Chapter IV: Part 4

In this way, in Gaul and Spain at least, the joint Vandal, Alan, and Suevian invasion is the beginning of the formation of the modern nations, though the invading nations themselves form no element in the later life of Gaul and only a secondary element in the later life of Spain. The later life of these lands, and that of Italy also, has sprung of the settlement of Teutonic nations in a Roman land, and of the mutual influences which Roman and Teuton have had on one another. Roman and Teuton lived side by side, and out of their living side by side has gradually sprung up a third thing different from either, a thing which we cannot call either Roman or Teutonic, or more truly a thing which we may call Roman and Teutonic and some other things as well, according to the side of it which we look at. This third thing is the Romance element in modern Europe, the Romance nations and their Romance tongues. Their birth, perhaps rather the appearance of their first germs, comes in the fifth century; we do not see them in their fulness till ages afterwards; but it is then that the causes out of which they sprang began to work. Unluckily it is hard to find a land in which the elements of the fifth century have been allowed to run their natural course undisturbed to this day. Italy had no chance. Had not the system of Theodoric been violently broken up, first by the Imperial reconquest, then by the Lombard invasion, Italy might have supplied the best of all studies of the way in which a Romance people with a Romance speech might grow up on the very soil of Rome herself. Spain supplied a more hopeful field; the position of the country hindered later Teutonic settlements; but the Saracen conqueror came before West-Goth and Roman had been thoroughly fused into one people. Hence came the distinctive character of Spanish history, the history of a people whose national life was formed by the need laid upon them of daily working out the Eternal Question in its sternest shape. Northern Gaul, unlike Spain and Italy, lay open to continued reinforcements of the Teutonic element within it. _Francia_ was an unbroken land lying far away on both sides of the Rhine, and the division into _Austria_ and _Neustria_ forestalls the later division into _Francia Teutonica_ and _Francia Latina_. The rise to power of the Austrasian Mayors was almost as much a Teutonic conquest of a Latin land as had been the first conquest by Chlodowig, and the settlement of the Normans in the tenth century brought in another Teutonic element in one part of the land. France then, in the narrower sense of that name, differs from Spain and Italy in the presence of these later Teutonic elements; but in Aquitaine and Provence they had little force; it is there, rather than anywhere else, that the normal result of the movements of the fifth century may be best studied. In the modern world of all, where those South-Gaulish lands have helped to make up the great nation of modern France, it is undoubtedly in that French nation that we can best study the threefold elements of a Romance people. The præ-Roman, the Roman, the Teutonic, elements are all there; the whole, as a whole, is none of the three, but the result of their fusion; but the whole, looked at from special sides only, may well be called by any name of the three. The blood must be mainly Celtic--in the south Iberian and Ligurian--but with some Roman and some Teutonic infusion. The speech is Latin, but with a larger Teutonic infusion than would be thought at first sight. The political history is that of a Teutonic kingdom, but a kingdom modified by planting its Teutonic kingship among the Latin-speaking folk of an originally Celtic land. The elements are fused into a whole; yet they still stand side by side; we cannot say that the Frank assimilated the Roman or that the Roman assimilated the Frank. The Frank learned the speech of the Roman; but in learning it he modified it, and he gave it his own name. The modern Frenchman is neither Roman nor Frank; he is rather the outcome of the settlement of the two in a land in which elements earlier than either have not been without their influence on both.

The mention of the earlier elements in Gaul, elements earlier than either Roman or Teuton, suggests yet another analogy between the age in which the Roman power was formed and the age in which it was broken in pieces. The Roman was so far from displacing the Greek tongue or Greek life, wherever he found them really established, that he became in some sort, not only their disciple, but their missionary. Wherever the Roman went, he carried some measure of Greek influences with him. The Roman conquest of Asia continued that work of hellenizing Asia which the Macedonian conquest had begun. It did much to root up elements older than Greek; it made the solid Asiatic peninsula, the special Romania of later times, into a land where in later times the Turk has come in on his errand of destruction, but where all that he has spared is still Greek. As the Roman did this work in the East, so the Teuton did a kindred work in the West; as the Roman everywhere carried Greece with him, so the Teuton everywhere carried Rome with him; his coming gave the finishing stroke to the rooting out of all elements older than the Roman conquest. Here and there old tongues and old beliefs had lingered till his coming; but for them he had not even those feeble traces of reverence which may have still lived on in the mind of a Roman of Gaul. He gladly learned the tongue of the Roman; he never learned the tongue of the Celt or the Iberian; he gladly bowed to the God whom Rome had learned to worship; nothing drew him either to the elder gods of Rome or to the gods elder still who were worshipped before the Roman came. In two corners only, special circumstances, taking the shape of a distinct reaction, allowed the elder races and tongues to put on a new life. The Gascon north of the Pyrenees and the Briton south of the Channel rose again, when elsewhere all kindred vestiges were dying out, to form each one a folk which has lived on to our own day as a survival of days, not only before Chlodowig and Ataulf, but before Gaius Julius and Gaius Sextius.

So grew up the new nations in the Western lands of Rome, the fruit in some sort, we may say, of the union of Gothia and Romania. But there were other nations which did not spring of that union, nations which kept their untouched Teutonic being, nations which still dwelled beyond the Empire, which within some small parts of the Empire settled in another sort from the Goth and the Burgundian nations. So it was in the island which we won, not from the Roman but from the Briton; so it was in the lands by Rhine and Danube, where our kinsfolk conquered almost in the same sort as we did. Yet even on lands and nations like these the influence of Rome was deep and abiding. Step by step they embraced the faith of Rome; and, without casting away their own tongues, they adopted the tongue of Rome as the tongue of learning and religion. So it was in Germany and Scandinavia; so it was in all the lands whose religion and culture came from Germany;--with the Slaves of the North-West who came within the world of the Western Cæsar and the Western Pontiff, even with the intruding Magyar whose coming split asunder the great Slavonic mass, and left the Pole and the Wend to look to the elder Rome, while the Serb and the Russian looked to the younger. But the great conquest--only which side was the conqueror?--was nearer home. It was another partnership between Gothia and Romania, though of quite another kind from that which was meant to come of the bride-ale of Narbonne, when Rome and Germany fused together their political being, and the Western Empire of Rome became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

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In our general survey of the fifth century in the West, we have passed but lightly over the most striking event of its earlier years, the taking of the Roman city by the Goth. Before the century was out, Rome had become used to capture and plunder. Gaiseric and Ricimer had harried her more fiercely than ever Alaric had done. As an event, as an incident, none in the whole history of the world was ever fitted to make a deeper impression on men’s minds than the first Teutonic capture of Rome. For the purposes of the preacher and the moralist it was all that the preachers and moralists of the time painted it. But on the actual course of events it had little effect. And why? Because the world had so largely become Rome that the momentary woes of the city which had once alone been Rome were of comparatively little moment. The invasion of Italy by Alaric led indirectly to those invasions of Gaul and Spain which laid the foundations of the modern world; but his actual sack of Rome had no effect on the busy series of revolutions which followed on those invasions. So it was with that other event of the later half of the century in which so many have so strangely seen the end of the Roman Empire, the boundary line between ancient and modern history. It was doubtless an impressive fact, we see in the annals of the time that it was an impressive fact, when Emperors ceased to reign either at Rome or at Ravenna. But as the news that the Roman Empire had come to an end would have sounded very strange at Constantinople, so it would have sounded no less strange at Soissons or at Salona. It did not greatly touch the Roman realm of Syagrius in northern Gaul that Italy had acknowledged Zeno as sole Emperor, and that he was represented in the Italian diocese by the patrician Odowakar. That those decent formalities veiled a revolution by which the reigning Emperor had been set aside by a chief of barbarian mercenaries was nothing new or wonderful. The only difference between the revolution of 476 and a crowd of earlier revolutions was that Odowakar found that it suited his purpose to acknowledge the nominal superiority of an absent sovereign rather than to reign in the name of a present puppet of his own creation. Presently it was found convenient at Constantinople to brand the patrician as a tyrant, and to grant a new commission to another Teutonic leader to displace him and to rule in his stead. The personal greatness of Theodoric overshadowed Emperor and Empire; from his palace at Ravenna, by one title or another, by direct dominion, as guardian, as elder kinsman, as representative of the Roman power, as head by natural selection of the whole Teutonic world, he ruled over all the western lands save one; and even to the conquering Frank he could say, Thus far shalt thou come and no further. In true majesty such a position was more than Imperial; moreover there was nothing in the rule of Theodoric which touched the Roman life of Italy. What might have happened if the East-Gothic power in Italy had been as lasting as the Frankish power in Gaul, or even as the West-Gothic power in Spain, it is vain to guess. As far as we can see, it was the very greatness of Theodoric which kept his power from being lasting. Like so many other of the very greatest of men, he set on foot a system which he himself could work, but which none but himself could work. He sought to set up a kingdom of Goths and Romans, under which the two nations should live side by side, distinct but friendly, each keeping its own law and doing its own work. And for one life-time the thing was done. Theodoric could keep the whole fabric of Roman life untouched, with the Goth standing by as an armed protector. He could, as he said, leave to the Roman consul the honours of government and take for the Gothic king only the toils. Smaller men neither could nor would do this, and even a succession of Theodorics could hardly have kept on for generations the peculiar relations between Goths and Romans which he established. His rule was the best, as that of the Franks was about the worst, to be found in Roman and Teutonic Europe in his day. Still fusion between Roman and Teuton was the very essence of Frankish rule; under the system of Theodoric no direct step towards fusion could be taken. It was the necessary result of his position that he gave Italy one generation of peace and prosperity such as has no fellow for ages on either side of it, but that, when he was gone, a fabric which had no foundation but his personal qualities broke down with a crash. Then came the two events of the sixth century at which we have already glanced. Italy was wasted by a long and bloody war, which in the end swept the East-Gothic people from the earth, and for a moment left the Roman Augustus undisputed master of every corner of the Italian peninsula. Then, before the land had rested from the long struggle, came another Teutonic invasion, the invasion of a people far less touched by Roman teaching than the Goths had been. The Lombards, establishing their rule and their name in the two ends of Italy, never won the whole of Italy. They never reigned in Rome; it was only in the last days of their power that they reigned in Ravenna. Throughout the land, if there was a bit of Lombardy here, there was a bit of untouched Romania there, and if the Roman Terminus often fell back, he also sometimes went forward. Even after the Lombard had yielded to the Frank, after the Frank had taken on himself the titles and mission of the Roman, a large part of Southern Italy, the once Greek land, with the old Greek life which had never wholly died out kept up and strengthened, acknowledged the lordship, not of the German-speaking Augustus of the Old Rome, but of the Greek-speaking Augustus of the New.

Of the Empire itself, its unions, its divisions, the general position which it kept in the world, I shall speak in another lecture. My present subject is the influence of Rome on the new nations which in the course of the fifth century found themselves homes within her borders. And that practically means her influence on the Teutonic nations of the Western European mainland. It is true that the greatest Teutonic migration of all, the long marches of the Goths, Eastern and Western, began in the East. While Vandals, Burgundians, Franks, came in by way of Rhine, the Goths came in by way of Danube. Their course in the Danubian lands forms one of the most striking pieces of the history of the fourth century and one of the most confused pieces of the history of the fifth. But that history of the Goths which really affected the world, the history both of the West-Goths of Alaric and of the East-Goths of Theodoric, was wrought in the West. The Western Goths, as their name implies, came before the Eastern and found homes further to the West. And after the withdrawal of Theodoric and the East-Goths from the Eastern provinces, those provinces which still remained under the immediate rule of the Emperors at the New Rome, all part of the first Teutonic invaders in the history of the Eastern peninsula may be said to come to an end. In that peninsula they had been hardly more than invaders; they had formed no important abiding settlement. For them the Eastern lands were mainly a road to Italy and Spain and Gaul. The part which the Teutons played in the West was to be played in the East, so far as it was to be played at all, by quite another branch of the Aryan stock.

I have often had to point out the analogy between the position of the Teutonic settlers in the West and that of the Slavonic settlers in the East. The East, mainly the South-East, of Europe is the true field for Slavonic growth. Of the Slaves of the North-West we have already spoken a word or two, as coming within the range of the dominion and the creed of the Western Rome. The North-Western Slaves have been largely exterminated or assimilated by Teutonic conquerors; even those who escaped this lot have passed, by their union with the Latin Church, into the general group of the nations of Western Europe. The historic calling of the Slavonic nations lies in the East, within the range of the Eastern Empire and the Eastern Church. There we may make our comparison between their position towards that side of the Roman world and the position of the Teutons towards its Western side. The analogy between the two is real and strong; but it is an analogy which presents almost as many points of contrast as of likeness. In the phrase that I have so often had to use, the Slaves were to the Eastern lands of Rome, as the Teutons were to the Western, at once conquerors and disciples. But they were neither conquerors nor disciples in exactly the same sense. The difference largely turned on the different positions of the Old and the New Rome. In the West, the more deeply Roman influences took root, the less did the city of Rome show itself as a seat of actual rule, till the days came when it became the seat of an œcumenical rule of another kind. From the third century to the nineteenth, Rome never was the abiding dwelling-place of Emperors; wherever they dwelled, they were, as far as the local Rome was concerned, non-resident. The influence of Rome, the use of the Roman language, had nothing to do with any political boundary; it was only here and there, in the Exarchate and in the Imperial possessions in Spain, that there was any distinct geographical frontier between Roman and Teutonic rule. The possession of the Roman city did not necessarily carry with it any special dominion in other Roman lands, and a great dominion in other Roman lands might be won without its possession. With the Eastern Rome it was far otherwise; there the city was the life and soul and centre of all. The too discerning eye of its founder had planted his New Rome at the junction of two worlds, to prolong the being of successive powers which, save for its possession, might sooner have passed away. Constantinople was never without an Emperor dwelling within its walls, and holding a greater or less extent of territory in fact as well as in name. His boundaries might fluctuate; the position of this or that land might fluctuate. In the process of constant warfare along a long and ill-defined boundary, this or that land or city might sometimes be under the undisputed authority of the Emperor; it might sometimes be absolutely cut off from the Empire and form part of a barbarian kingdom; it might sometimes be in the intermediate state of a dependency over which the Emperor held an outward superiority which he could enforce or not according to circumstances. All this has its like in the West; but there is nothing in the West like the firm abiding of the Imperial power at Constantinople. Whatever was the extent or the nature of the dominion of the Eastern Emperor, the Eastern Rome was its local centre, the spot to which every corner of that dominion looked as its head. No Slavonic host harried the Eastern Rome as so many Teutonic hosts harried the Western. No king of a Slavonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Sophia, as so many kings of a Teutonic people received an Imperial crown in Saint Peter’s. The utmost that such a king could do was to set up a Tzarigrad of his own, to wear a crown which he loved to call Imperial at Ochrida or at Skoupi. The Slave became in many things a disciple of the Eastern Rome, but in some things he was perhaps an imitator rather than a disciple. He always remained an outsider, in a way in which the Teuton did not remain in the West. In religious worship, above all, he never adopted either of the tongues of the Empire; he could become a disciple without becoming a subject. No new speech, no new nationality, arose in the East out of a mixture of Slavonic and Roman or Greek elements, answering to the formation of the Romance tongues and nations of the West. One cause, as we shall hereafter see, was that the Eastern Rome spoke with two tongues, while the Western Rome spoke with one only. There is a Romance nation in the East, but the Slave was not one of its component elements; the Slavonic invasion in short did not a little to hinder its growth. On many of these points I may have to speak again. The main business of the present lecture lies in the West, in the Western lands of the European mainland. Yet we must not forget that the birth of our own nation, the settlement of our forefathers in our second home, came within the bounds of the same century which saw Burgundian, Gothic, and Frankish kingdoms arise in Gaul. But we, in our island home, our _alter orbis_, stood largely aloof from the revolutions of the mainland. Our own tale must be told separately, and it cannot be told in all its fulness till the revolutions of the mainland are fully understood. To-day we have had to deal with the settlements of our kinsfolk in the continental provinces of the West. At the East we have simply glanced. We shall have to speak of it more fully when we come to speak of the causes which split East and West apart for ever.

LECTURE IV.

THE DIVIDED EMPIRE.

The most renowned of my predecessors in this chair, in planning that History of Rome which unhappily remained a fragment, but which gave to the world in its last finished volume the very perfection of historical narrative, designed to carry on his work to the coronation of Charles the Great. The reading and thought of forty years have ever more and more convinced me of the wisdom of Arnold’s choice. The year 800 was not, any more than the year 476, the end of the Roman Empire; it is not, any more than the year 476, a boundary between “Ancient” and “Modern” History. But it is one of the most marked turning-points in the history of the Empire and of the world, a turning-point of immeasureably greater moment than the consulship of Basiliscus and Armatus. The election of the first Charles changed the face of the world far more than the deposition of the last Romulus. Of a History of Rome such as Arnold planned, it was, as the wise instinct of Arnold saw, the fitting ending. The election of Charles did, in outward show, restore the Old Rome to her old position. She again became, if not the dwelling-place, at least the crowning-place, of Emperors. In truth the Old Rome had never before beheld the ancient Hebrew rite which, from the fifth century onwards, had become familiar in the New. For a thousand years longer the titles of her Empire went on; for seven hundred years longer they could be won only before the altar of the Vatican basilica. For full five hundred years longer the Roman Empire of the West was, as such, a living thing, a thing that influenced the minds and acts of men, a mighty fact, a still mightier theory. But in the West the Emperor of the Romans had less and less to do with the Old Rome. To his Imperial capital he gradually became a stranger, and his capital became a city of strangers to him. In short, the Roman power in the West altogether passed away, not only from the Roman city, but from the artificial Roman nation. When Rome again asserted her right to choose her sovereign, she chose, she could not fail to choose, a man who was not Roman even by adoption. She chose the Frankish king. Pippin had been Patrician; so had Ricimer; so had Odowakar. But the son of Pippin bore a loftier style. The long-abiding tradition was broken through; a barbarian received the diadem; the Roman Pontiff spoke the words, and the Roman people echoed them--“Karolo Augusto, a Deo coronato, magno et pacifico Romanorum Imperatori, vita et victoria.” The German was at last Augustus. No greater witness could there be to the moral conquest which each race had won over the other. The Empire now in form received its greatest territorial enlargement. Gaul was won back and Germany was added. Wherever the Frankish king had before ruled as king, he now ruled as Emperor. Terminus advanced to the Elbe and the Eider; he was ready to advance to the Oder and the Vistula, or, if need should be, to the world’s end. All unreal, all nominal, some objector will cry; an advance, not of Rome, but of Germany, an advance, not of the Roman Augustus, but of the Frankish king. And truly the Empire of Charles, much more the Empire of the Henries and Fredericks, was unreal in this, that it was assuredly a very different thing from the Empire of Trajan or of Diocletian. It was assuredly not Roman in the sense in which the Empire even of Theodosius was Roman. But here lies the greatest proof of the influence of Rome, of her magic power over the minds of men, that a power which had practically ceased to be Roman, should still be Roman in men’s eyes, and, as Roman, should command a reverence, a devotion, a bowing down as it were of the whole soul, which could be called forth by no other name. A name may have lost its first meaning; but, as long as men will fight and die for the name, the name is a fact indeed.

The act of 800, it must always be borne in mind, was in one sense the repetition, in another sense the undoing, of the act of 476; but it was in no case the revival of the line of Emperors which came to an end in 476. Charles, Emperor of the Romans, was not the successor after a long interval either of Romulus Augustulus or of Julius Nepos; he was the immediate successor of Constantine the Sixth. The Emperors had lost all practical authority in Rome earlier in the century; their power had passed to the Frank. Charles Augustus received no powers which he had not already exercised as Patrician; only hitherto the titles of sovereignty had been left to the Emperor beyond the sea. The name now went with the reality; the titles and badges of Empire were transferred to the new Emperor reigning at Rome, at least crowned and anointed at Rome. There was no need to depose any reigning sovereign. Rome had acknowledged Constantine; she refused to acknowledge Eirênê; the Empire could not be held by a woman, least of all by a woman who had deposed and blinded her own son. There was again an interregnum, such as had followed the death of Romulus and the death of Aurelian; that interregnum was ended by the election of Charles. In Western theory no doubt, Charles himself, and each of his successors, was elected to the sovereignty of the whole Empire; he was to reign, if he could, over the New Rome as well as over the Old. In Eastern theory no doubt the election and coronation were null and void; the Emperor anointed in Saint Sophia had a right which none could take away to reign over the Old Rome as well as over the New. Each Emperor in short asserted himself to be the one true Emperor and the other to be an impostor or a tyrant. The dispute was for some centuries stirred up afresh from time to time at some moment favourable for its discussion. To men zealous for Eastern rights the Western claimant was a mere Ἀλαμανῶν ῥήξ; to men zealous for Western rights the Eastern claimant was nothing loftier than “Rex Græciæ.” The most curious piece of discussion on the subject is the memorable controversy, waged by or invented for Basil of the East and Lewis of the West, while the grounds of the dispute were still fresh. It was a moment of pride for Charles the Great himself when Nikêphoros waived his claim to universal rule, when he admitted the Frankish king as his equal and bade his ambassadors adore him as _Imperator_ and βασιλεύς. A conflict of claims like this, in which each of the two greatest princes of Christendom gave himself out to be the one head of Christendom, might have been expected to lead to something more than constant disputes and jealousies; it might have been expected to lead to constant wars. As a matter of fact, formal wars between the two Empires were not common; there was little to gain by them on either side. But rivalry and ill-feeling went on between the princes of the West and of the East, between the men of the West and of the East, to the great damage of Christendom in more than one hour of need.

The truest view of the event of 800 is that the existing Empire was split asunder, and that the western fragment, that which acknowledged the Frankish king as its Emperor, was in form enlarged by the addition of the territories of the Frankish king. The Empire was now really split asunder; it was split asunder between two rivals, each of whom held himself to be the one lawful representative of their common predecessors. This state of things must not be confounded with the state of things in the fifth century. The Empire was now divided in quite another way from that in which it had been divided between the sons of Theodosius. The division between the sons of Theodosius did not differ in form from the division between the sons of Constantine or the earlier division between Diocletian and Maximian. The division between Arcadius and Honorius, and the Emperors who followed them in the fifth century, was a division by consent; the administration of a single Empire was divided, as it had often been before, between two Imperial colleagues. But now it was divided between two rival potentates, each of whom was in theory bound to deny the rights of the other. Then the West was often willing to accept the prince named by the Emperor who reigned over the East; now assuredly no prince named by the lord of Constantinople, the “rex Græciæ,” would have been admitted to royal and imperial unction at Aachen, at Milan, and at Rome. But mark further that the Western division, the Western Empire, was not only parted from the Eastern, but was enlarged by the addition of new territories, over a great part of which no Emperor had ever reigned before. If Charles had kept his Frankish and Lombard kingdoms distinct from his Roman Empire, the last would have consisted only of Rome and Ravenna and the lands about those cities. No one so well deserved the somewhat grotesque title of his later successors, “zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs,” as the first Emperor who could have understood his own description in any Teutonic tongue. Charles, as I said earlier in these lectures, annexed the lands which Drusus and Germanicus had failed to annex. But to what did he annex them? Assuredly to something very different from the Empire of the first Augustus, to something very different from that western half of the Empire of Augustus which had been reigned over by Maximian and Valentinian. And the effect of the annexation was widely different from what it would have been if it had been made either by Drusus or by Valentinian. The main difference lies in this, that whatever was annexed to the Empire at either of the earlier times was forthwith added to the artificial Roman nation that was growing up, while the inclusion of the whole dominions of Charles within the Empire, though it still carried with it an extension of Roman influences, in no way carried with it any extension of an artificial Roman nation. The new subjects of the Roman Empire, the inhabitants of Gaul and Germany, assuredly did not feel that they had become Romans. The election of Charles to the Empire, the annexation of all his dominions to the Empire, did far more to make the Empire German than it did to make Germany Roman. The Roman style of the Empire is still very much more than a name; its Roman traditions are still very much more than mere words; it is still by its abiding Roman character that it keeps its influence over the minds of men. But it is now altogether divorced from any practical connexion with the Roman city and with the Roman nation. It was nothing new that Emperors should be made elsewhere than in Rome; that discovery was made before the first century of the Empire ended. But the Emperors so made were Romans, Roman in speech, Roman at one stage by real citizenship, at another by artificial nationality. It was something new that Rome should be the crowning-place, and only the crowning-place, of Emperors who were Roman in no sense but that of being Roman Emperors. The Emperor was _Romanorum Imperator_ to the last; but who were the _Romani_? Were they the inhabitants of the Empire as a body? The mass of them would assuredly have disclaimed the Roman name. Or had the name fallen back on its elder and narrower senses in which it meant only the people of the Roman city? But in Rome itself the authority of the Roman Emperor passed away more thoroughly and more formally than elsewhere. The _Imperator_ and the _Pontifex Maximus_ had long ceased to be the same, and in Rome the _Pontifex Maximus_ of the new faith had become the true local sovereign. For ages the _Imperator_ came to Rome only to become _Imperator_, and then to go away. At last, when the succession begun by Charles was drawing near its thousandth year, an _Imperator electus_ came to Rome, and went away without winning the right to cast aside his qualifying adjective.

The truest description of the Western Empire during the thousand years from the first Charles to the last Francis is that which sounds so like a contradiction, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” It remained by the strictest continuity a Roman Empire; once accept the position of the Western Emperors as against the Eastern, and no flaw can be found in the whole succession. But the Roman Empire had become a possession of the German nation; German electors chose a German king, and the German king had a right to receive his consecration as Roman Emperor without any further questions being asked.

“Ex quo Romanum nostra virtute redemptum,
Hostibus expulsis, ad nos justissimus ordo
Transtulit imperium, Romani gloria regni
Nos penes est: quemcumque sibi Germania regem
Præficit, hunc dives submisso vertice Roma
Suscipit, et verso Tiberim regit ordine Rhenus.”

An older form of the same idea is found in the phrase which spoke of the translation of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks. Translated to the Franks, the Empire, as concerns the West, assuredly was; and, on the Western theory, it may in a sense be said to be translated from the Greeks. A line of Emperors whose native speech was German succeeded, in Western ideas, a line of Emperors whose native speech was Greek. Yet the phrase will not stand every test. The words “Greek” and “Frank,” as used in the formula, do not exactly answer to one another. A man of the East, if he could have brought himself to allow that the Empire had been translated at all from his own side of Hadria, would have said that the formula should rather speak of a translation of the Empire from the Romans to the Franks. But no one in the West would have thought of saying that the Empire was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. We have just heard the Western Empire called, with national pride, a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But no national pride could have been called up by speaking of the Eastern Empire as a Holy Roman Empire of the Greek nation. For “German” was a national name in which the men of the Western Empire gloried; “Greek” was a name which no man of the Eastern Empire admitted to belong to him. It is perfectly true that the two Empires did in the end become, the one a German, the other a Greek state. But they became German and Greek in different senses and by different processes. We see at once that the Western Empire became German through the election of a German king to its crown. It seems ridiculous to speak, even for the sake of pointing the contrast, of the Eastern Empire becoming Greek by the election of a Greek king to its crown. Something like that might happen in the nineteenth century; it could not possibly happen in the ninth. We may here bring in the analogy and the contrast of which I spoke at the end of our last lecture. The nearest analogy to be found in the East to the Empire of Charles the Frank would have been if Bulgarian Simeon or Servian Stephen had been crowned Emperor of the Romans in Saint Sophia and had from that moment reigned over Bulgaria or Servia in his character of Emperor of the Romans. But the nearest approach to this was when the Tzar Simeon and the Tzar Stephen took an Imperial style without entering the walls of the Tzarigrad. That such was the nearest approach in the East to the event of the year 800 is the most marked point of difference between the positions of the Teuton in the West and the Slave in the East. One main reason why it was the nearest approach lies in the different positions held by the Old and the New Rome in the two Empires. For another main reason we must look a little further.

I said a few minutes back that a man in the East might perhaps have said that the Empire was translated to the Franks from the Romans, but that no man in the West would ever have said that the Empire was translated from the Greeks to the Romans. I said also in my last lecture that one great cause of the different position held by the Teutons in the West and by the Slaves in the East was that the Eastern Empire spoke with two tongues, while the Western Empire spoke with one tongue only. The cause of that difference has to be sought for in far earlier stages of our subject; it is the continuation of the difference which I pointed out long ago between the position of Rome in the East and in the West; the difference that, while in both alike Rome was a ruler, in the West she was also a teacher, while in the East she was herself a learner. In the West Latin displaced the native languages. We may say that no Roman ever learned Celtic or Iberian. If any Roman ever did, it could have been only for some immediate practical purpose. But in the East Latin never displaced Greek; it was not likely to displace, there was no wish that it should displace, a tongue which every educated Roman learned as a matter of course. The tendency was rather the other way. At one stage, as I pointed out in another set of lectures, Greek went far to displace Latin as a literary tongue even in Rome; the later Latin writers, like Ammianus and Claudian, mark in truth a Latin reaction against Greek influences. In the Greek East Greek lived on and flourished; Latin was simply set up by its side for certain purposes. The Roman Empire of course, whether in East or West, knew no official tongue but Latin. Latin therefore remained for ages the tongue of government and warfare in the Roman East, while Greek was the language of ordinary speech, of literature, and of religion. That is to say, the position which belonged to Latin alone in the West was in the East divided between Latin and Greek. It was impossible therefore that either of those tongues should make the same way among other nations which Latin, with its undivided supremacy, made in the West. In those parts of Eastern Europe where Greek had not already established itself, the phænomena of Western Europe showed themselves. In inland Thrace and Mœsia, just as in Gaul and Spain, a Romance speech did spring up, and in the wilder lands of Illyricum, the Skipetar, the modern Albanian, still kept his own speech, like the Basque and the Breton of the West. Thus to the invading Teuton, the culture of the Empire presented itself only in a single shape, a Latin shape, while the invading Slave, if he wished to adopt the culture of the Empire, must have been puzzled by the twofold shape, Greek and Latin, in which it stood before him. It was an almost necessary consequence that neither element ever had the same influence on the Slavonic conquerors of the East which the single Latin element had on the Teutonic conquerors of the West.

I have said that the Roman Empire of the West became by degrees a German power, and that the Roman Empire of the East became by degrees a Greek power. But I have said also that they became so in different ways. We have seen that the Western Empire became German by the process of choosing German kings to its Emperors, and by extending the name of Roman Empire over their German dominions. The Eastern Empire became Greek in quite another way. There was no transfer of Roman power to Greek princes, no extension of the Roman name over Greek lands. Either process might have happened with Slavonic princes and Slavonic lands; neither could happen with Greek princes or Greek lands, for the simple reason that Greek princes and lands, as distinguished from Roman, were not in being. In the Romania of the East, in Eastern Europe and Western Asia, Greek and Roman meant the same thing. We have spoken of an artificial Greek nation and of an artificial Roman nation; in the Eastern Romania they were the same thing. Of the two tongues of the East-Roman world, the tongue which was native to the soil proved the stronger. Latin gradually died out even in its own range; it died out, that is, as a separate speech, though not till it had poured a vast infusion of Latin words into the official Greek vocabulary. Greek became the one language of the Roman Empire of the East; as in the West the Romance languages grew up, while Latin long abode beside them as an official, a literary, and a religious speech, so in the East men spoke a more modern form of the Greek tongue, while its older shape went on as the official, the literary, and the religious speech. But down to the coming of the Ottoman, nay down to the movement of our own century which in some lands has thrown off his yoke, the Roman name lived on. What name in short should supplant it? The name of _Hellên_ had passed away; it had become synonymous with _pagan_. The Greek name had never been used in the Hellenic lands; it was the name by which the Hellênes were known in the West, exactly as the _Deutschen_ and the _Cymry_ are known among other nations by other names than those by which they call themselves. In truth the people whom the Latins called _Græci_ called themselves at one stage Ἕλληνες and at another Ῥωμαῖοι. The Roman name lived on, and well it might; there was nothing to change it. While the Western part of the Empire was first united to the Eastern and then separated from it, while it was separated from it to pass to one who was first Patrician of the Romans and then Emperor of the Romans, but who would hardly have called himself personally a Roman, the Eastern lands of Rome were ruled in unbroken succession by princes following one another in the same Imperial seat, any one of whom would have been amazed indeed if his right to the Roman name had been disputed. Prince and people alike clave to that name and knew no other; and Romans they were, not in the same sense as the first settlers on the Palatine, not even in the same sense as the Volscian Cicero and the Spaniard Trajan; but in the sense in which their forefathers had become Romans by the edict of Antoninus. They were Romans by the same right as Theodosius when he came as a second Trajan from Spain, as Jovius himself when he came from the land that should be Tzernagora. It would have been hard to find a Roman pedigree for Justinian; but neither would it have been easy to find one for Aurelian. The Greek--not the pure Hellên of old but the Greek of the artificial nation formed by Macedonian conquest--had the same right to the Roman name which the Gaul had; so to be sure had the Syrian and the Egyptian. But then the Syrian and the Egyptian could hardly be said to accept the gift; under the guise of national creeds, creeds that were deemed heretical by the orthodoxy of either Rome, they clave to an elder national being which was neither Greek nor Roman, and they fell away from their Roman allegiance to become not wholly unwilling subjects of the Saracen. The very losses of the Empire, the cutting off of its Eastern provinces, helped, not indeed to make the Empire more Roman, but to make Roman and Greek more thoroughly words of the same meaning within its Eastern provinces. In the course of the seventh century, the Oriental lands of Syria and Egypt, the Latin lands of Spain and Africa, were finally torn away from the Empire. Part of Latin Italy had already passed to the Lombard; the rest now followed it to form the kernel of the new Roman Empire of the West. The result of all this was that, from Sicily to Tauros, the subjects left to the Empire, the Romans of the East, were almost wholly men of Greek speech and of what we have called artificial Greek nationality. Within the Eastern Empire the artificial Greek nation and the artificial Roman nation seemed to have become the same thing. Every Greek was a Roman; it seemed as if every Roman was a Greek. It was not wholly so; even within the Eastern peninsula the Albanian and the Rouman nationalities were still to show themselves. But to all appearance the Roman lands of the East were as purely Greek-speaking lands as the Roman lands of the West were Latin-speaking lands. If the Western Empire became German, it was by choosing a German king and in some sort adopting his German subjects. If the Eastern Empire became Greek, it was because the un-Greek parts were lopped off from it. To this process the finishing stroke was put by the event of 800. Latin Italy then parted, even in name, from its allegiance to the Eastern Rome. The prince who reigned at Constantinople was by the truest political succession Emperor of the Romans; but the Romans who were left for him to rule over were well nigh wholly Greek.

In this way therefore, and largely by virtue of the same act, the Eastern Empire became Greek, while the Western Empire became German. The one became Greek through one of its old elements obtaining an exclusive predominance; the other became German by bringing in an element altogether new. But in becoming severally German and Greek, neither ceased to be Roman. The Roman spirit might die out; but the Roman succession went on; the Roman tradition was never broken. In the East the tie to the Roman past was never snapped; if it passed away, it was because the Romans of the East seemed almost to forget that there had ever been any Romans but themselves or any Rome but their own. In the West, on the other hand, the tie to the Roman past was never formally snapped any more than in the East; but it passed away because it was overshadowed and stifled by the un-Roman institutions that grew up by the side of it. The Augustus of the East was Emperor of the Romans and nothing more; it was strange that the diadem of Jovius should be conferred by a Christian unction, but what the Christian unction of the East did confer was the diadem of Jovius and none other. The Augustus of the West was also King of Germany, of Italy, and of Burgundy; Aachen, Milan, Arles, had their share in making him as well as the Eternal City. Take away the German, the Italian, and the Burgundian realms, and it might be hard to find on the map the lands over which Cæsar ruled purely in his character of Cæsar. Again, in the East, wherever the Emperor reigned at all, he truly reigned. Did the Empire reach once more from Ister to Orontes, from Ararat to Ætna? Was it shut up within a corner of Thrace and a fragment of the coast of Asia? In either case, be the Empire great or small, be its sovereign the mighty Macedonian or the trembling Palaiologos, wherever he was sovereign at all, he was βασιλεύς and αὐτοκράτωρ in the fullest sense. In the West, through the growth of a new set of ideas and institutions, the Emperor, still keeping all his titles, all his formal dignity, still worshipped with a ceremonial only less stately than that of his Eastern brother, gradually sank into a mere chief of unruly feudatories, into a mere President, it might seem, of a Confederation in which every member was stronger than the head. An Eastern Emperor might expect to be slain or blinded to make room for another; but, while he kept his life and his eyes, his will was undisputed. A Western Emperor was commonly free from such extreme changes of fortune. A few only died on the battle-field or by private murder, and those few at least enjoyed the light of heaven till their last moments. But while they reigned, while men called them Lords of the World, Vicars of the Almighty, if they loved the truth of power rather than its show, they might have been tempted to envy the smallest of their vassals who within a few roods of ground did without let or hindrance that which was right in his own eyes.

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