Upon this world, informed by these ideas, there finally
descended, in the 5th century, the avalanche of barbaric invasion.
Its impact seemed to split the Empire into fragmentary
kingdoms; yet it left the universal Church intact,
and with it the conception of empire. With that
Barbarian invasions.
conception, indeed, the barbarians had already been for centuries
familiar: service in Roman armies, and settlement in Roman
territories, had made the Roman empire for them, as much as for
the civilized provincial, part of the order of the world. One of
the barbarian invaders, Odoacer (Odovakar), might seem, in 476,
to have swept away the Empire from the West, when he commanded
the abdication of Romulus Augustulus; and the date
476 has indeed been generally emphasized as marking “the fall
of the Western empire.” Other invaders, again, men like the
Frank Clovis or the great Ostrogoth Theodoric, might seem,
in succeeding years, to have completed the work of Odoacer,
and to have shattered the sorry scheme of the later Empire,
by remoulding it into national kingdoms. De facto, there is
some truth in such a view: de jure, there is none.[1] All that
Odoacer did was to abolish one of the two joint rulers of the
indivisible Empire, and to make the remaining ruler at Constantinople
sole emperor from the Bosporus to the pillars of
Hercules. He abolished the dual sovereignty which had been
inaugurated by Diocletian, and returned to the unity of the
Empire in the days of Marcus Aurelius. He did not abolish the
Roman empire in the West: he only abolished its separate ruler,
and, leaving the Empire itself subsisting, under the sway (nominal,
it is true, but none the less acknowledged) of the emperor resident
at Constantinople, he claimed to act as his vicar, under the name
of patrician, in the administration of the Italian provinces.[2]
As Odoacer thus fitted himself into the scheme of empire, so
did both Clovis and Theodoric. They do not claim to be
emperors (that was reserved for Charlemagne): they claim to
be the vicars and lieutenants of the Empire. Theodoric spoke
of himself to Zeno as imperio vestro famulans; he left
justice and administration in Roman hands, and maintained
two annual consuls in Rome. Clovis received the title of consul
from Anastasius; the Visigothic kings of Spain (like the kings
of the savage Lombards) styled themselves Flavii, and permitted
the cities of their eastern coast to send tribute to Constantinople.
Yet it must be admitted that, as a matter of fact, this adhesion
of the new barbaric kings to the Empire was little more than a
form. The Empire maintained its ideal unity by treating them
as its vicars; but they themselves were forming separate and
independent kingdoms within its borders. The Italy of the
Ostrogoths cannot have belonged, in any real sense, to the
Empire; otherwise Justinian would never have needed to attempt
its reconquest. And in the 7th and 8th centuries the form of
adhesion itself decayed: the emperor was retiring upon the
Greek world of the East, and the German conquerors, settled
within their kingdoms, lost the width of outlook of their old
migratory days.
It is here that the action of the Church becomes of supreme
importance. The Church had not ceased to believe in the
continuous life of the Empire. The Fathers had
taught that when the cycle of empires was finally
ended by the disappearance of the empire of Rome,
The Church and the Empire.
the days of Antichrist would dawn; and, since Antichrist
was not yet come, the Church believed that the Empire
still lived, and would continue to live till his coming. Meanwhile
the Eastern emperor, ever since Justinian’s reconquest of
Italy, had been able to maintain his hold on the centre of Italy;
and Rome itself, the seat of the head of the Church, still ranked
as one of the cities under his sway. The imperialist theory of
the Church found its satisfaction in this connexion of its head
with Constantinople; and as long as this connexion continued
to satisfy the Church, there was little prospect of any change.
For many years after their invasion of 568, the pressure which
the Lombards maintained on central Italy, from their kingdom
in the valley of the Po, kept the popes steadily faithful to the
emperor of the East and his representative in Italy, the exarch
of Ravenna. But it was not in the nature of things that such
Growing divergence between East and West.
The popes.
fidelity should continue unimpaired. The development
of the East and the West could not but proceed along
constantly diverging lines, until the point was reached
when their connexion must snap. On the one hand, the
development of the West set towards the increase of the
powers of the bishop of Rome until he reached a height
at which subjection to the emperor at Constantinople became
impossible. Residence in Rome, the old seat of empire, had in
itself given him a great prestige; and to this prestige St Gregory
(pope from 590 to 604) had added in a number of ways. He
was one of the Fathers of the Church, and turned its theology
into the channels in which it was to flow for centuries; he had
acquired for his church the great spiritual colony of England by
the mission of St Augustine; he had been the protector of Italy
against the Lombards. As the popes thus became more and
more spiritual emperors of the West, they found themselves less
and less able to remain the subjects of the lay emperor of the
East. Meanwhile the emperors of the East were led to interfere
in ecclesiastical affairs in a manner which the popes and the
Western Church refused to tolerate. Brought into contact with
the pure monotheism of Mahommedanism, Leo the Isaurian
(718–741) was stimulated into a crusade against image-worship,
in order to remove from the Christian Church the charge of
idolatry. The West clung to its images: the popes revolted
against his decrees; and the breach rapidly became irreparable.
As the hold of the Eastern emperor on central Italy began to be
shaken, the popes may have begun to cherish the hope of becoming
their successors and of founding a temporal dominion; and
that hope can only have contributed to the final dissolution of
their connexion with the Eastern empire.
Thus, in the course of the 8th century, the Empire, as represented by the emperors at Constantinople, had begun to fade utterly out of the West. It had been forgotten by lay sovereigns; it was being abandoned by the pope, who had been its chosen apostle. But it did not follow that, because the Eastern emperor ceased to be the representative of the Empire for the West, the conception of Empire itself therefore perished. The popes only abandoned the representative; they did not abandon the conception. If they had abandoned the conception, they would have abandoned the idea that there was an order of the world; they would have committed themselves to a belief in the coming of Antichrist. The conception of the world as a single Empire-Church remained: what had to be discovered was a new representative of one of the two sides of that conception. For a brief time, it would seem, the pope himself cherished the idea of becoming, in his own person, the successor of the ancient Caesars in their own old capital. By the aid of the Frankish kings, he had been able to stop the Lombards from acquiring the succession to the derelict territories of the Eastern emperor in Italy (from which their last exarch had fled overseas in 752), and he had become the temporal sovereign of those territories. Successor to the Eastern emperor in central Italy, why should he not also become his successor as representative of the Empire—all the more, since he was the head of the Church, which was coextensive with the Empire? Some such hope seems to inspire the Donation of Constantine, a document forged between 754 and 774, in which Constantine is represented as having conferred on Silvester I. the imperial palace and insignia, and therewith omnes Italiae seu occidentalium regionum provincias loca et civitates. But the hope, if it ever was cherished,
- ↑ 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.
- ↑ 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 ὡς ἰδίας μὲν αὐτοῖς βασιλείας οὐ δέοι κοινὸς δὲ ἀποχρήσει μόνος ὤν αὐτοκράτωρ ἐπ᾽ ἀμφοτέροις τοῖς πέρασι. 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.
