in the Commonwealth, that is, in the Roman Empire."[1] One constantly finds this feeling that the cause of Cæsar is the cause of Christ,[2] and the more the Eastern bishops began to look upon the Emperor as their chief, the more obvious it must have seemed. But gradually Old Rome was falling away from the Empire. The Fathers of Chalcedon had pretended that she held the primacy because she was the capital of the Empire, and now the very city that had given her name to the Roman world could hardly be counted any longer as part of that world. In 401 the Goths had poured into Italy; in 410 they had plundered Rome; in 452 the Huns had only just not done so too (St. Leo turned them back), but they had overrun the Roman land. Then the East-Goths set up a kingdom in Italy (493-555) in open defiance of Cæsar, and soon after came the Lombards (568). The Bishop of Old Rome sat in the midst of barbarians, and, what is worse, he began to have friendly relations with them. They heard that he had made the closest alliance with a barbarian king; that the Franks were encouraged by him to conquer the Lombard kingdom, and, instead of giving it back to Caesar, to keep it themselves. At last came the final blow. In 800, in his own cathedral he crowned their king Emperor, set up a rival Augustus, ignoring the rightful line that still went on at New Rome. It must have seemed to the Byzantine bishops sheer high treason. They would never acknowledge Charles but as the barbarian king of a barbarian people. Irene, even if a woman, was Augustus Cæsar, Autocrat of the Romans, and Charles was only the king of the Franks.[3] The Roman Patriarch had finally
- ↑ De schism. Don. iii. 3.
- ↑ St. Ambrose (340–397) continually reckons the defeat of the legions as a victory of Satan over the cause of Christ (e.g., de fide, xvi. 136, seq.). When his brother Satyrus died he said: "He was taken away lest he see the overthrow of the whole earth and the end of the world" (de excessu Sat. 30)—Gratian has just been killed. Dante's de Monarchia is the classical apology for this position.
- ↑ ῥήξ τῶν φράγκων. Ῥήξ is Rex. They would not call him βασιλέυς, because they called the Emperor so, and had come to look upon the word as equal to Imperator. Luitprand: Legatio in Pertz, Mon. Germ. III, p. 347. Here is an example of their feelings on this subject: they say to Luitprand, Archbishop of Cremona, who went on an embassy to Constantinople in 968: "But the mad
