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 rôle; 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).
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 The Empire and the rise of the idea of national states. 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.
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
Influence
of the Reforma-tion.
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.[1] 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.
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,
The
Empire as
a German confedera-tion.
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
- ↑ Cf. the Act 25 Henry VIII. c. 22, § 1: “the lawful kings and emperors of this realm.”
