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 Besançon
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.
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 The Hohen-staufen emperors. 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 Overthrow of the Empire in Italy. 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.
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 The Empire from the election of Rudolph of Habsburg, 1273. 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
