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The inclination for French innovations displayed by the reigning duke, Maximilian Joseph, who surrounded himself with the old Illuminati, caused her, on this occasion, by Bonaparte's aid, to be richly compensated by the annexation of the bishoprics of Bamberg, Wurzburg, Augsburg, and Freisingen, with several small towns, etc.; all the monasteries were abolished.
Bishop Otto of Freisingen, the historian, who himself took the cross at that time, expresses it as his opinion "that every man of sound understanding would be forced to acknowledge so sudden and uncommon a change could have been produced in no other way than by the right hand of the Lord."
Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the men of after times who loved them most Tacitus and St. Augustine, Dante, Racine, and Flaubert. The World-History of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the De Civitate of St. Augustine.
The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen, and of the Cardinal Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive and finished than that of Augustine himself. In recent times this theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and Carlyle.
But before proceeding with the history of this strange fable, it will be well to extract the different accounts given of the Priest-King and his realm by early writers; and we shall then be better able to judge of the influence the myth obtained in Europe. Otto of Freisingen is the first author to mention the monarchy of Prester John, with whom we are acquainted.
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