Anjou to Normandy rather than Normandy to Anjou, and it was as duke of Normandy that their son Henry II began his political career. The extension of his domains southward by marriage only gave Normandy the central position in his realm, and it was the loss of Normandy under John which led to the empire's collapse.
Against the application of the term 'empire' to the dominion of Henry II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation—from one point of view neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked, yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor will the government of the Norman- Angevin ruler square with the modern definition of an empire as "a state formed by the rule of one state over other states."[1] His various dominions, if we except Ireland, were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in England, duke in Normandy,
- ↑ W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism, p. i.
