§57. FOUNDING OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE. A.D.800. 253
to maintain his power in Italy and to defend his own subjects, first against the Lombards and then against the Franks, had virtually forfeited his claim.
For the West the event was the re-establishment, on a Teutonic basis, of the old Roman empire, which henceforth, together with the papacy, controlled the history of the middle ages. The pope and the emperor represented the highest dignity and power in church and state. But the pope was the greater and more endu ring power of the two. He continued, down to the Reformation, the spiritual ruler of all Europe, and is to this day the ruler of an empire much vaster than that of ancient Rome. He is, in the striking language of Hobbes, " the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof."
THE RELATION OF THE POPE AXD THE EMPEROR.
What was the legal and actual relation between these two sovereignties, and the limits of jurisdiction of each? This was the struggle of centuries. It involved many problems which could only be settled in the course of events. It was easy enough to distinguish the two in theory by confining the pope to spiritual, and the emperor to temporal affairs. But on the theocratic theory of the union of church and state the two will and must come into frequent conflict.
The pope, by voluntarily conferring the imperial crown upon Charles, might claim that the empire was his gift, and that the right of crowning implied the right of discrowning. And this right was exercised by popes at a later period, who wielded the secular as well as the spiritual sword and absolved nations of their oath of allegiance. A mosaic picture in the triclinium of Leo III. in the Lateran (from the ninth century) represents St. Peter in glory, bestowing upon Leo kneeling at his right hand the priestly stole, and upon Charles kneeling at his left, the standard of Rome.1 This is the mediaeval hierarchical theory,
1 The picture is reproduced in the works of V<5tault and Stacke above quoted.
254 FOUETH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
which derives all power from God through Peter as the head of the church. Gregory VII. compared the church to the sun, the state to the moon who derives her light from the sun. The popes will always maintain the principle of the absolute supre macy of the church over the state, and support or oppose a gov ernment — whether it be an empire or a kingdom or a republic — according to the degree of its subserviency to the interests of the hierarchy. The papal Syllabus of 1864 expresses the genuine spirit of the system in irreconcilable conflict with the spirit of modern history and civilization. The Vatican Palace is the richest museum of classical and mediaeval curiosities, and the pope himself, the infallible oracle of two hundred millions of souls, is by far the greatest curiosity in it.
On the other hand Charles, although devotedly attached to the church and the pope, was too absolute a monarch to recog nize a sovereignty within his sovereignty. He derived his idea of the theocracy from the Old Testament, and the relation between Moses and Aaron. He understood and exercised his imperial dignity pretty much in the same way as Constantino the Great and Theodosius the Great had done in the Byzantine empire, which was csesaro-papal in principle and practice, and so is its successor, the Russian empire. Charles believed that he was the divinely appointed protector of the church and the regulator of all her external and to some extent also the internal affairs. He called the synods of his empire without asking the pope. He presided at the Council of Frankfort (794), which legislated on matters of doctrine and discipline, condemned the Adoption heresy, agreeably to the pope, and rejected the image worship against the decision of the second oecumenical 'Council of Nicsea (787) and the declared views of several popes.1 He appointed
1 Milman (II. 497) : " The Council of Frankfort displays most fully the power assumed by Charlemagne over the hierarchy as well as the nobility of the realm, the mingled character, the all-embracing comprehensiveness of his legislation. The assembly at Frankfort was at once a Diet or Parliament of the realm and an ecclesiastical Council. It took cognizance alternately of