I drew a distinction in my last lecture between two stages in the dying out of the Roman power and its traditions. There were times when the two Empires of East and West, however changed their character from what it had been in earlier times, however far they had gone, the one to become Greek, the other to become German, might still be held to keep the essence of their old Roman being. And there were later times when the names and traditions of Rome still lingered on, but when they could not be looked on as more than shadows and survivals. I wish it of course to be understood that this division between these times is an arbitrary line of my own drawing. In the West at least it does not answer to any such marked epoch as the event of 800, the event of 1453, the event of 1806. I drew the line at the death of Frederick the Second. We shall, I think, all allow that, if Frederick the Second represents a state of things which had become very unlike the state of things under Trajan or even under Constantine, Francis the Second represents a state of things at least as unlike the state of things under Frederick. But it does not follow that, if a line is to be drawn, every one would draw it at the death of Frederick. It might be said that the Empire had become a mere German state before his day, that the position of Frederick was exceptional, that his importance in Italian affairs really belonged to the King of Sicily and not to the Emperor of the Romans, that the career even of his grandfather showed that in his time the Roman claims of the German kings had become thoroughly unreal, and rested wholly on the strength of their German armies. Another might draw the line much later; he might say that the true Empire passed away when an Emperor, a third Frederick most unlike the First and Second, took his crown for the last time before the altar of old Saint Peter’s. He might draw it when that Frederick’s son took an Imperial style, though to be sure with a qualifying adjective, without any show of Imperial crowning. Or he might draw it when the last Imperator, successor of the first Imperator electus, took the crown of the Empire, not before the altar of Saint Peter at Rome, but before the altar of Saint Petronius at Bologna. The last is indeed an epoch-making moment; Charles the Fifth does seem to wind up with some fitting dignity that Imperial line which began with Charles the Great. And as the last Emperor, as distinguished from Emperors-elect, he does truly wind it up. The gap between Charles and Ferdinand is in truth a wide one. But surely there is a still wider gap between Frederick the Wonder of the World and princes like William of Holland, Richard of Cornwall, and even, when looked on from the Imperial side, as Rudolf of Habsburg. Rudolf is indeed different from William and Richard; he is great and famous as German King; but the line of Emperors knows him not. The fact that the man whom we may call the restorer of the German kingdom never sought the Imperial crown seems of itself to point to the reign of the last Emperor before him, even if that Emperor had not been Frederick the Second, as the time when the Empire, as a power in itself, and not simply as a lofty title, a mighty memory, came to an end. Under Charles the Fifth the Empire seems to spring again to the fulness of its ancient power; but his abdication and death revealed a truth. When his titles of Empire passed to Ferdinand and his European position passed to Philip, it became clear that, however the titles of Empire might make the position of Charles more brilliant, his might had not really been the might of the Empire, but the might of Burgundy and Castile. The line, wherever we draw it, is an arbitrary one, unmarked either by formal changes or by events of the first greatness. I think we shall all agree that the Peace of Constanz and the Peace of Westfalia are the acts of a power which in the earlier time still kept much of a really Roman position, while in the later time all truly Roman character had passed from it. The change between the two states of things is gradual; at what point between the two we choose to draw the line is largely matter of opinion, one might say rather matter of taste or of feeling.

In the East our case is much clearer. The event of 1204 is one that stands out with far greater distinctness than the event of 1250. No years in the Byzantine annals are more honourable than those in which they for a while cease to be Byzantine. It is when the ??a??? again become Byzantine that they again degenerate. If the name of Roman is to be held as an epithet of honour, at no time did prince and people better deserve that name than when they were banished from the New Rome. Adversity brought out vigorous qualities indeed in the Emperors of Nikaia and their subjects. Yet the fact that they were Emperors of Nikaia and not of Constantinople puts a wide barrier between them and their predecessors. The life of the Eastern Empire had been so thoroughly bound up in the possession of the Eastern Rome that no change could seem so great as that which gave the Eastern Rome to a Latin stranger. The Empire of Nikaia proved in the end the most vigorous and abiding among its fellows; but it had fellows. It was only one of a crowd of states, Greek and Latin, into which the Roman Empire of the East was broken in pieces. That the old Empire was utterly broken in pieces, that its old position had wholly passed away, is shown by unavoidable changes in language. It is now indeed hard to avoid using the word Greek. To be sure no Orthodox speaker of the Greek tongue—that is now the definition of the artificial Greek nation—dreamed of calling himself ?????; the Greeks, the Griffons, of Western speakers were still everywhere ??a??? in their own eyes. Strange indeed is the opposition of names in these days. When we find ??a??? and ?at???? opposed, we seem to be carried back to the consulship of Manlius and Decius; when somewhat earlier we find a strife between ??a??? and ??a???, we seem to be carried back from the pages of Anna to the pages of Dionysios, from the reign of Alexios to the reign of Tullus. But now that Emperors, Kings, Despots, Dukes, Grand-Sires, outlying possessions of Italian commonwealths and Italian families, have become thick on the ground and still thicker on the waters, we can hardly use any other name than Greek to distinguish a prince or a people speaking the later shape of the tongue of Hellas from princes and people speaking the later shapes of the tongue of Latium. When we step within the range of theological controversy, our difficulties become greater still. If we keep to our elder language, the special badge of the Roman will be that he denies the authority of the Roman Church. The Roman name, as the formal name of a power, ceased only in 1453, or rather in 1461. The Roman name, as the name of a people, can hardly be said to have even now passed away. But from 800 onwards we may fairly use such distinguishing forms as “Eastern” and “Byzantine”; from 1204 onwards we can hardly help adopting the Western language of the time, and speaking of those scattered fragments of the Eastern Empire which were still held by its own people as “Greek.”

The Empire of Nikaia may seem to have well proved its right to be looked on as the true successor of the old Empire by the great exploit of winning back the Imperial city. For eight hundred years we have had to deal with powers that win back oftener than with powers that can be strictly said to advance; but to win back Constantinople in the thirteenth century was to gain a richer prize than even to win back Rome in the sixth. Without Constantinople an East-Roman or Greek Empire might seem to have no position in the face of the world. In possession of Constantinople, it might seem to be brought back to something like its old place among powers and nations. Still the Empire of the Palaiologoi was but a feeble representative, a mere shadow and survival, not only of the Empire of the Macedonians, but of the Empire of the KomnÊnoi. For a while it was an advancing power in Europe; even when its northern frontiers had fallen back before the Bulgarian, the Servian, the Ottoman himself, it could still advance in the old Greek lands. It showed the Byzantine power of revival in its last and strangest form, when the whole of PeloponnÊsos, bating the points held by Venice, was again united under a Greek prince. In those days it was something for the Roman Empire to outlive the principality of Achaia, days when the Isle of Pelops formed the main body of an Empire of which the city of Constantine was the distant head. If the last Emperor of the West took his crown at Bologna, the last Emperor of the East took his on the spot which had been Sparta. But “Emperor of the East” I should not say. That is one of the many conventional ways of describing the princes of the Eastern Rome, the use of which may sometimes help to turn a sentence. But no prince reigning at Constantinople ever called himself Emperor of the East, and there was another prince who did. In those days Empires arose and fell with speed in the Eastern world. Even before 1204, a stranger born on English soil, a Count of Poitou whom a strange chance made also King of England, had the privilege of overthrowing an Emperor of the Romans whose Empire was bounded by the isle of Cyprus. Master of that island, that old battle-field of Aryan and Semitic man, he had the wisdom to get rid of an useless possession, and to bestow it as a kingdom on a vassal of his own who had lately been King of Jerusalem. So, after the great crash of the Latin conquest, momentary Emperors had reigned in Epeiros and at ThessalonikÊ. But there was yet another Imperial claimant whose power, like that of him of Nikaia, was more than momentary. It should never be forgotten that the last fragment of Greek-speaking Roman power that the world saw lingered on, not in Megarian Byzantium but at Arkadian Trebizond. As the northern shore of the Euxine saw the last Greek commonwealth, so its southern shore saw the last Greek Empire. For Greek we must call it. The KomnÊnos at Trebizond, admitting the superiority of the Palaiologos at Constantinople, cast aside his Roman style, and called himself among other titles Emperor of the East. The West had long before heard of an Emperor of Britain and of an Emperor of the Spains; but now for the first time in the East a man was found calling himself as??e?? and a?t????t??, but as??e?? and a?t????t?? of something else and not ??a???. But an Emperor of the East, an Emperor of all the East, p?s?? t?? ??at????, still keeps about him something of the sublimity of vagueness; his Imperial style has a better sound than the Imperial style of a German duchy or a negro island; an Emperor of the East does not seem to be cabined, cribbed, confined, within quite such a paltry space as an Emperor of Hayti or an Emperor of Austria. Still a prince who called himself Emperor, but did not dare to call himself Emperor of the Romans, proclaimed himself by his very style to be, to use the most civil words, a shadow and a survival. Indeed there is a curious analogy between the survival at Trebizond and the survival at Vienna. The KomnÊnos and the Lotharingian each cast aside his Roman style, to carry on the business, as our own expounder of things Imperial puts it, under another name.

But, if we cannot allow the so-called Empires of Cyprus, Epeiros, and Trebizond, or even the restored Byzantine Empire of the Palaiologoi, to be more than shadows and survivals of the old Roman Empire of the East, they did at least continue it in the sense in which any whole may be said to be continued in its fragments. We can hardly say that that Empire was in the same sort continued either in the Turkish Sultanate of Roum or in the Latin Empire of Romania. Truly they are shadows and survivals of the old Empire; but shadows and survivals of a different kind from those at Epeiros and Trebizond. That the Seljuk lords of Nikaia should have been called Sultans of Roum, that the Ottoman lord of Constantinople and his people should bear the same Roman name among the nations of the further East, that, before the Ottoman was lord of Constantinople, Bajazet should have been addressed by Timour as the Keiser of Roum, all these things are strange and startling tributes to the abiding life of the Roman name, but of little more than the name. The Latin Empire of Romania is more remarkable. Two or three centuries earlier, if a band of Western warriors had made their way into Constantinople, their most obvious legal pretext, if they had sought for a legal pretext, would have been the establishment of the authority of the Emperor crowned at Rome over the Eastern as well as the Western portion of the Empire. To German crusaders such a thought might possibly have presented itself even in the thirteenth century; Constantinople might have been claimed for the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation with more show of reason than Prussia or Livonia. But the thought was not likely to come into the minds of Frenchmen, of Flemings, of Venetians so lately themselves vassals of the Eastern Emperor, of Italians other than the most zealous Ghibelins. Earlier crusaders had consented to become liegemen of Alexios KomnÊnos, and if some refused or delayed, it was certainly not out of loyalty to Henry of Franconia. The men of Pisa, firm stay of CÆsar in the West, did not scruple to fight for his Eastern rival against the Latin invaders. That the chief of the conquerors took the title of Emperor was in itself a confession that Constantinople was a lawful seat of Empire; but difficulties on either side might hinder the authors of the new Imperial style from literally translating ??a??? as??e?? as the description of a Latin potentate. The style became territorial; Baldwin and Henry shrank, not unreasonably, from calling themselves Emperors of the Roman people, but they did not shrink from proclaiming themselves Emperors of a Roman land. A strange position it was that the Latin Emperors of Romania held during the two generations of their rule in Constantinople. Almost more strange is the long cleaving of Western opinion to their supposed rights after the Greek princes and people again held their old home.

We may then, I think, fix, with some confidence, the year 1204 as the time when the true Roman Empire of the East came to an end. The various Greek powers continue it, but they continue it only as fragments; none of them can claim to be the very thing itself, however cut short. But they are genuine fragments; if not the very thing itself, they are pieces of it. In the East ??a??? had become the name of a nation, distinct and easily recognized, if artificial, and Trebizond and Epeiros, no less than Constantinople, sheltered fragments of that divided nation. The Western Empire in its later, its purely German, shape, does not in the same way continue the national existence of any people that could be called even artificial Romans. It continues Roman titles and memories; as so doing, it is a true survival of the Roman power, but it has passed away from all Roman national life to become no small element in the national life of another people. It became the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, and the German nation felt itself lifted up by having the Holy Roman Empire in its keeping. After 1250 we begin to feel that there is something incongruous even in the Imperial coronation. The personal dignity of Henry of Luxemburg veils the fact that even he was not like the Franks and the Swabians; Lewis of Bavaria is rather the great subject of Imperial theories than a doer of any Imperial deeds. We come to Charles the Fourth and Frederick the Third; the crowning of Charles at Rome may be bracketted with his crowning at Arles, and Frederick will call forth a smile on the most Ghibelin of lips, as we see him in cope and crown, Augustus and Pater PatriÆ and something like Pontifex as well, in that strange gathering of men of all ages which keeps watch over his penniless son at InnsbrÜck. On the other hand, if the Eastern survivals, unlike the Western, kept on a national being which might in some sort be called Roman, the Western, the German, shadow of Empire had the advantage of unity. It was one survival and not many. There is no formal break between 800 and 1806. The difference is the difference between a thing which is utterly broken in pieces, but of which each fragment keeps, so far as a fragment can, the character of the whole, and a thing which lives on, which never loses its personality, which is never broken in pieces, but which so changes its character that to speak of it as the same thing, though technically accurate, strikes us as no longer expressing the real facts. In many points there is a wider difference between the Empire of the first CÆsars and the Empire of the Hohenstaufen than there is between the Empire of the Hohenstaufen and the Empire of the Austrians and Lorrainers. But the Hohenstaufen Emperors still felt as Emperors and acted as Emperors; whether their objects were wise or foolish, possible or impossible, they were still Imperial objects, objects that reached far beyond the bounds of Swabia or of Germany. Among the other princes of the West they held something more than a mere precedency. The kings of France, of Britain, of Spain, might deny their supremacy, but they denied it as a thing which needed to be denied; they might refuse to acknowledge the Emperor as their lord, but they still felt that the one Emperor was a being of another class from the kings around him who might or might not be his men. Their whole position was not German but European; if not the sovereigns, they were at least the chiefs, of all Western Christendom. But the Austrian Emperors sank to be Kings of Germany keeping the titles of Empire, and Kings of Germany who had much less authority in their own kingdom than other kings. For in truth the German kingdom had given way beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. The Imperial tradition had first split the kingdom in pieces, and had then kept the pieces from altogether falling apart. The Emperor was set too high in formal dignity to exercise the ordinary authority of lesser kings. We cannot speak of the Austrian Emperors as chiefs of Western Christendom, though, in a character which was not Imperial, they might sometimes become its champions. The Swabian Emperors were, if not above, at least before, all other princes; the Austrians can barely maintain their right to be the first among them. They keep at most a barren precedency, and even that is not always undisputed. Their policy is not European; it is hardly German; it seeks only the advancement of their own house in Germany and out of it. At last they seem altogether to forget who and what they are. When an Emperor-elect of the Romans, King of Germany and Jerusalem, could cast aside his Roman and German style, his Roman and German speech, and could describe himself as “Empereur d’Allemagne et d’Autriche” in a treaty with one who called himself “Empereur des FranÇais,” it was time that the ancient titles should yet be used in one document more, in that which should announce to the world that, as the titles had now ceased to have a meaning, the thing which they described had ceased to be.

Of the two men who, under those strange and novel descriptions, signed the Treaty of Pressburg, if one had forgotten who and what he was, the other knew perfectly well who and what he was. The first Buonaparte did not, like writers and orators now-a-days, use the words “Emperor” and “Empire” simply to sound fine. When he called himself “Emperor of the French,” he knew perfectly well what he meant by the name. What he meant involved to be sure a few historical misrepresentations, but they were misrepresentations which were very convenient for his purpose. Once grant that Austrasian Charles and Corsican Buonaparte were alike Frenchmen, and the theory does not hang badly together. The lordship of the world, at the lowest the supremacy of Western Europe, was translated from Rome and Germany to France. The ruler of France held the position in the world which the rulers of Rome and Germany once had held. So it was in fact; the style of 1804 did but put that fact into very emphatic words. There was again an Emperor, a as??e?? with ???e? around him; only that as??e?? was no longer Roman, Greek, or German, but, by conquest at least, French. It might even add a malicious sweetness to the new Imperial position to reckon Rome and Germany among the subject lands of France. The first French Empire was not a mere survival of the Roman Empire in any of its stages; nor was it a mere analogy, as when we apply the Imperial name to barbarian princes who hold an Imperial position in their own world. The Empire of the Moguls in many things repeated the Empire of the CÆsars; but it repeated it unconsciously. But about the French Empire everything was conscious; every detail of imposture had a meaning. It was not in any sense a survival, neither was it a true revival; it was in some sort a mockery, in some sort an imitation, a spurious branch of the same stock, a parody of the old Empire set up in a kind of strange rivalry on the ground of the old Empire. But the old Empire was not made but grew; it took a long time even to crumble in pieces. The new Empire, made by one man, grew mightily for a few years, and then broke asunder in a moment. Still the new Civilis, the man who made the Empire of the Gauls, must be allowed the doubtful pre-eminence of being, if ?a??p?????, at least e?a??p????? also. Of the grotesque imitation of his work to which some bowed down not twenty years back, it is needless to speak.

I spoke just now of a document, the treaty of Pressburg, which was signed by two personages described as the “Emperor of the French” and the “Emperor of Germany and Austria.” It must never be forgotten that the title of “Emperor of Austria” dates, not from 1806 but from 1804. The King of Germany, Emperor-elect of the Romans, while he still held the highest place on earth, thought good to call himself “Hereditary Emperor of Austria”—Erbkaiser von Oesterreich. What the two titles meant side by side, no man can tell; but when the Roman and German titles were dropped, the so-called “Empire of Austria” went on as a distinct survival of the old Empire, and a very memorable survival too. For it is the most successful imposture on record. This use of an Imperial style has caused a power which is in its own nature modern, upstart, and revolutionary, to be looked on as ancient, venerable, and conservative. A power of yesterday, which has lived only by trampling on every historic right and every national memory, has somehow come to be looked on as the very embodiment of dignified and conservative antiquity. But the particular way in which the imposture has succeeded is the most wonderful thing of all. In the last century among ourselves Smithson thought good to call himself Percy, and the world believes that he is Percy. But the world believes that Smithson is Percy; it does not believe that the old Percies were Smithsons. This last is what is believed in the Austrian case. Nobody believes that the present King of Hungary and Archduke of Austria is Emperor of the Romans and King of Germany. But many believe that real Emperors of the Romans and Kings of Germany were, what he calls himself, Emperors of Austria. I have seen Frederick Barbarossa called “Emperor of Austria;” half the world believes that the Pragmatic Sanction of Charles the Sixth settled an Empire of Austria on Maria Theresa; I have seen a book of the eighteenth century in which Joseph the Second was of course spoken of simply as “the Emperor,” but in which the editor in the nineteenth century thought it needful to explain that the “Emperor” spoken of was “Emperor of Austria.” I have found natives of Switzerland on their ground who believed that the Imperial eagle carved on this or that ancient building was the badge of Austria and not of Rome. Yes; never was imposture more successful; never was the truth of history more thoroughly turned round. It would be somewhat hard to bear if Francis of Lorraine were thought to be something like Frederick of Hohenstaufen; but the dead may turn in their graves when Frederick of Hohenstaufen is thought to be something like Francis of Lorraine.

The truth is that the strange neglect into which the Imperial history has fallen, the general incapacity or unwillingness to grasp the leading fact in the whole history of Europe, is largely owing to the existence and the success of the great Austrian imposture. But there are two other European powers which also take to themselves the Imperial style, and each of which is in a certain sense a revival of the old Empire. Neither the Russian nor the German Empire can be allowed to be more than a survival of the true Empire; but neither of them is a sheer imposture like the so-called Empire of Austria. The German Empire called yesterday into being is a real new birth of the old German kingdom. Its head, with no claim to represent the Imperial position of Charles and Otto, is a real representative of Henry of Saxony and Rudolf of Habsburg. But so many Kings of Germany had been Emperors that it might have seemed strange to make a King of Germany and not to call him Emperor. And it would have been hard to find any lower title for the head of a Confederation which numbers other kings among its members. Such an one in truth has in some sort an Imperial position; he too, like AgamemnÔn or Æthelstan, is a as??e?? with his ???e? round him. The elder Empire of Russia stands on quite another ground. So far as it is an Imperial survival, it is a survival of the Empire of the East. The Tzar of Moscow belongs to the same class as the Tzars of Bulgaria and Servia. We have seen how the Slavonic powers which, while assaulting the Empire, bowed down before the greatness of the Empire, took to themselves its Imperial titles, and bore outside the Tzarigrad the lofty style which they would have been better pleased to bear within its walls. And since the fall of Constantinople, the Russian princes, to say nothing of some supposed kindred with the last Imperial house, have, as the most powerful princes of the Eastern Church, stepped into something like the general position in the world which had belonged to the Eastern Emperors. With less of geographical connexion, they certainly represent the Eastern Empire with far more of truth than any modern Western power can claim to represent the Western Empire. Only the title of “Emperor of all the Russias” can hardly be accepted as a truth, as long as two Russian lands, the lands of Halicz and Vladimir, are tied on to the Austrian duchy on the strength of having been in far distant ages conquered by a Hungarian king.

In all these powers then which bear or have borne the Imperial style, Russia, Germany, Austria, France under the first Buonaparte, we can see a distinct connexion with the Roman power. The thought of the Roman power in some of its forms and stages was present to the minds of those by whom the Imperial style was taken. But the application of that style to so many powers has gone far to take from it any distinct meaning. I will not say that the words “Empire” and “Imperial” were always in my younger days used with a conscious reference to Rome and her memories; but I will say that they were not used quite as they are now, simply to sound fine. A poet or an orator might use them in some impassioned strain; men did not in every day speech talk about “the Empire” as familiarly as they talk about “the parish.” A little time back, in opposition to this new insular whim, “Empire” always meant something specially French. Even the cant phrase of “the Second Empire” to mean the dominion of the last Buonaparte has, I suspect, done something to overshadow the great truths of history; we all know that a man who has written many volumes on a great historical subject took for granted that a “Prince of the Empire,” above all a Prince of Orange, must mean something in France. To those whose studies lead them to look on Imperator and as??e?? as words which translate each other, it does seem a pity if the style of Emperor should come simply to be the English equivalent for t??a????.

But leaving smaller questions like these aside, there is indeed one survival of the ancient Empire before whose mighty history all minds must bend in awe, a survival well nigh greater and more memorable than that of which it is the survival. When Gratian, the Christian Imperator, laid aside the badges of the pagan Pontifex Maximus, truly he did not foresee the day when a Christian Pontifex Maximus should claim to place the crown of the Imperator on his brow, and should even claim the right to take away what he might in some sort seem to have given. Christian CÆsars might indeed repeat what a pagan CÆsar had said in unconscious prophecy, that he could better bear the proclamation of a rival Emperor than the election of a Christian Bishop in the Imperial city. A day was to come when, if men deemed that two great lights were set in the Christian firmament, yet it was CÆsar’s moon that shone with a feebler and reflected light, a light that might suffice to rule the night of earthly things, while the sun of the Pontiff shone with a light that came straight from the Creator’s hand, a greater light to rule the day of man’s spiritual being. It might still be held that God had two earthly Vicars, that two swords were placed by His grant, each in the hand chosen to wield it; but the sword that was wielded by the successor of Augustus was held to be of baser metal and duller edge than the sword that was wielded by the successor of Peter. Great and mighty were those claims, and great and mighty were once the men who put them forth. Even Ghibelins in heart, historic liegemen of CÆsar, must stand by and wonder, if they cannot approve, when CÆsar stands uncrowned, unclad, unheeded, at the Pontiff’s gate, cast down from the throne of the world by a word sent forth from Rome in Rome’s new character. At one moment the lord of fifty legions is left, at the bidding of an unarmed man, without a single sword ready to leave its scabbard at his call. At another moment he whose word has wrought such wonders, himself in turn driven from his church and throne, leaves the world with the protest that it is because he has loved righteousness and hated iniquity that he dies in exile, and is comforted in his dying hour by the answer that in exile he cannot die, seeing God hath given him the nations for his inheritance and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession. Rome again rules the world, and again rules it by a moral power; she rules the world so surely that she can again as it were turn her back upon herself; the voice of her Pontiff can speak from Avignon as the voice of her Augustus had once spoken from Ravenna. But we must bear in mind that it was simply because her Emperors had come to speak from Ravenna and from a crowd of other spots other than Rome, that a voice that would have seemed as strange to Constantine as to Trajan had learned to come forth, it might be from Rome, it might be from Clermont or from Lyons. Let us look at the case with the calm gaze of history. History knows nothing of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as the centre of spiritual unity, the divinely commissioned head of the Universal Church. History knows just as little of theories in which the Roman Bishop appears as Antichrist and the Man of Sin. It may indeed be the business of history to trace the steps by which either theory arose in men’s minds; but it is not by the light of such theories as these that she will look at the facts of her own science. In the eyes of history the power of the Roman Church grew up simply because it was the Roman Church and the Church of no meaner city. The church founded in the mother and head of all cities could not fail to rank as the mother and head of all churches. Rome, the local Rome, still had life in her to rule, and if her Emperor forsook his calling in the local seat of rule, her Bishop was there to take his place. When the sword of Valentinian was powerless against the Hun, the voice of Leo was ready to charm with all its wisdom. Claudius and Vespasian had brought the elder folk of Britain beneath the earthly yoke of Rome; when their work of a moment had passed away, it was for Gregory to bring another folk of Britain as more abiding dwellers within her ghostly fold. CÆsar after CÆsar had given and taken away the crowns of vassal kings; when CÆsar’s name had become but a shadow in Western lands, it was for the Roman Pontiff to bid shear the locks of the last degenerate Merwing, to pour for the first time the kingly unction on a Frankish head. In all these cases, in a hundred others, Rome still speaks as the head and teacher of the nations; she is driven to speak through the voice of her Bishop simply because her Emperor has forsaken her. How truly, how wholly, it was the constant absence, the frequent weakness, of the Emperor out of which the power of the Pontiff grew will be seen by comparing the story of the Old Rome with the story of the New. At Constantinople the Emperor was ever present, ever reigning; where he dwelled and reigned there was no room for any other power to take to itself the slightest fragment of Imperial rule. Never was any line of princes more deeply impressed with a religious character than the Eastern CÆsars; none more constantly made the Faith, the advancement of the Faith, the humiliation of its enemies, the abiding objects of their policy; their style was the “Faithful Emperor;” their cry of battle was “Victory to the Cross.” Nowhere were Church and State more truly one; but nowhere was the temporal ruler more distinctly in all causes and over all persons within his dominions supreme. In the West the present Patriarch had well nigh taken the place of the absent Emperor; in the East the present Emperor had well nigh taken on himself the functions of a Patriarch who in his presence was but his creature. Like his pagan predecessors, it was he, and not the priest whom he appointed and deposed, who was truly Pontifex Maximus as well as Pater PatriÆ. A Dante of the tenth or eleventh century might have found the highest Ghibelin ideal, the Augustus crowned by God, ruling in God’s name as God’s Vicar but knowing no father or lord on earth, in the mighty Emperors of that day, in the men who turned from the toils of the camp and the splendours of the court to tame their own bodies with the hardness of a hermit in his cave, in NikÊphoros seeking rest on his bearskin on the earth for the stalwart limbs that had smitten down the Saracen, in Basil with his girdle of iron on his loins, marching forth to trample under foot all that stood forth as either the foe of Christ or the foe of Rome.

Mighty and wonderful indeed are those the most brilliant days in the long annals of the Eastern Empire. Crete, Cyprus, Kilikia, won back from the misbelievers—the Roman eagle again spreading her wings over the Euphrates and the Tigris—the cross again planted in what might seem to be its special home at Antioch and Edessa—all show the part which the Eastern Rome in her proudest days could play in that Eternal Question which is in truth the very substance of her whole history. Seated at the junction of two worlds, called into being by her founder as the special guardian of Europe and of those lands of Asia which Europe had made her own, as soon as the strife of West and East had changed into a strife of Christendom and Islam, the Eastern Rome was bound to be the foremost in the strife, or she was untrue to the cause of her own being. The Roman of the East, like the Spaniard of the West, was of necessity a crusader before crusades were preached; with both of them religion and patriotism were in truth the same; men could not deal a blow on behalf of their country which was not also a blow dealt on behalf of their faith. We have already glanced at this greatest of all the many instances of Byzantine power of revival, the great days of the Macedonian Emperors. I call back your thoughts to them again in order to carry out more fully the contrast between the East fighting for its very being against the unbelieving foe, fighting under the leadership of its still present Imperial head, and the West where the Imperial head fell away from the common work of all, and left the leadership of the Empire and of the kingdoms of the West to the spiritual power which stood ready to do the highest of his duties for him. When the West first marched for the deliverance of the East, it was not at the bidding of the CÆsar, but at the bidding of the Pontiff. In earlier days, when the danger was at their own gates, when new Attilas came, year after year, on the old errand of havoc, Germany was indeed ready with men to do once more the work of Aetius and the first Theodoric. The Saxon kings, father and son, knew how to smite the Magyar with blows more crushing than the Hun had tholed on the Catalaunian fields. So, ages after, men were not lacking to smite the Mongol at Lignitz as the Hun and the Magyar had been smitten before him. But in these wars men were fighting for their homes and for their lives, for their faith only as part of their homes and of their lives. When the great cry of all came up, when to fight for the faith was not to fight for men’s own homes and lives but for the homes and lives of others, then the voice that spoke was the voice, not of Rome’s Emperor but of her Bishop. Some months back I strove to draw for you a picture of the great day on which that voice was raised, as part of the tale of the memorable land and city that listened to it. By the Bright Mount of the Arvernian land, in the home of Sidonius and Gregory, the word was spoken, at whose bidding men of every calling short of kingship marched forth to do battle for the sepulchre of Christ. The man to speak the word should have been God’s Vicar in earthly things; he who bade men draw the sword should have been he who could bid them follow him as their loftiest leader; the call to the Holy War should have been in the West, as in the East it ever was, a decree that went forth from CÆsar Augustus. But the two swords had clashed in anger, the two lights shone with hostile brilliancy; the days were passed when the third Otto and the fifth Gregory might have stood side by side at such a gathering; he who now drew the sword at the bidding of Rome’s Emperor could do it only at the risk of the ban of Rome’s oft-times banished Bishop. Alexios KomnÊnos, vigorous founder of a vigorous dynasty, was still not a Heraclius or a Basil; but in the East the Emperor was still ready in his own place to do his own work; he had not vanished into some land beyond Mount HÆmus, and left a Patriarch who acknowledged him not to do the foremost duty of Empire in his stead.

In later stages of the crusading strife Kings and Emperors of the Romans did indeed take their share; and the greatest success won by any crusaders since the first fell to the lot of the Emperor who more than any other drew down on his head the curses of the spiritual Rome. Conrad went and came back; the elder Frederick died on his march; but the second Frederick, alone of Emperors, alone of European kings, made his way within the long-fought-for walls, and wore a royal crown in the city of Godfrey and of David. Cursed first for not going on the crusade, then cursed again for going, cursed most of all for actually winning the prize of so many struggles, the King of Salem had to fall back on traditions older than Godfrey, older than David; he had to fall back on the kingdom of Melchizedek, to place on his own head the crown which no priestly hand would set there. That the Bishop of the Western Rome should strive to hinder the Emperor of the Western Rome from winning the noblest prize that any Emperor since Heraclius had won, shows more than any other tale in history what a power had sprung up in the bosom of the Empire to supplant the Empire itself. A King of France, a King’s son of England, might go on the now hopeless errand; no Emperor, no German king, was likely to go and seek the misbelievers in the Eastern lands with the memory of Frederick before his eyes. A day was to come when the misbelievers were to come and threaten Emperors and German kings in their own realm. But before that day came, one Emperor, fighting for the last fragment of Rome’s Eastern power, was to win by his fall such glory as no Emperor had for ages won by his triumphs. And, even in the moment of that glorious fall, he was doomed to show that the Bishops of the Western Rome could be as deadly in their friendship to the CÆsars of the East as they could be in their enmity to their own sovereigns, whether on the throne of Charles or on the throne of David.

I have already spoken of the event of the year 1204, the taking of Constantinople by the Latins, as the point at which we must place the end of the old and unbroken Empire of Rome in the East. High indeed among the crimes and follies of recorded history must we rank that exploit of princely freebooters in crusading garb which broke in pieces the ancient bulwark of Christendom, and left only feeble fragments which could not fail to be swallowed up one by one by the advancing Infidel. Men with the cross on their shoulders, with their swords hallowed to the service of the faith, turned aside from their calling to carve out realms for themselves at the cost of their fellow-Christians, and thereby to do the work of the misbeliever more thoroughly than he could ever have done it for himself. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the paths of the Eastern and Western Emperors had parted so far asunder that the rival claims of the Greek and the German representatives of Rome might well have died out in oblivion. But the Western Rome had now another representative whose claims could not die out. If her Emperor no longer cared to assert his right to the dominion of the world, her Bishop was ever ready to make the claim. The men of the West were taught to look on the Christian East as a schismatic land to be won back to the true obedience; they were taught that it was a worthy work to drive the pastors of the Eastern Churches from their thrones and to instal in their place dependents of the encroaching Bishop of the West. Vassals of Rome in her new character, a spiritual Prusias, a spiritual Herod, were to teach once more the lesson of bondage to Greece and Asia, to bid all lands look once more to the elder Rome as the judge that alone gave forth judgements which none might gainsay. It is indeed due to the memory of the great Innocent to remember that it was not at his bidding, but in direct disobedience to his straitest command, that Frank and Venetian turned their swords against Constantinople instead of wielding them for Jerusalem. It was not at his word or with his approval that men whose calling it was to rescue the Temple of the Lord from misbelieving masters, defiled the church of the Divine Wisdom as no unbelieving master has ever defiled it. But Innocent did not scruple to take advantage of the crimes which he had forbidden, and to enlarge his spiritual dominion by the help of the plunderers whom he had failed to call off from their work of plunder. And so the disunited East, a Christendom in which Christians had ceased to be brethren, stood a ready prey for the Infidel, strong in his unity, strong in the guidance of the mightiest line of princes to whom the championship of the Asiatic, now the Mussulman, side of the Eternal Question had ever fallen.

For we have reached the days of the Ottoman. Europe and Christendom had now to strive with a foe more terrible than Carthage or than Persia, more terrible than the Saracen of the East or of the West, more terrible than the Hun, the Avar, the Magyar, or the earlier tribes of his own Turkish stock. The Arab had cut the Empire short; but in cutting the Empire short, he had relieved it of provinces which were no source of true strength, and thereby he had given it for the first time somewhat of the life and vigour of a nation. The Seljuk Turk had conquered the lands which the Arab had ravaged but could never conquer; but he had conquered them only by making them a wilderness. He had fixed his throne at Nikaia, but he had fixed it there only to fall back again. If the Sultan of Rome ever dreamed that the Eastern Rome itself was to be his, his dream was of the kind which comes from the gate of ivory. But the vision of Othman was the vision of a seer to whom the future was laid open. He and his house were not to be beaten back till they had reared a dominion on Christian, on European, soil, which far more than outweighed the winning back of the most western land of Europe from Eastern masters. The Ottoman was to become, what no other of the many earlier invaders of his stock had ever become, not the mere passing scourge, but the indwelling and abiding oppressor of Christian and European lands. The Hun and the Avar had been driven back or swept away from the earth. The Bulgarian had bowed himself to Christian teaching; he had cast aside his barbarian speech, and had merged his national being in the national being of an European people. The Magyar had kept his name and his tongue; but he had made his way into the fellowship of Christendom and of Europe; only, to the abiding loss of the nations of South-Eastern Europe, his Christian teaching had come from the Western Rome. The Mongol had fixed himself on a far off march of Europe and Asia, to hold from thence an overlordship over the most distant and least known of European powers. The Ottoman was to do more than these. He was to do what the Arab and the Seljuk had striven in vain to do; he was to fix his seat in the New Rome itself. And more, he was to win the New Rome in the character of an European power, and to storm its walls by the hands of soldiers of European birth. When Mahomet pitched his camp before Constantinople, it was not, like the Saracen who came before him, in the character of a lord of Asia invading Europe; he came as one whose vast dominion on European soil had long hemmed in the Roman world in that corner of Thrace which he had kept as well nigh the last morsel to devour. The conqueror of Constantinople came as one who already ruled on the Danube, but who did not as yet rule on the Nile or the Euphrates. And he came as one who knew how to press into his service the choicest wits and the strongest arms of all the lands from the Danube to the Propontis as well as of the lands from the Propontis to the Halys. The institution of the Janissaries, that cruelest offshoot of the wisdom of the serpent, had turned the strength of every conquered people against itself, and had changed those who should have been the deliverers from oppression into the most trustworthy instruments of the oppressor. The ramparts of Constantinople were stormed by warriors of Greek, of Slavonic, and of Albanian blood; the dominions of the masters of Constantinople were administered by statesmen of European stock, once of Christian faith; whether the human prey kidnapped in childhood or the baser brood who, then as now, sold their souls for barbarian hire. In all the endless phases of the Eternal Question, never had the powers of evil yet devised such a weapon as this, the holding down of nations in bondage by the hands of the choicest of their own flesh and blood.

I would fain ask how many there are among those around me who bear in memory that this day on which we have come together[1] is the anniversary of the darkest day in the history of Christendom. The twenty-ninth of May, the day so long and so strangely honoured among us as the day of the birth and return of Charles the Second, bears about it in other lands the memory of events of greater moment in the history of the world. It is the day of the fall of the Eastern Rome, the martyr’s birthday of her last Emperor. It was on this day that the barbarian first seated himself on the throne of the CÆsars, that the infidel first planted the badge of Antichrist on the most glorious of Christian temples. From this day onwards the Christian East has been in mourning, mourning for the home of its Empire, for the holy place of its faith. On such a day as this there should go up no anthem of rejoicing, but the sad strain of the Hebrew gleeman who had seen a day of no less blackness; “O God, the heathen have come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem an heap of stones.” But for the Hebrew seventy years only of sorrow were appointed; our captivity—for the captivity of the Eastern Rome is the captivity of all Christendom—has gone on now for four hundred and two and forty years as it is this day. Now, as then, barbarians sit encamped as a wasting horde in the fairest regions of the earth; now, as then, the profession of the Christian faith entails an abiding martyrdom on nations in their own land. And heavier still is the thought that not a few in Christian lands love to have it so. We daily hear the strange lesson that “British interests,” “imperial interests”—the interest perhaps of the usurer wrung from the life-blood of his victim—demand that we should do all that we can to prolong the rule of the oppressor, to prolong the bondage of the oppressed. We have seen the strange sight of English statesmen rejoicing, as at some worthy exploit of their hands, that they had given back to the rule of the Sultan, that is to the bondage of the unbelieving stranger in their own land, the men, the women, the children, for whom the swords of better men than they had wrought deliverance. With shame like this done in our own day, we can hardly turn round and throw stones even at the men of the Fourth Crusade. They at least sinned for the human motive of their own pelf; it is something for which no human motive can be found when men rejoice in the sorrows of the helpless lands which, after a glimpse of the light of freedom, were again thrust down into the night of bondage which that short glimpse of light has made more black.

Let us remember then, as our story brings the tale of the Eastern Rome to its end, that it was as it were in the night that has just passed that the last Christian worship was paid beneath the dome of Saint Sophia, that it was as it were by the morning light of this very day that the last Constantine took his post by the gate of Saint RÔmanos, to die, when to die was all that he could do, for his Empire and for his faith. And yet there is one thought which casts a shadow over the end of the hero and of his power. The last Christian worship beneath the dome of Saint Sophia was a worship paid according to foreign rites, a worship from which the men of the Christian East shrank as from a defilement. So far had the ghostly power of the Western Rome spread its shadow over all lands, that the temporal help of the West could be won only, or rather could be promised only and never won, by treason to the old religious traditions of the East. It was a brighter moment in the memory of our fathers, a moment which has no fellow in our own memory, when three of the great powers of East and West, representing three of the great races of Europe, three of the great divisions of Christendom, Orthodox Russia, Catholic France, Protestant England, fought side by side to break the power of the barbarian on the great day of Navarino.

From the last European survival of the Eastern Rome—for ever remember that a more abiding survival still lingered for a while in Asia—let us turn to another power which we can now look upon as no more than a survival, the last direct survival of the Western Rome. From Constantinople let us turn to Vienna, from the Palaiologos to the Habsburg, from the last Constantine to the first Leopold. For two hundred and thirty years the flood of Ottoman conquest had swept on; it was at last to be stemmed. The Turk appeared, as he had appeared already, before what we must now perchance call the Imperial city of the West. But he fared in another sort from that in which he had fared before the Imperial city of the East. He had made his way into Constantinople; he could not make his way into Vienna. He made his way into Constantinople over the corpse of a slaughtered Emperor; from Vienna he was beaten back, but it was not by the arm of an Emperor that he was beaten back. No king of another land came to the help of Constantine; a king of another land did come to the help of Leopold. Constantine fell by the sword of a foe that was too strong for him; Leopold found a helper who was stronger than his foe, and devoted the full turnings and searchings of an Imperial mind to find out with how little sacrifice of Imperial dignity he could pay some feeble thanks to the man who had saved his throne and life. Vienna was saved for Christendom; it never shared the fate of Belgrade and Buda. But it was the sword of the Slave, the sword of the Pole, that saved it. Look on a hundred years, and the debt is paid in full. Poland is wiped out from the list of nations, and the house that the Pole had saved takes its share of the spoils of its deliverer.

I have ended my tale of Rome, my tale of Rome in her many shapes and stages, in the last feeble survivals of her power, in the more strange survivals of her mere style. Once more I have to meet you before the year, as years in this place are reckoned, comes to its end. As I began by speaking of a world on which Rome had not yet risen, I must end by speaking of a world from which Rome has passed away.