--in theory at least--was Rome itself, and the Roman Church stood by its side, while Constantinople was Hellenic and even Oriental. Between the two Empires there was fixed an impassable gulf; and they were divided by deep differences of thought and temper, which appeared most particularly in the sphere of religion, and expressed themselves in the cleavage between the Catholic and the Orthodox Churches. Yet, as when Rome fell, the Catholic Church survived, and ultimately found for itself a new Empire of the West, so, when Constantinople fell, the Orthodox Church continued its life, and found for itself a new Empire of the East--the Empire of Russia. Under Ivan the Great (1462-1505) Moscow became the metropolis of Orthodoxy; Byzantine law influenced his code; and he took for his cognizance the double-headed eagle. Ivan the Terrible, his grandson, finally assumed in 1547 the title of Tsar; and henceforth the Russian emperor is, in theory and very largely in fact, the successor of the old East Roman emperor,[13] the head of the Orthodox Church, with the mission of vengeance on Islam for the fall of Constantinople.

Modern Empires.

In the 19th century the word "empire" has had a large and important bearing in politics. In France it has been the apanage of the Bonapartes, and has meant a centralized system of government by an efficient Caesar, resting immediately on the people, and annihilating the powers of the people's representatives. Under Napoleon I. this conception had a Carolingian colour: under Napoleon III. there is less of Carolingianism, and more of Caesarism--more of a popular dictatorship. While in modern France Empire has meant autocracy instead of representative government, in Germany it has meant a greater national unity and a federal government in the place of a confederation. The modern German empire is at once like and unlike the old Holy Roman Empire. It is unlike the old medieval Empire; for it has no connexion with the Catholic Church, and no relation to Rome. But it is like the Holy Roman Empire of the 17th and 18th centuries--for it represents a federation, but a more real and more unitary federation, of the several states of Germany. The likeness is perhaps more striking than the dissimilarity; and in virtue of this likeness, and because the memory of the old German _Kaiserzeit_ was a driving force in 1870, we may speak of the modern German empire as the successor of the old Holy Roman Empire, if we remember that we are speaking of that Empire in its last two centuries of existence. The modern "Empire of Austria," on the other hand, does not connote an empire in the sense of a federation, but is a convenient designation for the sum of the territories ruled by a single sovereign under various titles (king of Bohemia, archduke of Austria, &c.) and unified in a single political system.[14] The title of Emperor was assumed, as we have seen, through an historical accident; and, though the Habsburgs of to-day are personally the lineal descendants of the old Holy Roman emperors, they do not in any way possess an empire that represents the old Holy Empire. In England, of recent years, the term "Empire" and the conception of imperialism have become prominent and crucial. To Englishmen to-day, as to Germans before 1870, the term and the conception stand for the greater unity and definitely federal government of a number of separate states. For the German, indeed, Empire has meant, in great measure, the strengthening of a loose federal institution by the addition of a common personal superior: to us it means the turning of a loose union of separate states already under a common personal superior--the King--into a federal commonwealth living under some common federal institutions. But the aim is much the same; it is the integration of a people under a single scheme which shall be consistent with a large measure of political autonomy. We speak of imperial federation; and indeed our modern imperialism is closely allied to federalism. Yet we do well to cling to the term empire rather than federation; for the one term emphasizes the whole and its unity, the other the part and its independence. This imperialism, which is federalism viewed as making for a single whole, is very different from that Bonapartist imperialism, which means autocracy; for its essence is free co-ordination, and the self-government of each co-ordinated part. The British Empire (q.v.) is, in a sense, an aspiration rather than a reality, a thought rather than a fact; but, just for that reason, it is like the old Empire of which we have spoken; and though it be neither Roman nor Holy, yet it has, like its prototype, one law, if not the law of Rome--one faith, if not in matters of religion, at any rate in the field of political and social ideals.

Authorities.--See, in the first place, J. Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_
(1904 edition); J. von Dollinger, article on "The Empire of Charles
the Great" (in _Essays on Historical and Literary Subjects_,
translated by Margaret Warre, 1894); H. Fisher, _The Medieval Empire_
(1898); E. Gibbon, _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, edited
by J.B. Bury. It would be impossible to refer to all the books bearing
on the article, but one may select (i.) for the period down to 476,
Stuart Jones, _The Roman Empire_ (1908), an excellent brief sketch; H.
Schiller, _Geschichte der romischen Kaiserzeit_ (1883-1888); O. Seeck,
_Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt_ (Band I., Berlin,
1897-1898, Band II., 1901) (a remarkable and stimulating book); and
the two excellent articles on "Imperium" and "Princeps" in Smith's
_Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities_ (1890); (ii.) for the
period from 476 down to 888, T. Hodgkin, _Italy and her Invaders_
(1880-1900); F. Gregorovius, _Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter_
(1886-1894; Eng. trans., London, 1894-1900); E. Lavisse, _Histoire de
France_, II. i. (1901); J.B. Bury, _History of the Later Roman Empire_
(1889); (iii.) for the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, W. von
Giesebrecht, _Geschichte der deutschen Kaiserzeit_ (1881-1890); J.
Zeller, _Histoire d'Allemagne_ (1872-1891); R.L. Poole, _Illustrations
of Medieval Thought_ (1884); S. Riezler, _Die literarischen
Widersacher der Papste zur Zeit Ludwigs des Baiers_ (1874); J.
Jannsen, _Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des
Mittelalters_ (1885-1894); L. von Ranke, _Deutsche Geschichte im
Zeitalter der Reformation_ (1839-1847), and _Zur deutschen
Geschichte_. _Vom Religionsfrieden bis zum dreissigjahrigen Krieg_
(1869); and T. Carlyle, _Frederick the Great_ (1872-1873). On the fall
of the Roman Empire and the transition to the modern German Empire see
Sir J.R. Seeley, _Life and Times of Stein_ (1878); H. von Treitschke,
_Deutsche Geschichte_ (1879-1894); and H. von Sybel, _Die Begrundung
des deutschen Reichs_ (1890-1894, Eng. trans., _The Founding of the
Germ. Emp._, New York, 1890-1891). For institutional history, see R.
Schroder, _Lehrbuch der deutschen Rechtsgeschichte_ (1894). On the
influence of the Holy Roman Empire upon the history of Germany, see J.
Ficker, _Das deutsche Kaiserreich_ (1861), and _Deutsches Konigtum und
Kaisertum_ (1862); and H. von Sybel, _Die deutsche Nation und das
Kaiserreich_ (1861). (E. Br.)

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Bryce points out, with much subtlety and truth, that the rise of
a second Rome in the East not only helped to perpetuate the Empire by
providing a new centre which would take the place of Rome when Rome
fell, but also tended to make it more universal; "for, having lost
its local centre, it subsisted no longer by historic right only, but,
so to speak, naturally, as a part of an order of things which a
change in external conditions seemed incapable of disturbing" (_Holy
Roman Empire_, p. 8 of the edition of 1904).

[2] The _de facto_ importance of the event of 476 can only be seen in
the light of later events, and it was not therefore noticed by
contemporaries. Marcellinus is the only contemporary who remarks on
its importance, cf. _Marcellini Chronicon_ (_Mon. Germ. Hist.,
Chronica minora._ ii. 91), _Hesperium Romanae gentis imperium ... cum
hoc Augustulo periit ... Gothorum dehinc regibus Romam tenentibus._

[3] A passage in Malchus, a Byzantine historian (quoted by Bryce,
_Holy Roman Empire_, p. 25, note _u_, in the edition of 1904),
expresses this truth exactly. The envoys sent to Zeno by Odoacer urge
[Greek: os hidias men autois basileias ou deoi koinos de hapochresei
monos on autokrator hep amphoterois tois perasi]. The envoys then
suggest the name of Odoacer, as one able to manage their affairs, and
ask Zeno to give him, _as an officer of the Empire_, the title of
Patricius and the administration of Italy.

[4] According to the view here followed, the Church was the ark in
which the conception of Empire was saved during the dark ages between
600 and 800. Some influence should perhaps also be assigned to Roman
law, which continued to be administered during these centuries,
especially in the towns, and maintained the imperial tradition. But
the influence of the Church is the essential fact.

[5] In the 5th century the title _patricius_ came to attach
particularly to the head of the Roman army (_magister utriusque
militiae_) to men like Aetius and Ricimer, who made and unmade
emperors (cf. Mommsen, _Gesammelte Schriften_, iv. 537, 545 sqq.).
Later it had been borne by the Greek exarchs of Ravenna. The
concession to Pippin of this great title makes him military head of
the Western empire, in the sense in which the title was used in the
5th century; it makes him representative of the Empire for Italy, in
the sense in which it had been used of the exarchs.

[6] See the famous bull _Venerabilem_ (_Corp. Jur. Canon._ Decr.
Greg. i. 6, c. 34).

[7] Even on this view, an imperial coronation at the hands of the
pope was necessary to complete the title; but this was regarded by
the Germans (though not by the pope) as a form which necessarily
followed.

[8] It is a curious fact that imperial titles (_imperator_ and
_basileus_) are used in the Anglo-Saxon diplomata of the 10th
century. Edred, for instance (946-955) is "imperator," "cyning and
casere totius Britanniae," "basileus Anglorum hujusque insulae
barbarorum": Edgar is "totius Albionis imperator Augustus" (cf.
Stubbs, _Const. Hist._ i. c. vii. S 71). These titles partly show the
turgidity of English Latinity in the 10th century, partly indicate
the quasi-imperial position held by the Wessex kings after the
reconquest of the Dane-law. But there seems to be no real ground for
Freeman's view (_Norman Conquest_, i. 548 sqq.), that England was
regarded as a third Empire, side by side with the other Empires of
West and East Europe. That the titles were assumed in order to
repudiate possible claims of the Western Empire to the overlordship
of England is disproved by the fact that they are assumed at a time
when there is no Western emperor. The assumption of an imperial style
by Henry VIII., which is mentioned below, is explained by the
Reformation, and does not mean any recurrence to a forgotten
Anglo-Saxon style.

[9] It is in virtue of this aspect that the Empire is holy. The term
_sacrum imperium_ seems to have been first used about the time of
Frederick I., when the emperors were anxious to magnify the sanctity
of their office in answer to papal opposition. The emperor himself
(see under EMPEROR) was always regarded, and at his coronation
treated, as a _persona ecclesiastica_.

[10] The emperor claimed suzerainty over the greater part of Europe
at various dates. Hungary and Poland, France and Spain, the
Scandinavian peninsula, the British Isles, were all claimed for the
Empire at different times (see Bryce, _Holy Roman Empire_, c. xii.).
The "effective" empire, if indeed it may be called effective,
embraced only Germany, Burgundy and the _regnum Italiae_ (the old
Lombard kingdom in the valley of the Po).

[11] Cf. the Act 25 Henry VIII. c. 22, S 1: "the lawful kings and
emperors of this realm."

[12] The Papacy, consistent to the last, formally protested at the
Congress of Vienna in 1815 against the failure of the Powers to
restore the Holy Roman Empire, the "centre of political unity" (Ed.).

[13] The Turks, occupying Constantinople, have also claimed to be the
heirs of the old emperors of Constantinople; and their sultans have
styled themselves _Keisar-i-Rum_.

[14] This does not, of course, apply to Hungary, which since 1867 has
not formed part of the Austrian empire and is ruled by the head of
the house of Habsburg not as emperor, but as king of Hungary.

EMPIRICISM (from Gr. [Greek: empeiros], skilled in, from [Greek: peira], experiment), in philosophy, the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-given data. It is opposed to all forms of intuitionalism, and holds that the mind is originally an absolute blank (_tabula rasa_), on which, as it were, sense-given impressions are mechanically recorded, without any action on the part of the mind. The process by which the mind is thus stored consists of an infinity of individual impressions. The frequent or invariable recurrence of similar series of events gives birth in the mind to what are wrongly called "laws"; in fact, these "laws" are merely statements of experience gathered together by association, and have no other kind of validity. In other words from the empirical standpoint the statement of such a "law" does not contain the word "must"; it merely asserts that such and such series have been invariably observed. In this theory there can strictly be no "causation"; one thing is observed to succeed another, but observations cannot assert that it is "caused" by that thing; it is _post hoc_, but not _propter hoc_. The idea of _necessary_ connexion is a purely mental idea, an a priori conception, in which observation of empirical data takes no part; empiricism in ethics likewise does away with the idea of the absolute authority of the moral law as conceived by the intuitionalists. The moral law is merely a collection of rules of conduct based on an infinite number of special cases in which the convenience of society or its rulers has subordinated the inclination of individuals. The fundamental objection to empiricism is that it fails to give an accurate explanation of experience; individual impressions as such are momentary, and their connexion into a body of coherent knowledge presupposes mental action distinct from mere receptivity. Empiricism was characteristic of all early speculation in Greece. During the middle ages the empiric spirit was in abeyance, but it revived from the time of Francis Bacon and was systematized especially in the English philosophers, Locke, Hume, the two Mills, Bentham and the associationist school generally.

See ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS; METAPHYSICS; PSYCHOLOGY; LOGIC; besides the
biographies of the empirical philosophers.

_In medicine_, the term is applied to a school of physicians who, in the time of Celsus and Galen, advocated accurate observation of the phenomena of health and disease in the belief that only by the collection of a vast mass of instances would a true science of medicine be attained. This point of view was carried to extremes by those who discarded all real study, and based their treatment on rules of thumb. Hence the modern sense of empirical as applied to the guess work of an untrained quack or charlatan.

EMPLOYERS' LIABILITY, and WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION.[1] The law of England as to the liability of employers in respect of personal injuries to their servants is regulated partly by the common law and partly by statute; but by the Employers' Liability Act 1880, such exceptions have been grafted upon the common law, and by the Workmen's Compensation Act 1906, principles so alien to the common law have been applied to most employments that it is impossible now to present any view of this branch of the law as a logical whole. All that can be done is to state the nature of the liability at common law. the extension of it effected by the Employers' Liability Act 1880, and the new liabilities introduced by later acts.

Common law.