the Great had awarded the tiara. But a little later Henry VI of Hohenstaufen succeeded in the opposite sense; even Richard Cœur-de-Lion swore the vassal's oath to him for England, and the universal Empire was on the point of becoming a fact when the greatest of all popes, Innocent III (1198-1216) made the papal overlordship of the world real for a short time. England became a Papal fief in 1213; Aragon and Leon and Portugal, Denmark and Poland and Hungary, Armenia and the recently founded Latin Empire in Byzantium followed. But with Innocent's death disintegration set in within the Church itself, and the great spiritual dignitaries, whom their investitures turned into vassals of the Pope as overlord, soon followed the lay vassals' example and set about limiting him by means of respresentative institutions for their order.[1] The notion that a General Council stood higher than a pope was not of religious origin, but arose primarily out of the feudal principle. Its tendency corresponded precisely to that which the English magnates had made good in Magna Charta. In the councils of Constance (1414) and Basel (1431) the last attempts were made to turn the Church, under its temporal aspect, into a clerical feudalism, in which an oligarchy of cardinals would have become the representative of the whole Clerical Estate of the West and taken the place hitherto held by the Roman nobility. But by that time the feudal idea had long taken second place to that of the State, and so the Roman barons won the victory. The field of candidature for the Papacy was limited to the narrowest environs of Rome, and unlimited power over the organizations of the Church was ipso facto secured to the centre. As for the Empire, it had long ago become a venerated shadow, like the Egyptian and the Chinese.
In comparison with the immense dynamism of these decisions, the building-up of feudalism in the Classical world was slow, static, almost noiseless, so that it is hardly recognizable save from the traces of transition. In the Homeric epos as we have it now, every locality possesses its Basileus, who, it is fairly evident, was once a great vassal — we can see in the figure of Agamemnon the conditions in which the ruler of a wide region took the field with the train of his peers. But in the Greek world the dissolution of the feudal world was associated with the formation of the city-state, the political "point." In consequence, the hereditary court-offices, the archai and timai, the prytaneis, the Archons, and perhaps the original Prætor,[2] were all urban in nature; and the
- ↑ It must not be forgotten that the immense domains of the Church had become hereditary fiefs of the bishops and archbishops, who were no more disposed than the lay peers to permit interferences on the part of the overlord.
- ↑ After the overthrow of the Tyrannis, c. 500, the two regents of the Roman patriciate bear the title prætor or judex. But it seems to me probable that these go back beyond the Tyrannis and even the preceding oligarchic period into that of the kingship proper, and that as court-offices they have the same origin as our Herzog, duke (præ-itor); Heerwart, in Athens polemarch; and Graf, earl ("Dinggraf" hereditary arbiter, in Athens archon). The name "consul" (from 366) is philologically thoroughly archaic, and therefore implies no new creation, but the renascence of a title (king's adviser?) which oligarchic sentiment had long repudiated.
