COMPARISON OF HENRY THE FOWLER AND OTTO WITH CHARLEMAGNE
The feeling of his unassailable position may have cheered the emperor on the journey to his own palatinate and church, at Memleben on the Unstrut, where the river, peaceful and calm on the surface but flowing strongly in its depths, winds its way out of the valley through the neighbouring mountains, which have still kept the name they bore in the days of antiquity. It is supposed to have been an ancient Germanic burial-place. He arrived there on the 6th of May, 973. It has rather been supposed that he came there with a foreboding of death. But death hovered over him. On the 7th he still kept the hours for prayer, not without interruption for rest and for “offering his hand to the poor,” as the chronicle says.
He seemed cheerful at table. Whilst he was listening to the singing of the Gospel at vespers, he was seized by the horror of death. Overcome by heat and weakness, he was placed on a seat, received the Communion, and died without any previous illness or death struggle. Thus the man who might have been considered as the ruler of all the western world, unexpectedly suffered the fate of mortals. The fullness of an inexhaustible vigour accompanied him to the end of his life, when it was suddenly conquered. He was only sixty-one years of age when he expired; his father had died at about the same age, in the same place, after a most active life.
Let us, even at the danger of repetition, add a few remarks concerning the position in the world of these two great men.
They had been preceded by Pepin and Charles the Great, likewise father and son, through whose succession and co-operation the West received its definite form. That which the father had planned, the son carried out with circumspect politics and the fortune of arms; under his long and peaceful administration the Western Empire was formed. The relations were not quite the same between Henry and Otto. Of Henry nothing is to be found from which one can conclude that his plans were the foundations of his son’s actions. But succeeding each other under altered circumstances, they obtained the greatest success. To them is due the fact that the Carlovingian kingdom was sustained. Father and son worked together to banish the most dangerous enemies by which Germany was at any time attacked. Through Otto, Italy again became closely united with the empire, and western France kept in peaceful relation to it. The western world, its power and civilisation, depended on the union of the three great lands.
[973 A.D.]
A German Chief
For the consolidation of the empire the union of Charles the Great with the papacy was most essential; the ecclesiastical and temporal interests co-operated. The church belonged to the Latin world; but it had a lasting effect on the Germanic tribes. It united their religious views with the idea of the apostolic mission of St. Peter, and with the traditions of antiquity. Thus Saxony, which Charles subjected with arms, was organised as an ecclesiastical province; Bavaria was subjected by direct influence of the pope to the great kingdom which then became the empire—that is to say, the constitution of the empire, embracing as it did Latin elements, did not take place without the influence of the pope. Nevertheless the personal authority of a great prince was necessary to keep all his provinces in unity.
Since then, as has been remarked, a considerable alteration took place. The opposition descended from antiquity between the priesthood and the higher authorities had again broken out; the priesthood had acquired a development and strength, with which the temporal power in the hands of the Carlovingians could no longer interfere. In Germany the hierarchical doctrines were also to the fore, and it might well have seemed possible that the essence of the German spirit had been absorbed by them. But how was it to escape this absorption? There can be no doubt that it was owing chiefly to the establishment of a princely house which was essentially Germanic and completely realised the idea of temporal power. The empire which Henry I conquered and Otto the Great raised to a magnificent structure, had a Germanic vein of preponderating strength and keenness; it gave back authority to temporal power—not alone the supreme authority but also the subordinate authority attending it, and was joined by those bishops who were free from the power of the pope at Rome, until now absolute. Had an unconditional subjection of the clergy taken place, this would have shattered the foundation of the empire. The religious idea was not fought by the Saxon princes, but ecclesiastical politics underwent a change. The object now was to insure the independence of the imperial and kingly authority and to save it from clerical interference in the government.
It strove for a juxtaposition of the two authorities with a preponderance of the temporal. This was the principle of the German Empire which was autonomically raised by Henry and Otto on the foundation of the Carlovingian. The relations of the European nations were reorganised by the unification of Germany. In England and France they had not been so fortunate as in Germany; the northern invasions had not been repelled, the nationalities had even become altered under their influence. They had other requirements, other centres. The rising of the temporal power in itself created new foundations for them.
If the empire aspired to universal authority, this attempt would have to be given up. A complete nullification of the papal authority would have been unbearable to the German Empire, and the neighbouring nations were far from being disposed to subject themselves to such a central superiority as would thus have arisen. Awakened national feeling laid the foundations of the German Empire, though religion was not without its effect. In the course of the following century the latter gained in intensity. From all these causes resulted the complex civilisation which we call Western Christianity; since thenceforward chaotic forces and tendencies progressed towards unification. The state thus founded became the basis for modern civilisation.e
THE UNFORESEEN EVILS OF OTTO’S REIGN
[962 A.D.]
By far the most important act of Otto’s eventful life was his assumption of the Lombard and the imperial crowns. His successors so steadily followed his example that the sovereign crowned at Aix-la-Chapelle claimed as his right to be afterwards crowned in Milan and in Rome. Thus grew up the Holy Roman Empire, that strange state which, directly descending through the empire of Charles the Great from the empire of the cæsars, contained so many elements foreign to ancient life. We are here concerned with it only in so far as it affected Germany. Germany itself never until the nineteenth century became an empire. It is true that at least the Holy Roman Empire was as a matter of fact confined to Germany; but in theory it was something quite different. Like France, Germany was a kingdom, but it differed from France in this, that its king was also king in Italy, and Roman emperor. As the latter title made him nominally the secular lord of the world, it might have been expected to excite the pride of his German subjects; and doubtless, after a time, they did learn to think highly of themselves as the imperial race. But the evidence tends to show that at first they had no wish for this honour, and would have much preferred had their ruler limited himself strictly to his own people. There are signs that during Otto’s reign they began to have a distinct consciousness of national life, their use of the word “deutsch,” to indicate the whole people, being one of these symptoms.