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In the connection of the church and state, I have considered
the former as subservient only, and relative, to the latter;
a salutary maxim, if in fact, as well as in narrative, it
had ever been held sacred. The Oriental philosophy of the
Gnostics, the dark abyss of predestination and grace, and
the strange transformation of the Eucharist from the sign to
the substance of Christ's body, (1) I have purposely
abandoned to the curiosity of speculative divines. But I
have reviewed, with diligence and pleasure, the objects of
ecclesiastical history, by which the decline and fall of the
Roman empire were materially affected, the propagation of
Christianity, the constitution of the Catholic church, the
ruin of Paganism, and the sects that arose from the
mysterious controversies concerning the Trinity and
incarnation. At the head of this class, we may justly rank
the worship of images, so fiercely disputed in the eighth
and ninth centuries; since a question of popular
superstition produced the revolt of Italy, the temporal
power of the popes, and the restoration of the Roman empire
in the West.
The primitive Christians were possessed with an
unconquerable repugnance to the use and abuse of images; and
this aversion may be ascribed to their descent from the
Jews, and their enmity to the Greeks. The Mosaic law had
severely proscribed all representations of the Deity; and
that precept was firmly established in the principles and
practice of the chosen people. The wit of the Christian
apologists was pointed against the foolish idolaters, who
bowed before the workmanship of their own hands; the images
of brass and marble, which, had they been endowed with sense
and motion, should have started rather from the pedestal to
adore the creative powers of the artist. (2) Perhaps some
recent and imperfect converts of the Gnostic tribe might
crown the statues of Christ and St. Paul with the profane
honors which they paid to those of Aristotle and Pythagoras;
(3) but the public religion of the Catholics was uniformly
simple and spiritual; and the first notice of the use of
pictures is in the censure of the council of Illiberis,
three hundred years after the Christian aera. Under the
successors of Constantine, in the peace and luxury of the
triumphant church, the more prudent bishops condescended to
indulge a visible superstition, for the benefit of the
multitude; and, after the ruin of Paganism, they were no
longer restrained by the apprehension of an odious parallel.
The first introduction of a symbolic worship was in the
veneration of the cross, and of relics. The saints and
martyrs, whose intercession was implored, were seated on the
right hand if God; but the gracious and often supernatural
favors, which, in the popular belief, were showered round
their tomb, conveyed an unquestionable sanction of the
devout pilgrims, who visited, and touched, and kissed these
lifeless remains, the memorials of their merits and
sufferings. (4) But a memorial, more interesting than the
skull or the sandals of a departed worthy, is the faithful
copy of his person and features, delineated by the arts of
painting or sculpture. In every age, such copies, so
congenial to human feelings, have been cherished by the zeal
of private friendship, or public esteem: the images of the
Roman emperors were adored with civil, and almost religious,
honors; a reverence less ostentatious, but more sincere, was
applied to the statues of sages and patriots; and these
profane virtues, these splendid sins, disappeared in the
presence of the holy men, who had died for their celestial
and everlasting country. At first, the experiment was made
with caution and scruple; and the venerable pictures were
discreetly allowed to instruct the ignorant, to awaken the
cold, and to gratify the prejudices of the heathen
proselytes. By a slow though inevitable progression, the
honors of the original were transferred to the copy: the
devout Christian prayed before the image of a saint; and the
Pagan rites of genuflection, luminaries, and incense, again
stole into the Catholic church. The scruples of reason, or
piety, were silenced by the strong evidence of visions and
miracles; and the pictures which speak, and move, and bleed,
must be endowed with a divine energy, and may be considered
as the proper objects of religious adoration. The most
audacious pencil might tremble in the rash attempt of
defining, by forms and colors, the infinite Spirit, the
eternal Father, who pervades and sustains the universe. (5)
But the superstitious mind was more easily reconciled to
paint and to worship the angels, and, above all, the Son of
God, under the human shape, which, on earth, they have
condescended to assume. The second person of the Trinity
had been clothed with a real and mortal body; but that body
had ascended into heaven: and, had not some similitude been
presented to the eyes of his disciples, the spiritual
worship of Christ might have been obliterated by the visible
relics and representations of the saints. A similar
indulgence was requisite and propitious for the Virgin Mary:
the place of her burial was unknown; and the assumption of
her soul and body into heaven was adopted by the credulity
of the Greeks and Latins. The use, and even the worship, of
images was firmly established before the end of the sixth
century: they were fondly cherished by the warm imagination
of the Greeks and Asiatics: the Pantheon and Vatican were
adorned with the emblems of a new superstition; but this
semblance of idolatry was more coldly entertained by the
rude Barbarians and the Arian clergy of the West. The
bolder forms of sculpture, in brass or marble, which peopled
the temples of antiquity, were offensive to the fancy or
conscience of the Christian Greeks: and a smooth surface of
colors has ever been esteemed a more decent and harmless
mode of imitation. (6)
The merit and effect of a copy depends on its resemblance
with the original; but the primitive Christians were
ignorant of the genuine features of the Son of God, his
mother, and his apostles: the statue of Christ at Paneas in
Palestine (7) was more probably that of some temporal savior;
the Gnostics and their profane monuments were reprobated;
and the fancy of the Christian artists could only be guided
by the clandestine imitation of some heathen model. In this
distress, a bold and dexterous invention assured at once the
likeness of the image and the innocence of the worship. A
new super structure of fable was raised on the popular basis
of a Syrian legend, on the correspondence of Christ and
Abgarus, so famous in the days of Eusebius, so reluctantly
deserted by our modern advocates. The bishop of Caesarea (8)
records the epistle, (9) but he most strangely forgets the
picture of Christ; (10) the perfect impression of his face on
a linen, with which he gratified the faith of the royal
stranger who had invoked his healing power, and offered the
strong city of Edessa to protect him against the malice of
the Jews. The ignorance of the primitive church is
explained by the long imprisonment of the image in a niche
of the wall, from whence, after an oblivion of five hundred
years, it was released by some prudent bishop, and
seasonably presented to the devotion of the times. Its
first and most glorious exploit was the deliverance of the
city from the arms of Chosroes Nushirvan; and it was soon
revered as a pledge of the divine promise, that Edessa
should never be taken by a foreign enemy. It is true,
indeed, that the text of Procopius ascribes the double
deliverance of Edessa to the wealth and valor of her
citizens, who purchased the absence and repelled the
assaults of the Persian monarch. He was ignorant, the
profane historian, of the testimony which he is compelled to
deliver in the ecclesiastical page of Evagrius, that the
Palladium was exposed on the rampart, and that the water
which had been sprinkled on the holy face, instead of
quenching, added new fuel to the flames of the besieged.
After this important service, the image of Edessa was
preserved with respect and gratitude; and if the Armenians
rejected the legend, the more credulous Greeks adored the
similitude, which was not the work of any mortal pencil, but
the immediate creation of the divine original. The style and
sentiments of a Byzantine hymn will declare how far their
worship was removed from the grossest idolatry. "How can we
with mortal eyes contemplate this image, whose celestial
splendor the host of heaven presumes not to behold? He who
dwells in heaven, condescends this day to visit us by his
venerable image; He who is seated on the cherubim, visits us
this day by a picture, which the Father has delineated with
his immaculate hand, which he has formed in an ineffable
manner, and which we sanctify by adoring it with fear and
love." Before the end of the sixth century, these images,
made without hands, (in Greek it is a single word, (11)) were
propagated in the camps and cities of the Eastern empire:
(12) they were the objects of worship, and the instruments of
miracles; and in the hour of danger or tumult, their
venerable presence could revive the hope, rekindle the
courage, or repress the fury, of the Roman legions. Of these
pictures, the far greater part, the transcripts of a human
pencil, could only pretend to a secondary likeness and
improper title: but there were some of higher descent, who
derived their resemblance from an immediate contact with the
original, endowed, for that purpose, with a miraculous and
prolific virtue. The most ambitious aspired from a filial
to a fraternal relation with the image of Edessa; and such
is the veronica of Rome, or Spain, or Jerusalem, which
Christ in his agony and bloody sweat applied to his face,
and delivered to a holy matron. The fruitful precedent was
speedily transferred to the Virgin Mary, and the saints and
martyrs. In the church of Diospolis, in Palestine, the
features of the Mother of God (13) were deeply inscribed in a
marble column; the East and West have been decorated by the
pencil of St. Luke; and the Evangelist, who was perhaps a
physician, has been forced to exercise the occupation of a
painter, so profane and odious in the eyes of the primitive
Christians. The Olympian Jove, created by the muse of Homer
and the chisel of Phidias, might inspire a philosophic mind
with momentary devotion; but these Catholic images were
faintly and flatly delineated by monkish artists in the last
degeneracy of taste and genius. (14)
The worship of images had stolen into the church by
insensible degrees, and each petty step was pleasing to the
superstitious mind, as productive of comfort, and innocent
of sin. But in the beginning of the eighth century, in the
full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous Greeks were
awakened by an apprehension, that under the mask of
Christianity, they had restored the religion of their
fathers: they heard, with grief and impatience, the name of
idolaters; the incessant charge of the Jews and Mahometans,
(15) who derived from the Law and the Koran an immortal
hatred to graven images and all relative worship. The
servitude of the Jews might curb their zeal, and depreciate
their authority; but the triumphant Mussulmans, who reigned
at Damascus, and threatened Constantinople, cast into the
scale of reproach the accumulated weight of truth and
victory. The cities of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt had been
fortified with the images of Christ, his mother, and his
saints; and each city presumed on the hope or promise of
miraculous defence. In a rapid conquest of ten years, the
Arabs subdued those cities and these images; and, in their
opinion, the Lord of Hosts pronounced a decisive judgment
between the adoration and contempt of these mute and
inanimate idols. (A) For a while Edessa had braved the
Persian assaults; but the chosen city, the spouse of Christ,
was involved in the common ruin; and his divine resemblance
became the slave and trophy of the infidels. After a
servitude of three hundred years, the Palladium was yielded
to the devotion of Constantinople, for a ransom of twelve
thousand pounds of silver, the redemption of two hundred
Mussulmans, and a perpetual truce for the territory of
Edessa. (16) In this season of distress and dismay, the
eloquence of the monks was exercised in the defence of
images; and they attempted to prove, that the sin and schism
of the greatest part of the Orientals had forfeited the
favor, and annihilated the virtue, of these precious
symbols. But they were now opposed by the murmurs of many
simple or rational Christians, who appealed to the evidence
of texts, of facts, and of the primitive times, and secretly
desired the reformation of the church. As the worship of
images had never been established by any general or positive
law, its progress in the Eastern empire had been retarded,
or accelerated, by the differences of men and manners, the
local degrees of refinement, and the personal characters of
the bishops. The splendid devotion was fondly cherished by
the levity of the capital, and the inventive genius of the
Byzantine clergy; while the rude and remote districts of
Asia were strangers to this innovation of sacred luxury.
Many large congregations of Gnostics and Arians maintained,
after their conversion, the simple worship which had
preceded their separation; and the Armenians, the most
warlike subjects of Rome, were not reconciled, in the
twelfth century, to the sight of images. (17) These various
denominations of men afforded a fund of prejudice and
aversion, of small account in the villages of Anatolia or
Thrace, but which, in the fortune of a soldier, a prelate,
or a eunuch, might be often connected with the powers of the
church and state.
Of such adventurers, the most fortunate was the emperor Leo
the Third, (18) who, from the mountains of Isauria, ascended
the throne of the East. He was ignorant of sacred and
profane letters; but his education, his reason, perhaps his
intercourse with the Jews and Arabs, had inspired the
martial peasant with a hatred of images; and it was held to
be the duty of a prince to impose on his subjects the
dictates of his own conscience. But in the outset of an
unsettled reign, during ten years of toil and danger, Leo
submitted to the meanness of hypocrisy, bowed before the
idols which he despised, and satisfied the Roman pontiff
with the annual professions of his orthodoxy and zeal. In
the reformation of religion, his first steps were moderate
and cautious: he assembled a great council of senators and
bishops, and enacted, with their consent, that all the
images should be removed from the sanctuary and altar to a
proper height in the churches where they might be visible to
the eyes, and inaccessible to the superstition, of the
people. But it was impossible on either side to check the
rapid through adverse impulse of veneration and abhorrence:
in their lofty position, the sacred images still edified
their votaries, and reproached the tyrant. He was himself
provoked by resistance and invective; and his own party
accused him of an imperfect discharge of his duty, and urged
for his imitation the example of the Jewish king, who had
broken without scruple the brazen serpent of the temple. By
a second edict, he proscribed the existence as well as the
use of religious pictures; the churches of Constantinople
and the provinces were cleansed from idolatry; the images of
Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, were demolished, or a
smooth surface of plaster was spread over the walls of the
edifice. The sect of the Iconoclasts was supported by the
zeal and despotism of six emperors, and the East and West
were involved in a noisy conflict of one hundred and twenty
years. It was the design of Leo the Isaurian to pronounce
the condemnation of images as an article of faith, and by
the authority of a general council: but the convocation of
such an assembly was reserved for his son Constantine; (19)
and though it is stigmatized by triumphant bigotry as a
meeting of fools and atheists, their own partial and
mutilated acts betray many symptoms of reason and piety. The
debates and decrees of many provincial synods introduced the
summons of the general council which met in the suburbs of
Constantinople, and was composed of the respectable number
of three hundred and thirty-eight bishops of Europe and
Anatolia; for the patriarchs of Antioch and Alexandria were
the slaves of the caliph, and the Roman pontiff had
withdrawn the churches of Italy and the West from the
communion of the Greeks. This Byzantine synod assumed the
rank and powers of the seventh general council; yet even
this title was a recognition of the six preceding
assemblies, which had laboriously built the structure of the
Catholic faith. After a serious deliberation of six months,
the three hundred and thirty-eight bishops pronounced and
subscribed a unanimous decree, that all visible symbols of
Christ, except in the Eucharist, were either blasphemous or
heretical; that image-worship was a corruption of
Christianity and a renewal of Paganism; that all such
monuments of idolatry should be broken or erased; and that
those who should refuse to deliver the objects of their
private superstition, were guilty of disobedience to the
authority of the church and of the emperor. In their loud
and loyal acclamations, they celebrated the merits of their
temporal redeemer; and to his zeal and justice they
intrusted the execution of their spiritual censures. At
Constantinople, as in the former councils, the will of the
prince was the rule of episcopal faith; but on this
occasion, I am inclined to suspect that a large majority of
the prelates sacrificed their secret conscience to the
temptations of hope and fear. In the long night of
superstition, the Christians had wandered far away from the
simplicity of the gospel: nor was it easy for them to
discern the clew, and tread back the mazes, of the
labyrinth. The worship of images was inseparably blended,
at least to a pious fancy, with the Cross, the Virgin, the
Saints and their relics; the holy ground was involved in a
cloud of miracles and visions; and the nerves of the mind,
curiosity and scepticism, were benumbed by the habits of
obedience and belief. Constantine himself is accused of
indulging a royal license to doubt, or deny, or deride the
mysteries of the Catholics, (20) but they were deeply
inscribed in the public and private creed of his bishops;
and the boldest Iconoclast might assault with a secret
horror the monuments of popular devotion, which were
consecrated to the honor of his celestial patrons. In the
reformation of the sixteenth century, freedom and knowledge
had expanded all the faculties of man: the thirst of
innovation superseded the reverence of antiquity; and the
vigor of Europe could disdain those phantoms which terrified
the sickly and servile weakness of the Greeks.
The scandal of an abstract heresy can be only proclaimed to
the people by the blast of the ecclesiastical trumpet; but
the most ignorant can perceive, the most torpid must feel,
the profanation and downfall of their visible deities. The
first hostilities of Leo were directed against a lofty
Christ on the vestibule, and above the gate, of the palace.
A ladder had been planted for the assault, but it was
furiously shaken by a crowd of zealots and women: they
beheld, with pious transport, the ministers of sacrilege
tumbling from on high and dashed against the pavement: and
the honors of the ancient martyrs were prostituted to these
criminals, who justly suffered for murder and rebellion. (21)
The execution of the Imperial edicts was resisted by
frequent tumults in Constantinople and the provinces: the
person of Leo was endangered, his officers were massacred,
and the popular enthusiasm was quelled by the strongest
efforts of the civil and military power. Of the
Archipelago, or Holy Sea, the numerous islands were filled
with images and monks: their votaries abjured, without
scruple, the enemy of Christ, his mother, and the saints;
they armed a fleet of boats and galleys, displayed their
consecrated banners, and boldly steered for the harbor of
Constantinople, to place on the throne a new favorite of God
and the people. They depended on the succor of a miracle:
but their miracles were inefficient against the Greek fire;
and, after the defeat and conflagration of the fleet, the
naked islands were abandoned to the clemency or justice of
the conqueror. The son of Leo, in the first year of his
reign, had undertaken an expedition against the Saracens:
during his absence, the capital, the palace, and the purple,
were occupied by his kinsman Artavasdes, the ambitious
champion of the orthodox faith. The worship of images was
triumphantly restored: the patriarch renounced his
dissimulation, or dissembled his sentiments and the
righteous claims of the usurper was acknowledged, both in
the new, and in ancient, Rome. Constantine flew for refuge
to his paternal mountains; but he descended at the head of
the bold and affectionate Isaurians; and his final victory
confounded the arms and predictions of the fanatics. His
long reign was distracted with clamor, sedition, conspiracy,
and mutual hatred, and sanguinary revenge; the persecution
of images was the motive or pretence, of his adversaries;
and, if they missed a temporal diadem, they were rewarded by
the Greeks with the crown of martyrdom. In every act of
open and clandestine treason, the emperor felt the
unforgiving enmity of the monks, the faithful slaves of the
superstition to which they owed their riches and influence.
They prayed, they preached, they absolved, they inflamed,
they conspired; the solitude of Palestine poured forth a
torrent of invective; and the pen of St. John Damascenus,
(22) the last of the Greek fathers, devoted the tyrant's
head, both in this world and the next. (23) (B) I am not at
leisure to examine how far the monks provoked, nor how much
they have exaggerated, their real and pretended sufferings,
nor how many lost their lives or limbs, their eyes or their
beards, by the cruelty of the emperor. (C) From the
chastisement of individuals, he proceeded to the abolition
of the order; and, as it was wealthy and useless, his
resentment might be stimulated by avarice, and justified by
patriotism. The formidable name and mission of the Dragon,
(24) his visitor-general, excited the terror and abhorrence
of the black nation: the religious communities were
dissolved, the buildings were converted into magazines, or
bar racks; the lands, movables, and cattle were confiscated;
and our modern precedents will support the charge, that much
wanton or malicious havoc was exercised against the relics,
and even the books of the monasteries. With the habit and
profession of monks, the public and private worship of
images was rigorously proscribed; and it should seem, that a
solemn abjuration of idolatry was exacted from the subjects,
or at least from the clergy, of the Eastern empire. (25)
The patient East abjured, with reluctance, her sacred
images; they were fondly cherished, and vigorously defended,
by the independent zeal of the Italians. In ecclesiastical
rank and jurisdiction, the patriarch of Constantinople and
the pope of Rome were nearly equal. But the Greek prelate
was a domestic slave under the eye of his master, at whose
nod he alternately passed from the convent to the throne,
and from the throne to the convent. A distant and dangerous
station, amidst the Barbarians of the West, excited the
spirit and freedom of the Latin bishops. Their popular
election endeared them to the Romans: the public and private
indigence was relieved by their ample revenue; and the
weakness or neglect of the emperors compelled them to
consult, both in peace and war, the temporal safety of the
city. In the school of adversity the priest insensibly
imbibed the virtues and the ambition of a prince; the same
character was assumed, the same policy was adopted, by the
Italian, the Greek, or the Syrian, who ascended the chair of
St. Peter; and, after the loss of her legions and provinces,
the genius and fortune of the popes again restored the
supremacy of Rome. It is agreed, that in the eighth
century, their dominion was founded on rebellion, and that
the rebellion was produced, and justified, by the heresy of
the Iconoclasts; but the conduct of the second and third
Gregory, in this memorable contest, is variously interpreted
by the wishes of their friends and enemies. The Byzantine
writers unanimously declare, that, after a fruitless
admonition, they pronounced the separation of the East and
West, and deprived the sacrilegious tyrant of the revenue
and sovereignty of Italy. Their excommunication is still
more clearly expressed by the Greeks, who beheld the
accomplishment of the papal triumphs; and as they are more
strongly attached to their religion than to their country,
they praise, instead of blaming, the zeal and orthodoxy of
these apostolical men. (26) The modern champions of Rome are
eager to accept the praise and the precedent: this great and
glorious example of the deposition of royal heretics is
celebrated by the cardinals Baronius and Bellarmine; (27) and
if they are asked, why the same thunders were not hurled
against the Neros and Julians of antiquity, they reply, that
the weakness of the primitive church was the sole cause of
her patient loyalty. (28) On this occasion the effects of
love and hatred are the same; and the zealous Protestants,
who seek to kindle the indignation, and to alarm the fears,
of princes and magistrates, expatiate on the insolence and
treason of the two Gregories against their lawful sovereign.
(29) They are defended only by the moderate Catholics, for
the most part, of the Gallican church, (30) who respect the
saint, without approving the sin. These common advocates of
the crown and the mitre circumscribe the truth of facts by
the rule of equity, Scripture, and tradition, and appeal to
the evidence of the Latins, (31) and the lives (32) and
epistles of the popes themselves.
Two original epistles, from Gregory the Second to the
emperor Leo, are still extant; (33) and if they cannot be
praised as the most perfect models of eloquence and logic,
they exhibit the portrait, or at least the mask, of the
founder of the papal monarchy. "During ten pure and
fortunate years," says Gregory to the emperor, "we have
tasted the annual comfort of your royal letters, subscribed
in purple ink, with your own hand, the sacred pledges of
your attachment to the orthodox creed of our fathers. How
deplorable is the change! how tremendous the scandal! You
now accuse the Catholics of idolatry; and, by the
accusation, you betray your own impiety and ignorance. To
this ignorance we are compelled to adapt the grossness of
our style and arguments: the first elements of holy letters
are sufficient for your confusion; and were you to enter a
grammar-school, and avow yourself the enemy of our worship,
the simple and pious children would be provoked to cast
their horn-books at your head." After this decent
salutation, the pope attempts the usual distinction between
the idols of antiquity and the Christian images. The former
were the fanciful representations of phantoms or daemons, at
a time when the true God had not manifested his person in
any visible likeness. The latter are the genuine forms of
Christ, his mother, and his saints, who had approved, by a
crowd of miracles, the innocence and merit of this relative
worship. He must indeed have trusted to the ignorance of
Leo, since he could assert the perpetual use of images, from
the apostolic age, and their venerable presence in the six
synods of the Catholic church. A more specious argument is
drawn from present possession and recent practice the
harmony of the Christian world supersedes the demand of a
general council; and Gregory frankly confesses, than such
assemblies can only be useful under the reign of an orthodox
prince. To the impudent and inhuman Leo, more guilty than a
heretic, he recommends peace, silence, and implicit
obedience to his spiritual guides of Constantinople and
Rome. The limits of civil and ecclesiastical powers are
defined by the pontiff. To the former he appropriates the
body; to the latter, the soul: the sword of justice is in
the hands of the magistrate: the more formidable weapon of
excommunication is intrusted to the clergy; and in the
exercise of their divine commission a zealous son will not
spare his offending father: the successor of St. Peter may
lawfully chastise the kings of the earth. "You assault us,
O tyrant! with a carnal and military hand: unarmed and naked
we can only implore the Christ, the prince of the heavenly
host, that he will send unto you a devil, for the
destruction of your body and the salvation of your soul. You
declare, with foolish arrogance, I will despatch my orders
to Rome: I will break in pieces the image of St. Peter; and
Gregory, like his predecessor Martin, shall be transported
in chains, and in exile, to the foot of the Imperial throne.
Would to God that I might be permitted to tread in the
footsteps of the holy Martin! but may the fate of Constans
serve as a warning to the persecutors of the church! After
his just condemnation by the bishops of Sicily, the tyrant
was cut off, in the fullness of his sins, by a domestic
servant: the saint is still adored by the nations of
Scythia, among whom he ended his banishment and his life.
But it is our duty to live for the edification and support
of the faithful people; nor are we reduced to risk our
safety on the event of a combat. Incapable as you are of
defending your Roman subjects, the maritime situation of the
city may perhaps expose it to your depredation but we can
remove to the distance of four-and-twenty stadia, to the
first fortress of the Lombards, and then - you may pursue
the winds. Are you ignorant that the popes are the bond of
union, the mediators of peace, between the East and West?
The eyes of the nations are fixed on our humility; and they
revere, as a God upon earth, the apostle St. Peter, whose
image you threaten to destroy. (35) The remote and interior
kingdoms of the West present their homage to Christ and his
vicegerent; and we now prepare to visit one of their most
powerful monarchs, who desires to receive from our hands the
sacrament of baptism. (36) The Barbarians have submitted to
the yoke of the gospel, while you alone are deaf to the
voice of the shepherd. These pious Barbarians are kindled
into rage: they thirst to avenge the persecution of the
East. Abandon your rash and fatal enterprise; reflect,
tremble, and repent. If you persist, we are innocent of the
blood that will be spilt in the contest; may it fall on your
own head!"
The first assault of Leo against the images of
Constantinople had been witnessed by a crowd of strangers
from Italy and the West, who related with grief and
indignation the sacrilege of the emperor. But on the
reception of his proscriptive edict, they trembled for their
domestic deities: the images of Christ and the Virgin, of
the angels, martyrs, and saints, were abolished in all the
churches of Italy; and a strong alternative was proposed to
the Roman pontiff, the royal favor as the price of his
compliance, degradation and exile as the penalty of his
disobedience. Neither zeal nor policy allowed him to
hesitate; and the haughty strain in which Gregory addressed
the emperor displays his confidence in the truth of his
doctrine or the powers of resistance. Without depending on
prayers or miracles, he boldly armed against the public
enemy, and his pastoral letters admonished the Italians of
their danger and their duty. (37) At this signal, Ravenna,
Venice, and the cities of the Exarchate and Pentapolis,
adhered to the cause of religion; their military force by
sea and land consisted, for the most part, of the natives;
and the spirit of patriotism and zeal was transfused into
the mercenary strangers. The Italians swore to live and die
in the defence of the pope and the holy images; the Roman
people was devoted to their father, and even the Lombards
were ambitious to share the merit and advantage of this holy
war. The most treasonable act, but the most obvious
revenge, was the destruction of the statues of Leo himself:
the most effectual and pleasing measure of rebellion, was
the withholding the tribute of Italy, and depriving him of a
power which he had recently abused by the imposition of a
new capitation. (38) A form of administration was preserved
by the election of magistrates and governors; and so high
was the public indignation, that the Italians were prepared
to create an orthodox emperor, and to conduct him with a
fleet and army to the palace of Constantinople. In that
palace, the Roman bishops, the second and third Gregory,
were condemned as the authors of the revolt, and every
attempt was made, either by fraud or force, to seize their
persons, and to strike at their lives. The city was
repeatedly visited or assaulted by captains of the guards,
and dukes and exarchs of high dignity or secret trust; they
landed with foreign troops, they obtained some domestic aid,
and the superstition of Naples may blush that her fathers
were attached to the cause of heresy. But these clandestine
or open attacks were repelled by the courage and vigilance
of the Romans; the Greeks were overthrown and massacred,
their leaders suffered an ignominious death, and the popes,
however inclined to mercy, refused to intercede for these
guilty victims. At Ravenna, (39) the several quarters of the
city had long exercised a bloody and hereditary feud; in
religious controversy they found a new aliment of faction:
but the votaries of images were superior in numbers or
spirit, and the exarch, who attempted to stem the torrent,
lost his life in a popular sedition. To punish this
flagitious deed, and restore his dominion in Italy, the
emperor sent a fleet and army into the Adriatic Gulf. After
suffering from the winds and waves much loss and delay, the
Greeks made their descent in the neighborhood of Ravenna:
they threatened to depopulate the guilty capital, and to
imitate, perhaps to surpass, the example of Justinian the
Second, who had chastised a former rebellion by the choice
and execution of fifty of the principal inhabitants. The
women and clergy, in sackcloth and ashes, lay prostrate in
prayer: the men were in arms for the defence of their
country; the common danger had united the factions, and the
event of a battle was preferred to the slow miseries of a
siege. In a hard-fought day, as the two armies alternately
yielded and advanced, a phantom was seen, a voice was heard,
and Ravenna was victorious by the assurance of victory. The
strangers retreated to their ships, but the populous
sea-coast poured forth a multitude of boats; the waters of
the Po were so deeply infected with blood, that during six
years the public prejudice abstained from the fish of the
river; and the institution of an annual feast perpetuated
the worship of images, and the abhorrence of the Greek
tyrant. Amidst the triumph of the Catholic arms, the Roman
pontiff convened a synod of ninety-three bishops against the
heresy of the Iconoclasts. With their consent, he
pronounced a general excommunication against all who by word
or deed should attack the tradition of the fathers and the
images of the saints: in this sentence the emperor was
tacitly involved, (40) but the vote of a last and hopeless
remonstrance may seem to imply that the anathema was yet
suspended over his guilty head. No sooner had they
confirmed their own safety, the worship of images, and the
freedom of Rome and Italy, than the popes appear to have
relaxed of their severity, and to have spared the relics of
the Byzantine dominion. Their moderate councils delayed and
prevented the election of a new emperor, and they exhorted
the Italians not to separate from the body of the Roman
monarchy. The exarch was permitted to reside within the
walls of Ravenna, a captive rather than a master; and till
the Imperial coronation of Charlemagne, the government of
Rome and Italy was exercised in the name of the successors
of Constantine. (41)
The liberty of Rome, which had been oppressed by the arms
and arts of Augustus, was rescued, after seven hundred and
fifty years of servitude, from the persecution of Leo the
Isaurian. By the Caesars, the triumphs of the consuls had
been annihilated: in the decline and fall of the empire, the
god Terminus, the sacred boundary, had insensibly receded
from the ocean, the Rhine, the Danube, and the Euphrates;
and Rome was reduced to her ancient territory from Viterbo
to Terracina, and from Narni to the mouth of the Tyber. (42)
When the kings were banished, the republic reposed on the
firm basis which had been founded by their wisdom and
virtue. Their perpetual jurisdiction was divided between
two annual magistrates: the senate continued to exercise the
powers of administration and counsel; and the legislative
authority was distributed in the assemblies of the people,
by a well-proportioned scale of property and service.
Ignorant of the arts of luxury, the primitive Romans had
improved the science of government and war: the will of the
community was absolute: the rights of individuals were
sacred: one hundred and thirty thousand citizens were armed
for defence or conquest; and a band of robbers and outlaws
was moulded into a nation deserving of freedom and ambitious
of glory. (43) When the sovereignty of the Greek emperors was
extinguished, the ruins of Rome presented the sad image of
depopulation and decay: her slavery was a habit, her liberty
an accident; the effect of superstition, and the object of
her own amazement and terror. The last vestige of the
substance, or even the forms, of the constitution, was
obliterated from the practice and memory of the Romans; and
they were devoid of knowledge, or virtue, again to build the
fabric of a commonwealth. Their scanty remnant, the
offspring of slaves and strangers, was despicable in the
eyes of the victorious Barbarians. As often as the Franks or
Lombards expressed their most bitter contempt of a foe, they
called him a Roman; "and in this name," says the bishop
Liutprand, "we include whatever is base, whatever is
cowardly, whatever is perfidious, the extremes of avarice
and luxury, and every vice that can prostitute the dignity
of human nature." (44) (D) By the necessity of their
situation, the inhabitants of Rome were cast into the rough
model of a republican government: they were compelled to
elect some judges in peace, and some leaders in war: the
nobles assembled to deliberate, and their resolves could not
be executed without the union and consent of the multitude.
The style of the Roman senate and people was revived, (45)
but the spirit was fled; and their new independence was
disgraced by the tumultuous conflict of vicentiousness and
oppression. The want of laws could only be supplied by the
influence of religion, and their foreign and domestic
counsels were moderated by the authority of the bishop. His
alms, his sermons, his correspondence with the kings and
prelates of the West, his recent services, their gratitude,
and oath, accustomed the Romans to consider him as the first
magistrate or prince of the city. The Christian humility of
the popes was not offended by the name of Dominus, or Lord;
and their face and inscription are still apparent on the
most ancient coins. (46) Their temporal dominion is now
confirmed by the reverence of a thousand years; and their
noblest title is the free choice of a people, whom they had
redeemed from slavery.
In the quarrels of ancient Greece, the holy people of Elis
enjoyed a perpetual peace, under the protection of Jupiter,
and in the exercise of the Olympic games. (47) Happy would it
have been for the Romans, if a similar privilege had guarded
the patrimony of St. Peter from the calamities of war; if
the Christians, who visited the holy threshold, would have
sheathed their swords in the presence of the apostle and his
successor. But this mystic circle could have been traced
only by the wand of a legislator and a sage: this pacific
system was incompatible with the zeal and ambition of the
popes the Romans were not addicted, like the inhabitants of
Elis, to the innocent and placid labors of agriculture; and
the Barbarians of Italy, though softened by the climate,
were far below the Grecian states in the institutions of
public and private life. A memorable example of repentance
and piety was exhibited by Liutprand, king of the Lombards.
In arms, at the gate of the Vatican, the conqueror listened
to the voice of Gregory the Second, (48) withdrew his troops,
resigned his conquests, respectfully visited the church of
St. Peter, and after performing his devotions, offered his
sword and dagger, his cuirass and mantle, his silver cross,
and his crown of gold, on the tomb of the apostle. But this
religious fervor was the illusion, perhaps the artifice, of
the moment; the sense of interest is strong and lasting; the
love of arms and rapine was congenial to the Lombards; and
both the prince and people were irresistibly tempted by the
disorders of Italy, the nakedness of Rome, and the unwarlike
profession of her new chief. On the first edicts of the
emperor, they declared themselves the champions of the holy
images: Liutprand invaded the province of Romagna, which had
already assumed that distinctive appellation; the Catholics
of the Exarchate yielded without reluctance to his civil and
military power; and a foreign enemy was introduced for the
first time into the impregnable fortress of Ravenna. That
city and fortress were speedily recovered by the active
diligence and maritime forces of the Venetians; and those
faithful subjects obeyed the exhortation of Gregory himself,
in separating the personal guilt of Leo from the general
cause of the Roman empire. (49) The Greeks were less mindful
of the service, than the Lombards of the injury: the two
nations, hostile in their faith, were reconciled in a
dangerous and unnatural alliance: the king and the exarch
marched to the conquest of Spoleto and Rome: the storm
evaporated without effect, but the policy of Liutprand
alarmed Italy with a vexatious alternative of hostility and
truce. His successor Astolphus declared himself the equal
enemy of the emperor and the pope: Ravenna was subdued by
force or treachery, (50) and this final conquest extinguished
the series of the exarchs, who had reigned with a
subordinate power since the time of Justinian and the ruin
of the Gothic kingdom. Rome was summoned to acknowledge the
victorious Lombard as her lawful sovereign; the annual
tribute of a piece of gold was fixed as the ransom of each
citizen, and the sword of destruction was unsheathed to
exact the penalty of her disobedience. The Romans
hesitated; they entreated; they complained; and the
threatening Barbarians were checked by arms and
negotiations, till the popes had engaged the friendship of
an ally and avenger beyond the Alps. (51)
In his distress, the first (E) Gregory had implored the aid
of the hero of the age, of Charles Martel, who governed the
French monarchy with the humble title of mayor or duke; and
who, by his signal victory over the Saracens, had saved his
country, and perhaps Europe, from the Mahometan yoke. The
ambassadors of the pope were received by Charles with decent
reverence; but the greatness of his occupations, and the
shortness of his life, prevented his interference in the
affairs of Italy, except by a friendly and ineffectual
mediation. His son Pepin, the heir of his power and
virtues, assumed the office of champion of the Roman church;
and the zeal of the French prince appears to have been
prompted by the love of glory and religion. But the danger
was on the banks of the Tyber, the succor on those of the
Seine, and our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant
misery. Amidst the tears of the city, Stephen the Third
embraced the generous resolution of visiting in person the
courts of Lombardy and France, to deprecate the injustice of
his enemy, or to excite the pity and indignation of his
friend. After soothing the public despair by litanies and
orations, he undertook this laborious journey with the
ambassadors of the French monarch and the Greek emperor.
The king of the Lombards was inexorable; but his threats
could not silence the complaints, nor retard the speed of
the Roman pontiff, who traversed the Pennine Alps, reposed
in the abbey of St. Maurice, and hastened to grasp the right
hand of his protector; a hand which was never lifted in
vain, either in war or friendship. Stephen was entertained
as the visible successor of the apostle; at the next
assembly, the field of March or of May, his injuries were
exposed to a devout and warlike nation, and he repassed the
Alps, not as a suppliant, but as a conqueror, at the head of
a French army, which was led by the king in person. The
Lombards, after a weak resistance, obtained an ignominious
peace, and swore to restore the possessions, and to respect
the sanctity, of the Roman church. But no sooner was
Astolphus delivered from the presence of the French arms,
than he forgot his promise and resented his disgrace. Rome
was again encompassed by his arms; and Stephen, apprehensive
of fatiguing the zeal of his Transalpine allies enforced his
complaint and request by an eloquent letter in the name and
person of St. Peter himself. (52) The apostle assures his
adopted sons, the king, the clergy, and the nobles of
France, that, dead in the flesh, he is still alive in the
spirit; that they now hear, and must obey, the voice of the
founder and guardian of the Roman church; that the Virgin,
the angels, the saints, and the martyrs, and all the host of
heaven, unanimously urge the request, and will confess the
obligation; that riches, victory, and paradise, will crown
their pious enterprise, and that eternal damnation will be
the penalty of their neglect, if they suffer his tomb, his
temple, and his people, to fall into the hands of the
perfidious Lombards. The second expedition of Pepin was not
less rapid and fortunate than the first: St. Peter was
satisfied, Rome was again saved, and Astolphus was taught
the lessons of justice and sincerity by the scourge of a
foreign master. After this double chastisement, the
Lombards languished about twenty years in a state of languor
and decay. But their minds were not yet humbled to their
condition; and instead of affecting the pacific virtues of
the feeble, they peevishly harassed the Romans with a
repetition of claims, evasions, and inroads, which they
undertook without reflection, and terminated without glory.
On either side, their expiring monarchy was pressed by the
zeal and prudence of Pope Adrian the First, the genius, the
fortune, and greatness of Charlemagne, the son of Pepin;
these heroes of the church and state were united in public
and domestic friendship, and while they trampled on the
prostrate, they varnished their proceedings with the fairest
colors of equity and moderation. (53) The passes of the Alps,
and the walls of Pavia, were the only defence of the
Lombards; the former were surprised, the latter were
invested, by the son of Pepin; and after a blockade of two
years, (F) Desiderius, the last of their native princes,
surrendered his sceptre and his capital. Under the dominion
of a foreign king, but in the possession of their national
laws, the Lombards became the brethren, rather than the
subjects, of the Franks; who derived their blood, and
manners, and language, from the same Germanic origin. (54)
The mutual obligations of the popes and the Carlovingian
family form the important link of ancient and modern, of
civil and ecclesiastical, history. In the conquest of Italy,
the champions of the Roman church obtained a favorable
occasion, a specious title, the wishes of the people, the
prayers and intrigues of the clergy. But the most essential
gifts of the popes to the Carlovingian race were the
dignities of king of France, (55) and of patrician of Rome.
I. Under the sacerdotal monarchy of St. Peter, the nations
began to resume the practice of seeking, on the banks of the
Tyber, their kings, their laws, and the oracles of their
fate. The Franks were perplexed between the name and
substance of their government. All the powers of royalty
were exercised by Pepin, mayor of the palace; and nothing,
except the regal title, was wanting to his ambition. His
enemies were crushed by his valor; his friends were
multiplied by his liberality; his father had been the savior
of Christendom; and the claims of personal merit were
repeated and ennobled in a descent of four generations. The
name and image of royalty was still preserved in the last
descendant of Clovis, the feeble Childeric; but his obsolete
right could only be used as an instrument of sedition: the
nation was desirous of restoring the simplicity of the
constitution; and Pepin, a subject and a prince, was
ambitious to ascertain his own rank and the fortune of his
family. The mayor and the nobles were bound, by an oath of
fidelity, to the royal phantom: the blood of Clovis was pure
and sacred in their eyes; and their common ambassadors
addressed the Roman pontiff, to dispel their scruples, or to
absolve their promise. The interest of Pope Zachary, the
successor of the two Gregories, prompted him to decide, and
to decide in their favor: he pronounced that the nation
might lawfully unite in the same person the title and
authority of king; and that the unfortunate Childeric, a
victim of the public safety, should be degraded, shaved, and
confined in a monastery for the remainder of his days. An
answer so agreeable to their wishes was accepted by the
Franks as the opinion of a casuist, the sentence of a judge,
or the oracle of a prophet: the Merovingian race disappeared
from the earth; and Pepin was exalted on a buckler by the
suffrage of a free people, accustomed to obey his laws and
to march under his standard. His coronation was twice
performed, with the sanction of the popes, by their most
faithful servant St. Boniface, the apostle of Germany, and
by the grateful hands of Stephen the Third, who, in the
monastery of St. Denys placed the diadem on the head of his
benefactor. The royal unction of the kings of Israel was
dexterously applied: (56) the successor of St. Peter assumed
the character of a divine ambassador: a German chieftain was
transformed into the Lord's anointed; and this Jewish rite
has been diffused and maintained by the superstition and
vanity of modern Europe. The Franks were absolved from their
ancient oath; but a dire anathema was thundered against them
and their posterity, if they should dare to renew the same
freedom of choice, or to elect a king, except in the holy
and meritorious race of the Carlovingian princes. Without
apprehending the future danger, these princes gloried in
their present security: the secretary of Charlemagne
affirms, that the French sceptre was transferred by the
authority of the popes; (57) and in their boldest
enterprises, they insist, with confidence, on this signal
and successful act of temporal jurisdiction.
II. In the change of manners and language the patricians of
Rome (58) were far removed from the senate of Romulus, on the
palace of Constantine, from the free nobles of the republic,
or the fictitious parents of the emperor. After the
recovery of Italy and Africa by the arms of Justinian, the
importance and danger of those remote provinces required the
presence of a supreme magistrate; he was indifferently
styled the exarch or the patrician; and these governors of
Ravenna, who fill their place in the chronology of princes,
extended their jurisdiction over the Roman city. Since the
revolt of Italy and the loss of the Exarchate, the distress
of the Romans had exacted some sacrifice of their
independence. Yet, even in this act, they exercised the
right of disposing of themselves; and the decrees of the
senate and people successively invested Charles Martel and
his posterity with the honors of patrician of Rome. The
leaders of a powerful nation would have disdained a servile
title and subordinate office; but the reign of the Greek
emperors was suspended; and, in the vacancy of the empire,
they derived a more glorious commission from the pope and
the republic. The Roman ambassadors presented these
patricians with the keys of the shrine of St. Peter, as a
pledge and symbol of sovereignty; with a holy banner which
it was their right and duty to unfurl in the defence of the
church and city. (59) In the time of Charles Martel and of
Pepin, the interposition of the Lombard kingdom covered the
freedom, while it threatened the safety, of Rome; and the
patriciate represented only the title, the service, the
alliance, of these distant protectors. The power and policy
of Charlemagne annihilated an enemy, and imposed a master.
In his first visit to the capital, he was received with all
the honors which had formerly been paid to the exarch, the
representative of the emperor; and these honors obtained
some new decorations from the joy and gratitude of Pope
Adrian the First. (60) No sooner was he informed of the
sudden approach of the monarch, than he despatched the
magistrates and nobles of Rome to meet him, with the banner,
about thirty miles from the city. At the distance of one
mile, the Flaminian way was lined with the schools, or
national communities, of Greeks, Lombards, Saxons, &c.: the
Roman youth were under arms; and the children of a more
tender age, with palms and olive branches in their hands,
chanted the praises of their great deliverer. At the aspect
of the holy crosses, and ensigns of the saints, he
dismounted from his horse, led the procession of his nobles
to the Vatican, and, as he ascended the stairs, devoutly
kissed each step of the threshold of the apostles. In the
portico, Adrian expected him at the head of his clergy: they
embraced, as friends and equals; but in their march to the
altar, the king or patrician assumed the right hand of the
pope. Nor was the Frank content with these vain and empty
demonstrations of respect. In the twenty-six years that
elapsed between the conquest of Lombardy and his Imperial
coronation, Rome, which had been delivered by the sword, was
subject, as his own, to the sceptre of Charlemagne. The
people swore allegiance to his person and family: in his
name money was coined, and justice was administered; and the
election of the popes was examined and confirmed by his
authority. Except an original and self-inherent claim of
sovereignty, there was not any prerogative remaining, which
the title of emperor could add to the patrician of Rome. (61)
The gratitude of the Carlovingians was adequate to these
obligations, and their names are consecrated, as the saviors
and benefactors of the Roman church. Her ancient patrimony
of farms and houses was transformed by their bounty into the
temporal dominion of cities and provinces; and the donation
of the Exarchate was the first-fruits of the conquests of
Pepin. (62) Astolphus with a sigh relinquished his prey; the
keys and the hostages of the principal cities were delivered
to the French ambassador; and, in his master's name, he
presented them before the tomb of St. Peter. The ample
measure of the Exarchate (63) might comprise all the
provinces of Italy which had obeyed the emperor and his
vicegerent; but its strict and proper limits were included
in the territories of Ravenna, Bologna, and Ferrara: its
inseparable dependency was the Pentapolis, which stretched
along the Adriatic from Rimini to Ancona, and advanced into
the midland- country as far as the ridges of the Apennine.
In this transaction, the ambition and avarice of the popes
have been severely condemned. Perhaps the humility of a
Christian priest should have rejected an earthly kingdom,
which it was not easy for him to govern without renouncing
the virtues of his profession. Perhaps a faithful subject,
or even a generous enemy, would have been less impatient to
divide the spoils of the Barbarian; and if the emperor had
intrusted Stephen to solicit in his name the restitution of
the Exarchate, I will not absolve the pope from the reproach
of treachery and falsehood. But in the rigid interpretation
of the laws, every one may accept, without injury, whatever
his benefactor can bestow without injustice. The Greek
emperor had abdicated, or forfeited, his right to the
Exarchate; and the sword of Astolphus was broken by the
stronger sword of the Carlovingian. It was not in the cause
of the Iconoclast that Pepin has exposed his person and army
in a double expedition beyond the Alps: he possessed, and
might lawfully alienate, his conquests: and to the
importunities of the Greeks he piously replied that no human
consideration should tempt him to resume the gift which he
had conferred on the Roman Pontiff for the remission of his
sins, and the salvation of his soul. The splendid donation
was granted in supreme and absolute dominion, and the world
beheld for the first time a Christian bishop invested with
the prerogatives of a temporal prince; the choice of
magistrates, the exercise of justice, the imposition of
taxes, and the wealth of the palace of Ravenna. In the
dissolution of the Lombard kingdom, the inhabitants of the
duchy of Spoleto (64) sought a refuge from the storm, shaved
their heads after the Roman fashion, declared themselves the
servants and subjects of St. Peter, and completed, by this
voluntary surrender, the present circle of the
ecclesiastical state. That mysterious circle was enlarged
to an indefinite extent, by the verbal or written donation
of Charlemagne, (65) who, in the first transports of his
victory, despoiled himself and the Greek emperor of the
cities and islands which had formerly been annexed to the
Exarchate. But, in the cooler moments of absence and
reflection, he viewed, with an eye of jealousy and envy, the
recent greatness of his ecclesiastical ally. The execution
of his own and his father's promises was respectfully
eluded: the king of the Franks and Lombards asserted the
inalienable rights of the empire; and, in his life and
death, Ravenna, (66) as well as Rome, was numbered in the
list of his metropolitan cities. The sovereignty of the
Exarchate melted away in the hands of the popes; they found
in the archbishops of Ravenna a dangerous and domestic
rival: (67) the nobles and people disdained the yoke of a
priest; and in the disorders of the times, they could only
retain the memory of an ancient claim, which, in a more
prosperous age, they have revived and realized.
Fraud is the resource of weakness and cunning; and the
strong, though ignorant, Barbarian was often entangled in
the net of sacerdotal policy. The Vatican and Lateran were
an arsenal and manufacture, which, according to the
occasion, have produced or concealed a various collection of
false or genuine, of corrupt or suspicious, acts, as they
tended to promote the interest of the Roman church. Before
the end of the eighth century, some apostolic scribe,
perhaps the notorious Isidore, composed the decretals, and
the donation of Constantine, the two magic pillars of the
spiritual and temporal monarchy of the popes. This
memorable donation was introduced to the world by an epistle
of Adrian the First, who exhorts Charlemagne to imitate the
liberality, and revive the name, of the great Constantine.
(68) According to the legend, the first of the Christian
emperors was healed of the leprosy, and purified in the
waters of baptism, by St. Silvester, the Roman bishop; and
never was physician more gloriously recompensed. His royal
proselyte withdrew from the seat and patrimony of St. Peter;
declared his resolution of founding a new capital in the
East; and resigned to the popes the free and perpetual
sovereignty of Rome, Italy, and the provinces of the West.
(69) This fiction was productive of the most beneficial
effects. The Greek princes were convicted of the guilt of
usurpation; and the revolt of Gregory was the claim of his
lawful inheritance. The popes were delivered from their debt
of gratitude; and the nominal gifts of the Carlovingians
were no more than the just and irrevocable restitution of a
scanty portion of the ecclesiastical state. The sovereignty
of Rome no longer depended on the choice of a fickle people;
and the successors of St. Peter and Constantine were
invested with the purple and prerogatives of the Caesars.
So deep was the ignorance and credulity of the times, that
the most absurd of fables was received, with equal
reverence, in Greece and in France, and is still enrolled
among the decrees of the canon law. (70) The emperors, and
the Romans, were incapable of discerning a forgery, that
subverted their rights and freedom; and the only opposition
proceeded from a Sabine monastery, which, in the beginning
of the twelfth century, disputed the truth and validity of
the donation of Constantine. (71) In the revival of letters
and liberty, this fictitious deed was transpierced by the
pen of Laurentius Valla, the pen of an eloquent critic and a
Roman patriot. (72) His contemporaries of the fifteenth
century were astonished at his sacrilegious boldness; yet
such is the silent and irresistible progress of reason,
that, before the end of the next age, the fable was rejected
by the contempt of historians (73) and poets, (74) and the
tacit or modest censure of the advocates of the Roman
church. (75) The popes themselves have indulged a smile at
the credulity of the vulgar; (76) but a false and obsolete
title still sanctifies their reign; and, by the same fortune
which has attended the decretals and the Sibylline oracles,
the edifice has subsisted after the foundations have been
undermined.
While the popes established in Italy their freedom and
dominion, the images, the first cause of their revolt, were
restored in the Eastern empire. (77) Under the reign of
Constantine the Fifth, the union of civil and ecclesiastical
power had overthrown the tree, without extirpating the root,
of superstition. The idols (for such they were now held)
were secretly cherished by the order and the sex most prone
to devotion; and the fond alliance of the monks and females
obtained a final victory over the reason and authority of
man. Leo the Fourth maintained with less rigor the religion
of his father and grandfather; but his wife, the fair and
ambitious Irene, had imbibed the zeal of the Athenians, the
heirs of the Idolatry, rather than the philosophy, of their
ancestors. During the life of her husband, these sentiments
were inflamed by danger and dissimulation, and she could
only labor to protect and promote some favorite monks whom
she drew from their caverns, and seated on the metropolitan
thrones of the East. But as soon as she reigned in her own
name and that of her son, Irene more seriously undertook the
ruin of the Iconoclasts; and the first step of her future
persecution was a general edict for liberty of conscience.
In the restoration of the monks, a thousand images were
exposed to the public veneration; a thousand legends were
inverted of their sufferings and miracles. By the
opportunities of death or removal, the episcopal seats were
judiciously filled the most eager competitors for earthly or
celestial favor anticipated and flattered the judgment of
their sovereign; and the promotion of her secretary Tarasius
gave Irene the patriarch of Constantinople, and the command
of the Oriental church. But the decrees of a general
council could only be repealed by a similar assembly: (78)
the Iconoclasts whom she convened were bold in possession,
and averse to debate; and the feeble voice of the bishops
was reechoed by the more formidable clamor of the soldiers
and people of Constantinople. The delay and intrigues of a
year, the separation of the disaffected troops, and the
choice of Nice for a second orthodox synod, removed these
obstacles; and the episcopal conscience was again, after the
Greek fashion, in the hands of the prince. No more than
eighteen days were allowed for the consummation of this
important work: the Iconoclasts appeared, not as judges, but
as criminals or penitents: the scene was decorated by the
legates of Pope Adrian and the Eastern patriarchs, (79) the
decrees were framed by the president Taracius, and ratified
by the acclamations and subscriptions of three hundred and
fifty bishops. They unanimously pronounced, that the
worship of images is agreeable to Scripture and reason, to
the fathers and councils of the church: but they hesitate
whether that worship be relative or direct; whether the
Godhead, and the figure of Christ, be entitled to the same
mode of adoration. Of this second Nicene council the acts
are still extant; a curious monument of superstition and
ignorance, of falsehood and folly. I shall only notice the
judgment of the bishops on the comparative merit of
image-worship and morality. A monk had concluded a truce
with the daemon of fornication, on condition of interrupting
his daily prayers to a picture that hung in his cell. His
scruples prompted him to consult the abbot. "Rather than
abstain from adoring Christ and his Mother in their holy
images, it would be better for you," replied the casuist,
"to enter every brothel, and visit every prostitute, in the
city." (80) For the honor of orthodoxy, at least the
orthodoxy of the Roman church, it is somewhat unfortunate,
that the two princes who convened the two councils of Nice
are both stained with the blood of their sons. The second
of these assemblies was approved and rigorously executed by
the despotism of Irene, and she refused her adversaries the
toleration which at first she had granted to her friends.
During the five succeeding reigns, a period of thirty-eight
years, the contest was maintained, with unabated rage and
various success, between the worshippers and the breakers of
the images; but I am not inclined to pursue with minute
diligence the repetition of the same events. Nicephorus
allowed a general liberty of speech and practice; and the
only virtue of his reign is accused by the monks as the
cause of his temporal and eternal perdition. Superstition
and weakness formed the character of Michael the First, but
the saints and images were incapable of supporting their
votary on the throne. In the purple, Leo the Fifth asserted
the name and religion of an Armenian; and the idols, with
their seditious adherents, were condemned to a second exile.
Their applause would have sanctified the murder of an
impious tyrant, but his assassin and successor, the second
Michael, was tainted from his birth with the Phrygian
heresies: he attempted to mediate between the contending
parties; and the intractable spirit of the Catholics
insensibly cast him into the opposite scale. His moderation
was guarded by timidity; but his son Theophilus, alike
ignorant of fear and pity, was the last and most cruel of
the Iconoclasts. The enthusiasm of the times ran strongly
against them; and the emperors who stemmed the torrent were
exasperated and punished by the public hatred. After the
death of Theophilus, the final victory of the images was
achieved by a second female, his widow Theodora, whom he
left the guardian of the empire. Her measures were bold and
decisive. The fiction of a tardy repentance absolved the
fame and the soul of her deceased husband; the sentence of
the Iconoclast patriarch was commuted from the loss of his
eyes to a whipping of two hundred lashes: the bishops
trembled, the monks shouted, and the festival of orthodoxy
preserves the annual memory of the triumph of the images. A
single question yet remained, whether they are endowed with
any proper and inherent sanctity; it was agitated by the
Greeks of the eleventh century; (81) and as this opinion has
the strongest recommendation of absurdity, I am surprised
that it was not more explicitly decided in the affirmative.
In the West, Pope Adrian the First accepted and announced
the decrees of the Nicene assembly, which is now revered by
the Catholics as the seventh in rank of the general
councils. Rome and Italy were docile to the voice of their
father; but the greatest part of the Latin Christians were
far behind in the race of superstition. The churches of
France, Germany, England, and Spain, steered a middle course
between the adoration and the destruction of images, which
they admitted into their temples, not as objects of worship,
but as lively and useful memorials of faith and history. An
angry book of controversy was composed and published in the
name of Charlemagne: (82) under his authority a synod of
three hundred bishops was assembled at Frankfort: (83) they
blamed the fury of the Iconoclasts, but they pronounced a
more severe censure against the superstition of the Greeks,
and the decrees of their pretended council, which was long
despised by the Barbarians of the West. (84) Among them the
worship of images advanced with a silent and insensible
progress; but a large atonement is made for their hesitation
and delay, by the gross idolatry of the ages which precede
the reformation, and of the countries, both in Europe and
America, which are still immersed in the gloom of
superstition.
It was after the Nycene synod, and under the reign of the
pious Irene, that the popes consummated the separation of
Rome and Italy, by the translation of the empire to the less
orthodox Charlemagne. They were compelled to choose between
the rival nations: religion was not the sole motive of their
choice; and while they dissembled the failings of their
friends, they beheld, with reluctance and suspicion, the
Catholic virtues of their foes. The difference of language
and manners had perpetuated the enmity of the two capitals;
and they were alienated from each other by the hostile
opposition of seventy years. In that schism the Romans had
tasted of freedom, and the popes of sovereignty: their
submission would have exposed them to the revenge of a
jealous tyrant; and the revolution of Italy had betrayed the
impotence, as well as the tyranny, of the Byzantine court.
The Greek emperors had restored the images, but they had not
restored the Calabrian estates (85) and the Illyrian diocese,
(86) which the Iconociasts had torn away from the successors
of St. Peter; and Pope Adrian threatens them with a sentence
of excommunication unless they speedily abjure this
practical heresy. (87) The Greeks were now orthodox; but
their religion might be tainted by the breath of the
reigning monarch: the Franks were now contumacious; but a
discerning eye might discern their approaching conversion,
from the use, to the adoration, of images. The name of
Charlemagne was stained by the polemic acrimony of his
scribes; but the conqueror himself conformed, with the
temper of a statesman, to the various practice of France and
Italy. In his four pilgrimages or visits to the Vatican, he
embraced the popes in the communion of friendship and piety;
knelt before the tomb, and consequently before the image, of
the apostle; and joined, without scruple, in all the prayers
and processions of the Roman liturgy. Would prudence or
gratitude allow the pontiffs to renounce their benefactor?
Had they a right to alienate his gift of the Exarchate? Had
they power to abolish his government of Rome? The title of
patrician was below the merit and greatness of Charlemagne;
and it was only by reviving the Western empire that they
could pay their obligations or secure their establishment.
By this decisive measure they would finally eradicate the
claims of the Greeks; from the debasement of a provincial
town, the majesty of Rome would be restored: the Latin
Christians would be united, under a supreme head, in their
ancient metropolis; and the conquerors of the West would
receive their crown from the successors of St. Peter. The
Roman church would acquire a zealous and respectable
advocate; and, under the shadow of the Carlovingian power,
the bishop might exercise, with honor and safety, the
government of the city. (88)
Before the ruin of Paganism in Rome, the competition for a
wealthy bishopric had often been productive of tumult and
bloodshed. The people was less numerous, but the times were
more savage, the prize more important, and the chair of St.
Peter was fiercely disputed by the leading ecclesiastics who
aspired to the rank of sovereign. The reign of Adrian the
First (89) surpasses the measure of past or succeeding ages;
(90) the walls of Rome, the sacred patrimony, the ruin of the
Lombards, and the friendship of Charlemagne, were the
trophies of his fame: he secretly edified the throne of his
successors, and displayed in a narrow space the virtues of a
great prince. His memory was revered; but in the next
election, a priest of the Lateran, Leo the Third, was
preferred to the nephew and the favorite of Adrian, whom he
had promoted to the first dignities of the church. Their
acquiescence or repentance disguised, above four years, the
blackest intention of revenge, till the day of a procession,
when a furious band of conspirators dispersed the unarmed
multitude, and assaulted with blows and wounds the sacred
person of the pope. But their enterprise on his life or
liberty was disappointed, perhaps by their own confusion and
remorse. Leo was left for dead on the ground: on his revival
from the swoon, the effect of his loss of blood, he
recovered his speech and sight; and this natural event was
improved to the miraculous restoration of his eyes and
tongue, of which he had been deprived, twice deprived, by
the knife of the assassins. (91) From his prison he escaped
to the Vatican: the duke of Spoleto hastened to his rescue,
Charlemagne sympathized in his injury, and in his camp of
Paderborn in Westphalia accepted, or solicited, a visit from
the Roman pontiff. Leo repassed the Alps with a commission
of counts and bishops, the guards of his safety and the
judges of his innocence; and it was not without reluctance,
that the conqueror of the Saxons delayed till the ensuing
year the personal discharge of this pious office. In his
fourth and last pilgrimage, he was received at Rome with the
due honors of king and patrician: Leo was permitted to purge
himself by oath of the crimes imputed to his charge: his
enemies were silenced, and the sacrilegious attempt against
his life was punished by the mild and insufficient penalty
of exile. On the festival of Christmas, the last year of
the eighth century, Charlemagne appeared in the church of
St. Peter; and, to gratify the vanity of Rome, he had
exchanged the simple dress of his country for the habit of a
patrician. (92) After the celebration of the holy mysteries,
Leo suddenly placed a precious crown on his head, (93) and
the dome resounded with the acclamations of the people,
"Long life and victory to Charles, the most pious Augustus,
crowned by God the great and pacific emperor of the Romans!"
The head and body of Charlemagne were consecrated by the
royal unction: after the example of the Caesars, he was
saluted or adored by the pontiff: his coronation oath
represents a promise to maintain the faith and privileges of
the church; and the first-fruits were paid in his rich
offerings to the shrine of his apostle. In his familiar
conversation, the emperor protested the ignorance of the
intentions of Leo, which he would have disappointed by his
absence on that memorable day. But the preparations of the
ceremony must have disclosed the secret; and the journey of
Charlemagne reveals his knowledge and expectation: he had
acknowledged that the Imperial title was the object of his
ambition, and a Roman synod had pronounced, that it was the
only adequate reward of his merit and services. (94)
The appellation of great has been often bestowed, and
sometimes deserved; but Charlemagne is the only prince in
whose favor the title has been indissolubly blended with the
name. That name, with the addition of saint, is inserted in
the Roman calendar; and the saint, by a rare felicity, is
crowned with the praises of the historians and philosophers
of an enlightened age. (95) His real merit is doubtless
enhanced by the barbarism of the nation and the times from
which he emerged: but the apparent magnitude of an object is
likewise enlarged by an unequal comparison; and the ruins of
Palmyra derive a casual splendor from the nakedness of the
surrounding desert. Without injustice to his fame, I may
discern some blemishes in the sanctity and greatness of the
restorer of the Western empire. Of his moral virtues,
chastity is not the most conspicuous: (96) but the public
happiness could not be materially injured by his nine wives
or concubines, the various indulgence of meaner or more
transient amours, the multitude of his bastards whom he
bestowed on the church, and the long celibacy and licentious
manners of his daughters, (97) whom the father was suspected
of loving with too fond a passion. (G) I shall be scarcely
permitted to accuse the ambition of a conqueror; but in a
day of equal retribution, the sons of his brother Carloman,
the Merovingian princes of Aquitain, and the four thousand
five hundred Saxons who were beheaded on the same spot,
would have something to allege against the justice and
humanity of Charlemagne. His treatment of the vanquished
Saxons (98) was an abuse of the right of conquest; his laws
were not less sanguinary than his arms, and in the
discussion of his motives, whatever is subtracted from
bigotry must be imputed to temper. The sedentary reader is
amazed by his incessant activity of mind and body; and his
subjects and enemies were not less astonished at his sudden
presence, at the moment when they believed him at the most
distant extremity of the empire; neither peace nor war, nor
summer nor winter, were a season of repose; and our fancy
cannot easily reconcile the annals of his reign with the
geography of his expeditions. (H) But this activity was a
national, rather than a personal, virtue; the vagrant life
of a Frank was spent in the chase, in pilgrimage, in
military adventures; and the journeys of Charlemagne were
distinguished only by a more numerous train and a more
important purpose. His military renown must be tried by the
scrutiny of his troops, his enemies, and his actions.
Alexander conquered with the arms of Philip, but the two
heroes who preceded Charlemagne bequeathed him their name,
their examples, and the companions of their victories. At
the head of his veteran and superior armies, he oppressed
the savage or degenerate nations, who were incapable of
confederating for their common safety: nor did he ever
encounter an equal antagonist in numbers, in discipline, or
in arms The science of war has been lost and revived with
the arts of peace; but his campaigns are not illustrated by
any siege or battle of singular difficulty and success; and
he might behold, with envy, the Saracen trophies of his
grandfather. After the Spanish expedition, his rear-guard
was defeated in the Pyrenaean mountains; and the soldiers,
whose situation was irretrievable, and whose valor was
useless, might accuse, with their last breath, the want of
skill or caution of their general. (99) I touch with
reverence the laws of Charlemagne, so highly applauded by a
respectable judge. They compose not a system, but a series,
of occasional and minute edicts, for the correction of
abuses, the reformation of manners, the economy of his
farms, the care of his poultry, and even the sale of his
eggs. He wished to improve the laws and the character of
the Franks; and his attempts, however feeble and imperfect,
are deserving of praise: the inveterate evils of the times
were suspended or mollified by his government; (100) but in
his institutions I can seldom discover the general views and
the immortal spirit of a legislator, who survives himself
for the benefit of posterity. The union and stability of
his empire depended on the life of a single man: he imitated
the dangerous practice of dividing his kingdoms among his
sons; and after his numerous diets, the whole constitution
was left to fluctuate between the disorders of anarchy and
despotism. His esteem for the piety and knowledge of the
clergy tempted him to intrust that aspiring order with
temporal dominion and civil jurisdiction; and his son Lewis,
when he was stripped and degraded by the bishops, might
accuse, in some measure, the imprudence of his father. His
laws enforced the imposition of tithes, because the daemons
had proclaimed in the air that the default of payment had
been the cause of the last scarcity. (101) The literary
merits of Charlemagne are attested by the foundation of
schools, the introduction of arts, the works which were
published in his name, and his familiar connection with the
subjects and strangers whom he invited to his court to
educate both the prince and people. His own studies were
tardy, laborious, and imperfect; if he spoke Latin, and
understood Greek, he derived the rudiments of knowledge from
conversation, rather than from books; and, in his mature
age, the emperor strove to acquire the practice of writing,
which every peasant now learns in his infancy. (102) The
grammar and logic, the music and astronomy, of the times,
were only cultivated as the handmaids of superstition; but
the curiosity of the human mind must ultimately tend to its
improvement, and the encouragement of learning reflects the
purest and most pleasing lustre on the character of
Charlemagne. (103) The dignity of his person, (104) the length
of his reign, the prosperity of his arms, the vigor of his
government, and the reverence of distant nations,
distinguish him from the royal crowd; and Europe dates a new
aera from his restoration of the Western empire.
That empire was not unworthy of its title; (105) and some of
the fairest kingdoms of Europe were the patrimony or
conquest of a prince, who reigned at the same time in
France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Hungary. (106) I. The
Roman province of Gaul had been transformed into the name
and monarchy of France; but, in the decay of the Merovingian
line, its limits were contracted by the independence of the
Britons and the revolt of Aquitain. Charlemagne pursued, and
confined, the Britons on the shores of the ocean; and that
ferocious tribe, whose origin and language are so different
from the French, was chastised by the imposition of tribute,
hostages, and peace. After a long and evasive contest, the
rebellion of the dukes of Aquitain was punished by the
forfeiture of their province, their liberty, and their
lives. Harsh and rigorous would have been such treatment of
ambitious governors, who had too faithfully copied the
mayors of the palace. But a recent discovery (107) has
proved that these unhappy princes were the last and lawful
heirs of the blood and sceptre of Clovis, and younger
branch, from the brother of Dagobert, of the Merovingian
house. Their ancient kingdom was reduced to the duchy of
Gascogne, to the counties of Fesenzac and Armagnac, at the
foot of the Pyrenees: their race was propagated till the
beginning of the sixteenth century; and after surviving
their Carlovingian tyrants, they were reserved to feel the
injustice, or the favors, of a third dynasty. By the
reunion of Aquitain, France was enlarged to its present
boundaries, with the additions of the Netherlands and Spain,
as far as the Rhine. II. The Saracens had been expelled
from France by the grandfather and father of Charlemagne;
but they still possessed the greatest part of Spain, from
the rock of Gibraltar to the Pyrenees. Amidst their civil
divisions, an Arabian emir of Saragossa implored his
protection in the diet of Paderborn. Charlemagne undertook
the expedition, restored the emir, and, without distinction
of faith, impartially crushed the resistance of the
Christians, and rewarded the obedience and services of the
Mahometans. In his absence he instituted the Spanish march,
(108) which extended from the Pyrenees to the River Ebro:
Barcelona was the residence of the French governor: he
possessed the counties of Rousillon and Catalonia; and the
infant kingdoms of Navarre and Arragon were subject to his
jurisdiction. III. As king of the Lombards, and patrician
of Rome, he reigned over the greatest part of Italy, (109) a
tract of a thousand miles from the Alps to the borders of
Calabria. The duchy of Beneventum, a Lombard fief, had
spread, at the expense of the Greeks, over the modern
kingdom of Naples. But Arrechis, the reigning duke, refused
to be included in the slavery of his country; assumed the
independent title of prince; and opposed his sword to the
Carlovingian monarchy. His defence was firm, his submission
was not inglorious, and the emperor was content with an easy
tribute, the demolition of his fortresses, and the
acknowledgement, on his coins, of a supreme lord. The artful
flattery of his son Grimoald added the appellation of
father, but he asserted his dignity with prudence, and
Benventum insensibly escaped from the French yoke. (110) IV.
Charlemagne was the first who united Germany under the same
sceptre. The name of Oriental France is preserved in the
circle of Franconia; and the people of Hesse and Thuringia
were recently incorporated with the victors, by the
conformity of religion and government. The Alemanni, so
formidable to the Romans, were the faithful vassals and
confederates of the Franks; and their country was inscribed
within the modern limits of Alsace, Swabia, and Switzerland.
The Bavarians, with a similar indulgence of their laws and
manners, were less patient of a master: the repeated
treasons of Tasillo justified the abolition of their
hereditary dukes; and their power was shared among the
counts, who judged and guarded that important frontier. But
the north of Germany, from the Rhine and beyond the Elbe,
was still hostile and Pagan; nor was it till after a war of
thirty-three years that the Saxons bowed under the yoke of
Christ and of Charlemagne. The idols and their votaries
were extirpated: the foundation of eight bishoprics, of
Munster, Osnaburgh, Paderborn, and Minden, of Bremen,
Verden, Hildesheim, and Halberstadt, define, on either side
of the Weser, the bounds of ancient Saxony these episcopal
seats were the first schools and cities of that savage land;
and the religion and humanity of the children atoned, in
some degree, for the massacre of the parents. Beyond the
Elbe, the Slavi, or Sclavonians, of similar manners and
various denominations, overspread the modern dominions of
Prussia, Poland, and Bohemia, and some transient marks of
obedience have tempted the French historian to extend the
empire to the Baltic and the Vistula. The conquest or
conversion of those countries is of a more recent age; but
the first union of Bohemia with the Germanic body may be
justly ascribed to the arms of Charlemagne. V. He
retaliated on the Avars, or Huns of Pannonia, the same
calamities which they had inflicted on the nations. Their
rings, the wooden fortifications which encircled their
districts and villages, were broken down by the triple
effort of a French army, that was poured into their country
by land and water, through the Carpathian mountains and
along the plain of the Danube. After a bloody conflict of
eight years, the loss of some French generals was avenged by
the slaughter of the most noble Huns: the relics of the
nation submitted the royal residence of the chagan was left
desolate and unknown; and the treasures, the rapine of two
hundred and fifty years, enriched the victorious troops, or
decorated the churches of Italy and Gaul. (111) After the
reduction of Pannonia, the empire of Charlemagne was bounded
only by the conflux of the Danube with the Teyss and the
Save: the provinces of Istria, Liburnia, and Dalmatia, were
an easy, though unprofitable, accession; and it was an
effect of his moderation, that he left the maritime cities
under the real or nominal sovereignty of the Greeks. But
these distant possessions added more to the reputation than
to the power of the Latin emperor; nor did he risk any
ecclesiastical foundations to reclaim the Barbarians from
their vagrant life and idolatrous worship. Some canals of
communication between the rivers, the Saone and the Meuse,
the Rhine and the Danube, were faintly attempted. (112) Their
execution would have vivified the empire; and more cost and
labor were often wasted in the structure of a cathedral. (I)
If we retrace the outlines of this geographical picture, it
will be seen that the empire of the Franks extended, between
east and west, from the Ebro to the Elbe or Vistula; between
the north and south, from the duchy of Beneventum to the
River Eyder, the perpetual boundary of Germany and Denmark.
The personal and political importance of Charlemagne was
magnified by the distress and division of the rest of
Europe. The islands of Great Britain and Ireland were
disputed by a crowd of princes of Saxon or Scottish origin:
and, after the loss of Spain, the Christian and Gothic
kingdom of Alphonso the Chaste was confined to the narrow
range of the Asturian mountains. These petty sovereigns
revered the power or virtue of the Carlovingian monarch,
implored the honor and support of his alliance, and styled
him their common parent, the sole and supreme emperor of the
West. (113) He maintained a more equal intercourse with the
caliph Harun al Rashid, (114) whose dominion stretched from
Africa to India, and accepted from his ambassadors a tent, a
water-clock, an elephant, and the keys of the Holy
Sepulchre. It is not easy to conceive the private
friendship of a Frank and an Arab, who were strangers to
each other's person, and language, and religion: but their
public correspondence was founded on vanity, and their
remote situation left no room for a competition of interest.
Two thirds of the Western empire of Rome were subject to
Charlemagne, and the deficiency was amply supplied by his
command of the inaccessible or invincible nations of
Germany. But in the choice of his enemies, (J) we may be
reasonably surprised that he so often preferred the poverty
of the north to the riches of the south. The
three-and-thirty campaigns laboriously consumed in the woods
and morasses of Germany would have sufficed to assert the
amplitude of his title by the expulsion of the Greeks from
Italy and the Saracens from Spain. The weakness of the
Greeks would have insured an easy victory; and the holy
crusade against the Saracens would have been prompted by
glory and revenge, and loudly justified by religion and
policy. Perhaps, in his expeditions beyond the Rhine and the
Elbe, he aspired to save his monarchy from the fate of the
Roman empire, to disarm the enemies of civilized society,
and to eradicate the seed of future emigrations. But it has
been wisely observed, that, in a light of precaution, all
conquest must be ineffectual, unless it could be universal,
since the increasing circle must be involved in a larger
sphere of hostility. (115) The subjugation of Germany
withdrew the veil which had so long concealed the continent
or islands of Scandinavia from the knowledge of Europe, and
awakened the torpid courage of their barbarous natives. The
fiercest of the Saxon idolaters escaped from the Christian
tyrant to their brethren of the North; the Ocean and
Mediterranean were covered with their piratical fleets; and
Charlemagne beheld with a sigh the destructive progress of
the Normans, who, in less than seventy years, precipitated
the fall of his race and monarchy.
Had the pope and the Romans revived the primitive
constitution, the titles of emperor and Augustus were
conferred on Charlemagne for the term of his life; and his
successors, on each vacancy, must have ascended the throne
by a formal or tacit election. But the association of his
son Lewis the Pious asserts the independent right of
monarchy and conquest, and the emperor seems on this
occasion to have foreseen and prevented the latent claims of
the clergy. The royal youth was commanded to take the crown
from the altar, and with his own hands to place it on his
head, as a gift which he held from God, his father, and the
nation. (116) The same ceremony was repeated, though with
less energy, in the subsequent associations of Lothaire and
Lewis the Second: the Carlovingian sceptre was transmitted
from father to son in a lineal descent of four generations;
and the ambition of the popes was reduced to the empty honor
of crowning and anointing these hereditary princes, who were
already invested with their power and dominions. The pious
Lewis survived his brothers, and embraced the whole empire
of Charlemagne; but the nations and the nobles, his bishops
and his children, quickly discerned that this mighty mass
was no longer inspired by the same soul; and the foundations
were undermined to the centre, while the external surface
was yet fair and entire. After a war, or battle, which
consumed one hundred thousand Franks, the empire was divided
by treaty between his three sons, who had violated every
filial and fraternal duty. The kingdoms of Germany and
France were forever separated; the provinces of Gaul,
between the Rhone and the Alps, the Meuse and the Rhine,
were assigned, with Italy, to the Imperial dignity of
Lothaire. In the partition of his share, Lorraine and Arles,
two recent and transitory kingdoms, were bestowed on the
younger children; and Lewis the Second, his eldest son, was
content with the realm of Italy, the proper and sufficient
patrimony of a Roman emperor. On his death without any male
issue, the vacant throne was disputed by his uncles and
cousins, and the popes most dexterously seized the occasion
of judging the claims and merits of the candidates, and of
bestowing on the most obsequious, or most liberal, the
Imperial office of advocate of the Roman church. The dregs
of the Carlovingian race no longer exhibited any symptoms of
virtue or power, and the ridiculous epithets of the bard,
the stammerer, the fat, and the simple, distinguished the
tame and uniform features of a crowd of kings alike
deserving of oblivion. By the failure of the collateral
branches, the whole inheritance devolved to Charles the Fat,
the last emperor of his family: his insanity authorized the
desertion of Germany, Italy, and France: he was deposed in a
diet, and solicited his daily bread from the rebels by whose
contempt his life and liberty had been spared. According to
the measure of their force, the governors, the bishops, and
the lords, usurped the fragments of the falling empire; and
some preference was shown to the female or illegitimate
blood of Charlemagne. Of the greater part, the title and
possession were alike doubtful, and the merit was adequate
to the contracted scale of their dominions. Those who could
appear with an army at the gates of Rome were crowned
emperors in the Vatican; but their modesty was more
frequently satisfied with the appellation of kings of Italy:
and the whole term of seventy-four years may be deemed a
vacancy, from the abdication of Charles the Fat to the
establishment of Otho the First.
Otho (117) was of the noble race of the dukes of Saxony; and
if he truly descended from Witikind, the adversary and
proselyte of Charlemagne, the posterity of a vanquished
people was exalted to reign over their conquerors. His
father, Henry the Fowler, was elected, by the suffrage of
the nation, to save and institute the kingdom of Germany.
Its limits (118) were enlarged on every side by his son, the
first and greatest of the Othos. A portion of Gaul, to the
west of the Rhine, along the banks of the Meuse and the
Moselle, was assigned to the Germans, by whose blood and
language it has been tinged since the time of Caesar and
Tacitus. Between the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Alps, the
successors of Otho acquired a vain supremacy over the broken
kingdoms of Burgundy and Arles. In the North, Christianity
was propagated by the sword of Otho, the conqueror and
apostle of the Slavic nations of the Elbe and Oder: the
marches of Brandenburgh and Sleswick were fortified with
German colonies; and the king of Denmark, the dukes of
Poland and Bohemia, confessed themselves his tributary
vassals. At the head of a victorious army, he passed the
Alps, subdued the kingdom of Italy, delivered the pope, and
forever fixed the Imperial crown in the name and nation of
Germany. From that memorable aera, two maxims of public
jurisprudence were introduced by force and ratified by time.
I. That the prince, who was elected in the German diet,
acquired, from that instant, the subject kingdoms of Italy
and Rome. II. But that he might not legally assume the
titles of emperor and Augustus, till he had received the
crown from the hands of the Roman pontiff. (119)
The Imperial dignity of Charlemagne was announced to the
East by the alteration of his style; and instead of saluting
his fathers, the Greek emperors, he presumed to adopt the
more equal and familiar appellation of brother. (120) Perhaps
in his connection with Irene he aspired to the name of
husband: his embassy to Constantinople spoke the language of
peace and friendship, and might conceal a treaty of marriage
with that ambitious princess, who had renounced the most
sacred duties of a mother. The nature, the duration, the
probable consequences of such a union between two distant
and dissonant empires, it is impossible to conjecture; but
the unanimous silence of the Latins may teach us to suspect,
that the report was invented by the enemies of Irene, to
charge her with the guilt of betraying the church and state
to the strangers of the West. (121) The French ambassadors
were the spectators, and had nearly been the victims, of the
conspiracy of Nicephorus, and the national hatred.
Constantinople was exasperated by the treason and sacrilege
of ancient Rome: a proverb, "That the Franks were good
friends and bad neighbors," was in every one's mouth; but it
was dangerous to provoke a neighbor who might be tempted to
reiterate, in the church of St. Sophia, the ceremony of his
Imperial coronation. After a tedious journey of circuit and
delay, the ambassadors of Nicephorus found him in his camp,
on the banks of the River Sala; and Charlemagne affected to
confound their vanity by displaying, in a Franconian
village, the pomp, or at least the pride, of the Byzantine
palace. (122) The Greeks were successively led through four
halls of audience: in the first they were ready to fall
prostrate before a splendid personage in a chair of state,
till he informed them that he was only a servant, the
constable, or master of the horse, of the emperor. The same
mistake, and the same answer, were repeated in the
apartments of the count palatine, the steward, and the
chamberlain; and their impatience was gradually heightened,
till the doors of the presence-chamber were thrown open, and
they beheld the genuine monarch, on his throne, enriched
with the foreign luxury which he despised, and encircled
with the love and reverence of his victorious chiefs. A
treaty of peace and alliance was concluded between the two
empires, and the limits of the East and West were defined by
the right of present possession. But the Greeks (123) soon
forgot this humiliating equality, or remembered it only to
hate the Barbarians by whom it was extorted. During the
short union of virtue and power, they respectfully saluted
the august Charlemagne, with the acclamations of basileus,
and emperor of the Romans. As soon as these qualities were
separated in the person of his pious son, the Byzantine
letters were inscribed, "To the king, or, as he styles
himself, the emperor of the Franks and Lombards." When both
power and virtue were extinct, they despoiled Lewis the
Second of his hereditary title, and with the barbarous
appellation of rex or rega, degraded him among the crowd of
Latin princes. His reply (124) is expressive of his weakness:
he proves, with some learning, that, both in sacred and
profane history, the name of king is synonymous with the
Greek word basileus: if, at Constantinople, it were assumed
in a more exclusive and imperial sense, he claims from his
ancestors, and from the popes, a just participation of the
honors of the Roman purple. The same controversy was revived
in the reign of the Othos; and their ambassador describes,
in lively colors, the insolence of the Byzantine court. (125)
The Greeks affected to despise the poverty and ignorance of
the Franks and Saxons; and in their last decline refused to
prostitute to the kings of Germany the title of Roman
emperors.
These emperors, in the election of the popes, continued to
exercise the powers which had been assumed by the Gothic and
Grecian princes; and the importance of this prerogative
increased with the temporal estate and spiritual
jurisdiction of the Roman church. In the Christian
aristocracy, the principal members of the clergy still
formed a senate to assist the administration, and to supply
the vacancy, of the bishop. Rome was divided into
twenty-eight parishes, and each parish was governed by a
cardinal priest, or presbyter, a title which, however common
or modest in its origin, has aspired to emulate the purple
of kings. Their number was enlarged by the association of
the seven deacons of the most considerable hospitals, the
seven palatine judges of the Lateran, and some dignitaries
of the church. This ecclesiastical senate was directed by
the seven cardinal-bishops of the Roman province, who were
less occupied in the suburb dioceses of Ostia, Porto,
Velitrae, Tusculum, Praeneste, Tibur, and the Sabines, than
by their weekly service in the Lateran, and their superior
share in the honors and authority of the apostolic see. On
the death of the pope, these bishops recommended a successor
to the suffrage of the college of cardinals, (126) and their
choice was ratified or rejected by the applause or clamor of
the Roman people. But the election was imperfect; nor could
the pontiff be legally consecrated till the emperor, the
advocate of the church, had graciously signified his
approbation and consent. The royal commissioner examined,
on the spot, the form and freedom of the proceedings; nor
was it till after a previous scrutiny into the
qualifications of the candidates, that he accepted an oath
of fidelity, and confirmed the donations which had
successively enriched the patrimony of St. Peter. In the
frequent schisms, the rival claims were submitted to the
sentence of the emperor; and in a synod of bishops he
presumed to judge, to condemn, and to punish, the crimes of
a guilty pontiff. Otho the First imposed a treaty on the
senate and people, who engaged to prefer the candidate most
acceptable to his majesty: (127) his successors anticipated
or prevented their choice: they bestowed the Roman benefice,
like the bishoprics of Cologne or Bamberg, on their
chancellors or preceptors; and whatever might be the merit
of a Frank or Saxon, his name sufficiently attests the
interposition of foreign power. These acts of prerogative
were most speciously excused by the vices of a popular
election. The competitor who had been excluded by the
cardinals appealed to the passions or avarice of the
multitude; the Vatican and the Lateran were stained with
blood; and the most powerful senators, the marquises of
Tuscany and the counts of Tusculum, held the apostolic see
in a long and disgraceful servitude. The Roman pontiffs, of
the ninth and tenth centuries, were insulted, imprisoned,
and murdered, by their tyrants; and such was their
indigence, after the loss and usurpation of the
ecclesiastical patrimonies, that they could neither support
the state of a prince, nor exercise the charity of a priest.
(128) The influence of two sister prostitutes, Marozia and
Theodora, was founded on their wealth and beauty, their
political and amorous intrigues: the most strenuous of their
lovers were rewarded with the Roman mitre, and their reign
(129) may have suggested to the darker ages (130) the fable
(131) of a female pope. (132) The bastard son, the grandson,
and the great-grandson of Marozia, a rare genealogy, were
seated in the chair of St. Peter, and it was at the age of
nineteen years that the second of these became the head of
the Latin church. (K) His youth and manhood were of a
suitable complexion; and the nations of pilgrims could bear
testimony to the charges that were urged against him in a
Roman synod, and in the presence of Otho the Great. As John
XII. had renounced the dress and decencies of his
profession, the soldier may not perhaps be dishonored by the
wine which he drank, the blood that he spilt, the flames
that he kindled, or the licentious pursuits of gaming and
hunting. His open simony might be the consequence of
distress; and his blasphemous invocation of Jupiter and
Venus, if it be true, could not possibly be serious. But we
read, with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of
Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome;
that the Lateran palace was turned into a school for
prostitution, and that his rapes of virgins and widows had
deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St.
Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by
his successor. (133) The Protestants have dwelt with
malicious pleasure on these characters of Antichrist; but to
a philosophic eye, the vices of the clergy are far less
dangerous than their virtues. After a long series of
scandal, the apostolic see was reformed and exalted by the
austerity and zeal of Gregory VII. That ambitious monk
devoted his life to the execution of two projects. I. To
fix in the college of cardinals the freedom and independence
of election, and forever to abolish the right or usurpation
of the emperors and the Roman people. II. To bestow and
resume the Western empire as a fief or benefice (134) of the
church, and to extend his temporal dominion over the kings
and kingdoms of the earth. After a contest of fifty years,
the first of these designs was accomplished by the firm
support of the ecclesiastical order, whose liberty was
connected with that of their chief. But the second attempt,
though it was crowned with some partial and apparent
success, has been vigorously resisted by the secular power,
and finally extinguished by the improvement of human reason.
In the revival of the empire of empire of Rome, neither the
bishop nor the people could bestow on Charlemagne or Otho
the provinces which were lost, as they had been won, by the
chance of arms. But the Romans were free to choose a master
for themselves; and the powers which had been delegated to
the patrician, were irrevocably granted to the French and
Saxon emperors of the West. The broken records of the times
(135) preserve some remembrance of their palace, their mint,
their tribunal, their edicts, and the sword of justice,
which, as late as the thirteenth century, was derived from
Caesar to the praefect of the city. (136) Between the arts of
the popes and the violence of the people, this supremacy was
crushed and annihilated. Content with the titles of emperor
and Augustus, the successors of Charlemagne neglected to
assert this local jurisdiction. In the hour of prosperity,
their ambition was diverted by more alluring objects; and in
the decay and division of the empire, they were oppressed by
the defence of their hereditary provinces. Amidst the ruins
of Italy, the famous Marozia invited one of the usurpers to
assume the character of her third husband; and Hugh, king of
Burgundy was introduced by her faction into the mole of
Hadrian or Castle of St. Angelo, which commands the
principal bridge and entrance of Rome. Her son by the first
marriage, Alberic, was compelled to attend at the nuptial
banquet; but his reluctant and ungraceful service was
chastised with a blow by his new father. The blow was
productive of a revolution. "Romans," exclaimed the youth,
"once you were the masters of the world, and these
Burgundians the most abject of your slaves. They now reign,
these voracious and brutal savages, and my injury is the
commencement of your servitude." (137) The alarum bell rang
to arms in every quarter of the city: the Burgundians
retreated with haste and shame; Marozia was imprisoned by
her victorious son, and his brother, Pope John XI., was
reduced to the exercise of his spiritual functions. With
the title of prince, Alberic possessed above twenty years
the government of Rome; and he is said to have gratified the
popular prejudice, by restoring the office, or at least the
title, of consuls and tribunes. His son and heir Octavian
assumed, with the pontificate, the name of John XII.: like
his predecessor, he was provoked by the Lombard princes to
seek a deliverer for the church and republic; and the
services of Otho were rewarded with the Imperial dignity.
But the Saxon was imperious, the Romans were impatient, the
festival of the coronation was disturbed by the secret
conflict of prerogative and freedom, and Otho commanded his
sword-bearer not to stir from his person, lest he should be
assaulted and murdered at the foot of the altar. (138) Before
he repassed the Alps, the emperor chastised the revolt of
the people and the ingratitude of John XII. The pope was
degraded in a synod; the praefect was mounted on an ass,
whipped through the city, and cast into a dungeon; thirteen
of the most guilty were hanged, others were mutilated or
banished; and this severe process was justified by the
ancient laws of Theodosius and Justinian. The voice of fame
has accused the second Otho of a perfidious and bloody act,
the massacre of the senators, whom he had invited to his
table under the fair semblance of hospitality and
friendship. (139) In the minority of his son Otho the Third,
Rome made a bold attempt to shake off the Saxon yoke, and
the consul Crescentius was the Brutus of the republic. From
the condition of a subject and an exile, he twice rose to
the command of the city, oppressed, expelled, and created
the popes, and formed a conspiracy for restoring the
authority of the Greek emperors. (L) In the fortress of St.
Angelo, he maintained an obstinate siege, till the
unfortunate consul was betrayed by a promise of safety: his
body was suspended on a gibbet, and his head was exposed on
the battlements of the castle. By a reverse of fortune,
Otho, after separating his troops, was besieged three days,
without food, in his palace; and a disgraceful escape saved
him from the justice or fury of the Romans. The senator
Ptolemy was the leader of the people, and the widow of
Crescentius enjoyed the pleasure or the fame of revenging
her husband, by a poison which she administered to her
Imperial lover. It was the design of Otho the Third to
abandon the ruder countries of the North, to erect his
throne in Italy, and to revive the institutions of the Roman
monarchy. But his successors only once in their lives
appeared on the banks of the Tyber, to receive their crown
in the Vatican. (140) Their absence was contemptible, their
presence odious and formidable. They descended from the
Alps, at the head of their barbarians, who were strangers
and enemies to the country; and their transient visit was a
scene of tumult and bloodshed. (141) A faint remembrance of
their ancestors still tormented the Romans; and they beheld
with pious indignation the succession of Saxons, Franks,
Swabians, and Bohemians, who usurped the purple and
prerogatives of the Caesars.
Maffei's gallery contained a medal with Imp. Caes August. P.
P. Crescentius. Hence Hobhouse infers that he affected the
empire. Hobhouse, Illustrations of Childe Harold, p. 252. -
M.]
There is nothing perhaps more adverse to nature and reason
than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign
nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest. A
torrent of Barbarians may pass over the earth, but an
extensive empire must be supported by a refined system of
policy and oppression; in the centre, an absolute power,
prompt in action and rich in resources; a swift and easy
communication with the extreme parts; fortifications to
check the first effort of rebellion; a regular
administration to protect and punish; and a well-disciplined
army to inspire fear, without provoking discontent and
despair. Far different was the situation of the German
Caesars, who were ambitious to enslave the kingdom of Italy.
Their patrimonial estates were stretched along the Rhine, or
scattered in the provinces; but this ample domain was
alienated by the imprudence or distress of successive
princes; and their revenue, from minute and vexatious
prerogative, was scarcely sufficient for the maintenance of
their household. Their troops were formed by the legal or
voluntary service of their feudal vassals, who passed the
Alps with reluctance, assumed the license of rapine and
disorder, and capriciously deserted before the end of the
campaign. Whole armies were swept away by the pestilential
influence of the climate: the survivors brought back the
bones of their princes and nobles, (142) and the effects of
their own intemperance were often imputed to the treachery
and malice of the Italians, who rejoiced at least in the
calamities of the Barbarians. This irregular tyranny might
contend on equal terms with the petty tyrants of Italy; nor
can the people, or the reader, be much interested in the
event of the quarrel. But in the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, the Lombards rekindled the flame of industry and
freedom; and the generous example was at length imitated by
the republics of Tuscany. In the Italian cities a
municipal government had never been totally abolished; and
their first privileges were granted by the favor and policy
of the emperors, who were desirous of erecting a plebeian
barrier against the independence of the nobles. But their
rapid progress, the daily extension of their power and
pretensions, were founded on the numbers and spirit of these
rising communities. (143) Each city filled the measure of her
diocese or district: the jurisdiction of the counts and
bishops, of the marquises and counts, was banished from the
land; and the proudest nobles were persuaded or compelled to
desert their solitary castles, and to embrace the more
honorable character of freemen and magistrates. The
legislative authority was inherent in the general assembly;
but the executive powers were intrusted to three consuls,
annually chosen from the three orders of captains,
valvassors, (144) and commons, into which the republic was
divided. Under the protection of equal law, the labors of
agriculture and commerce were gradually revived; but the
martial spirit of the Lombards was nourished by the presence
of danger; and as often as the bell was rung, or the
standard (145) erected, the gates of the city poured forth a
numerous and intrepid band, whose zeal in their own cause
was soon guided by the use and discipline of arms. At the
foot of these popular ramparts, the pride of the Caesars was
overthrown; and the invincible genius of liberty prevailed
over the two Frederics, the greatest princes of the middle
age; the first, superior perhaps in military prowess; the
second, who undoubtedly excelled in the softer
accomplishments of peace and learning.
Ambitious of restoring the splendor of the purple, Frederic
the First invaded the republics of Lombardy, with the arts
of a statesman, the valor of a soldier, and the cruelty of a
tyrant. The recent discovery of the Pandects had renewed a
science most favorable to despotism; and his venal advocates
proclaimed the emperor the absolute master of the lives and
properties of his subjects. His royal prerogatives, in a
less odious sense, were acknowledged in the diet of
Roncaglia; and the revenue of Italy was fixed at thirty
thousand pounds of silver, (146) which were multiplied to an
indefinite demand by the rapine of the fiscal officers. The
obstinate cities were reduced by the terror or the force of
his arms: his captives were delivered to the executioner, or
shot from his military engines; and. after the siege and
surrender of Milan, the buildings of that stately capital
were razed to the ground, three hundred hostages were sent
into Germany, and the inhabitants were dispersed in four
villages, under the yoke of the inflexible conqueror. (147)
But Milan soon rose from her ashes; and the league of
Lombardy was cemented by distress: their cause was espoused
by Venice, Pope Alexander the Third, and the Greek emperor:
the fabric of oppression was overturned in a day; and in the
treaty of Constance, Frederic subscribed, with some
reservations, the freedom of four-and-twenty cities. His
grandson contended with their vigor and maturity; but
Frederic the Second (148) was endowed with some personal and
peculiar advantages. His birth and education recommended
him to the Italians; and in the implacable discord of the
two factions, the Ghibelins were attached to the emperor,
while the Guelfs displayed the banner of liberty and the
church. The court of Rome had slumbered, when his father
Henry the Sixth was permitted to unite with the empire the
kingdoms of Naples and Sicily; and from these hereditary
realms the son derived an ample and ready supply of troops
and treasure. Yet Frederic the Second was finally oppressed
by the arms of the Lombards and the thunders of the Vatican:
his kingdom was given to a stranger, and the last of his
family was beheaded at Naples on a public scaffold. During
sixty years, no emperor appeared in Italy, and the name was
remembered only by the ignominious sale of the last relics
of sovereignty.
The Barbarian conquerors of the West were pleased to
decorate their chief with the title of emperor; but it was
not their design to invest him with the despotism of
Constantine and Justinian. The persons of the Germans were
free, their conquests were their own, and their national
character was animated by a spirit which scorned the servile
jurisprudence of the new or the ancient Rome. It would have
been a vain and dangerous attempt to impose a monarch on the
armed freemen, who were impatient of a magistrate; on the
bold, who refused to obey; on the powerful, who aspired to
command. The empire of Charlemagne and Otho was distributed
among the dukes of the nations or provinces, the counts of
the smaller districts, and the margraves of the marches or
frontiers, who all united the civil and military authority
as it had been delegated to the lieutenants of the first
Caesars. The Roman governors, who, for the most part, were
soldiers of fortune, seduced their mercenary legions,
assumed the Imperial purple, and either failed or succeeded
in their revolt, without wounding the power and unity of
government. If the dukes, margraves, and counts of Germany,
were less audacious in their claims, the consequences of
their success were more lasting and pernicious to the state.
Instead of aiming at the supreme rank, they silently labored
to establish and appropriate their provincial independence.
Their ambition was seconded by the weight of their estates
and vassals, their mutual example and support, the common
interest of the subordinate nobility, the change of princes
and families, the minorities of Otho the Third and Henry the
Fourth, the ambition of the popes, and the vain pursuit of
the fugitive crowns of Italy and Rome. All the attributes
of regal and territorial jurisdiction were gradually usurped
by the commanders of the provinces; the right of peace and
war, of life and death, of coinage and taxation, of foreign
alliance and domestic economy. Whatever had been seized by
violence, was ratified by favor or distress, was granted as
the price of a doubtful vote or a voluntary service;
whatever had been granted to one could not, without injury,
be denied to his successor or equal; and every act of local
or temporary possession was insensibly moulded into the
constitution of the Germanic kingdom. In every province,
the visible presence of the duke or count was interposed
between the throne and the nobles; the subjects of the law
became the vassals of a private chief; and the standard
which he received from his sovereign, was often raised
against him in the field. The temporal power of the clergy
was cherished and exalted by the superstition or policy of
the Carlovingian and Saxon dynasties, who blindly depended
on their moderation and fidelity; and the bishoprics of
Germany were made equal in extent and privilege, superior in
wealth and population, to the most ample states of the
military order. As long as the emperors retained the
prerogative of bestowing on every vacancy these ecclesiastic
and secular benefices, their cause was maintained by the
gratitude or ambition of their friends and favorites. But in
the quarrel of the investitures, they were deprived of their
influence over the episcopal chapters; the freedom of
election was restored, and the sovereign was reduced, by a
solemn mockery, to his first prayers, the recommendation,
once in his reign, to a single prebend in each church. The
secular governors, instead of being recalled at the will of
a superior, could be degraded only by the sentence of their
peers. In the first age of the monarchy, the appointment of
the son to the duchy or county of his father, was solicited
as a favor; it was gradually obtained as a custom, and
extorted as a right: the lineal succession was often
extended to the collateral or female branches; the states of
the empire (their popular, and at length their legal,
appellation) were divided and alienated by testament and
sale; and all idea of a public trust was lost in that of a
private and perpetual inheritance. The emperor could not
even be enriched by the casualties of forfeiture and
extinction: within the term of a year, he was obliged to
dispose of the vacant fief; and, in the choice of the
candidate, it was his duty to consult either the general or
the provincial diet. After the death of Frederic the Second,
Germany was left a monster with a hundred heads. A crowd of
princes and prelates disputed the ruins of the empire: the
lords of innumerable castles were less prone to obey, than
to imitate, their superiors; and, according to the measure
of their strength, their incessant hostilities received the
names of conquest or robbery. Such anarchy was the
inevitable consequence of the laws and manners of Europe;
and the kingdoms of France and Italy were shivered into
fragments by the violence of the same tempest. But the
Italian cities and the French vassals were divided and
destroyed, while the union of the Germans has produced,
under the name of an empire, a great system of a federative
republic. In the frequent and at last the perpetual
institution of diets, a national spirit was kept alive, and
the powers of a common legislature are still exercised by
the three branches or colleges of the electors, the princes,
and the free and Imperial cities of Germany. I. Seven of
the most powerful feudatories were permitted to assume, with
a distinguished name and rank, the exclusive privilege of
choosing the Roman emperor; and these electors were the king
of Bohemia, the duke of Saxony, the margrave of
Brandenburgh, the count palatine of the Rhine, and the three
archbishops of Mentz, of Treves, and of Cologne. II. The
college of princes and prelates purged themselves of a
promiscuous multitude: they reduced to four representative
votes the long series of independent counts, and excluded
the nobles or equestrian order, sixty thousand of whom, as
in the Polish diets, had appeared on horseback in the field
of election. III. The pride of birth and dominion, of the
sword and the mitre, wisely adopted the commons as the third
branch of the legislature, and, in the progress of society,
they were introduced about the same aera into the national
assemblies of France England, and Germany. The Hanseatic
League commanded the trade and navigation of the north: the
confederates of the Rhine secured the peace and intercourse
of the inland country; the influence of the cities has been
adequate to their wealth and policy, and their negative
still invalidates the acts of the two superior colleges of
electors and princes. (149)
It is in the fourteenth century that we may view in the
strongest light the state and contrast of the Roman empire
of Germany, which no longer held, except on the borders of
the Rhine and Danube, a single province of Trajan or
Constantine. Their unworthy successors were the counts of
Hapsburgh, of Nassau, of Luxemburgh, and Schwartzenburgh:
the emperor Henry the Seventh procured for his son the crown
of Bohemia, and his grandson Charles the Fourth was born
among a people strange and barbarous in the estimation of
the Germans themselves. (150) After the excommunication of
Lewis of Bavaria, he received the gift or promise of the
vacant empire from the Roman pontiffs, who, in the exile and
captivity of Avignon, affected the dominion of the earth.
The death of his competitors united the electoral college,
and Charles was unanimously saluted king of the Romans, and
future emperor; a title which, in the same age, was
prostituted to the Caesars of Germany and Greece. The
German emperor was no more than the elective and impotent
magistrate of an aristocracy of princes, who had not left
him a village that he might call his own. His best
prerogative was the right of presiding and proposing in the
national senate, which was convened at his summons; and his
native kingdom of Bohemia, less opulent than the adjacent
city of Nuremberg, was the firmest seat of his power and the
richest source of his revenue. The army with which he
passed the Alps consisted of three hundred horse. In the
cathedral of St. Ambrose, Charles was crowned with the iron
crown, which tradition ascribed to the Lombard monarchy; but
he was admitted only with a peaceful train; the gates of the
city were shut upon him; and the king of Italy was held a
captive by the arms of the Visconti, whom he confirmed in
the sovereignty of Milan. In the Vatican he was again
crowned with the golden crown of the empire; but, in
obedience to a secret treaty, the Roman emperor immediately
withdrew, without reposing a single night within the walls
of Rome. The eloquent Petrarch, (151) whose fancy revived
the visionary glories of the Capitol, deplores and upbraids
the ignominious flight of the Bohemian; and even his
contemporaries could observe, that the sole exercise of his
authority was in the lucrative sale of privileges and
titles. The gold of Italy secured the election of his son;
but such was the shameful poverty of the Roman emperor, that
his person was arrested by a butcher in the streets of
Worms, and was detained in the public inn, as a pledge or
hostage for the payment of his expenses.
From this humiliating scene, let us turn to the apparent
majesty of the same Charles in the diets of the empire. The
golden bull, which fixes the Germanic constitution, is
promulgated in the style of a sovereign and legislator. A
hundred princes bowed before his throne, and exalted their
own dignity by the voluntary honors which they yielded to
their chief or minister. At the royal banquet, the
hereditary great officers, the seven electors, who in rank
and title were equal to kings, performed their solemn and
domestic service of the palace. The seals of the triple
kingdom were borne in state by the archbishops of Mentz,
Cologne, and Treves, the perpetual arch-chancellors of
Germany, Italy, and Arles. The great marshal, on horseback,
exercised his function with a silver measure of oats, which
he emptied on the ground, and immediately dismounted to
regulate the order of the guests The great steward, the
count palatine of the Rhine, place the dishes on the table.
The great chamberlain, the margrave of Brandenburgh,
presented, after the repast, the golden ewer and basin, to
wash. The king of Bohemia, as great cup-bearer, was
represented by the emperor's brother, the duke of Luxemburgh
and Brabant; and the procession was closed by the great
huntsmen, who introduced a boar and a stag, with a loud
chorus of horns and hounds. (152) Nor was the supremacy of
the emperor confined to Germany alone: the hereditary
monarchs of Europe confessed the preeminence of his rank and
dignity: he was the first of the Christian princes, the
temporal head of the great republic of the West: (153) to his
person the title of majesty was long appropriated; and he
disputed with the pope the sublime prerogative of creating
kings and assembling councils. The oracle of the civil law,
the learned Bartolus, was a pensioner of Charles the Fourth;
and his school resounded with the doctrine, that the Roman
emperor was the rightful sovereign of the earth, from the
rising to the setting sun. The contrary opinion was
condemned, not as an error, but as a heresy, since even the
gospel had pronounced, "And there went forth a decree from
Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." (154)
If we annihilate the interval of time and space between
Augustus and Charles, strong and striking will be the
contrast between the two Caesars; the Bohemian who concealed
his weakness under the mask of ostentation, and the Roman,
who disguised his strength under the semblance of modesty.
At the head of his victorious legions, in his reign over the
sea and land, from the Nile and Euphrates to the Atlantic
Ocean, Augustus professed himself the servant of the state
and the equal of his fellow-citizens. The conqueror of Rome
and her provinces assumed a popular and legal form of a
censor, a consul, and a tribune. His will was the law of
mankind, but in the declaration of his laws he borrowed the
voice of the senate and people; and from their decrees their
master accepted and renewed his temporary commission to
administer the republic. In his dress, his domestics, (155)
his titles, in all the offices of social life, Augustus
maintained the character of a private Roman; and his most
artful flatterers respected the secret of his absolute and
perpetual monarchy.