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Updated: May 20, 2025
It is in these years of the seven Crusades, from 1095 to the last in 1248; of Frederick Barbarossa; of the centuries-long quarrel between the Welfs, or Guelphs, and the Waiblingers, or Ghibellines, which were for years in Italy, and are still in Germany, political parties; of the Hanseatic League of the cities to protect commerce from the piracies of a disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning, killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs, Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his biography in the single phrase, "To go to Canossa"; of Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy, Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western empire , goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a frontier post of the empire under the rule of a Hohenzollern.
The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were as fatal to feudalism as to world-empire and world-church. A series of wars occurring at this time were especially remarkable for the wholesale slaughter of the feudal nobility, whether on the field or under the headsman's axe.
When, however, the political empire fell, and men witnessed the ruin of their political ideal, they sought to realize the same universal conception in a world-church possessing imperial powers under the pope of Rome. At the period of the Reformation the Christian world had been in the grip of this world-church idea for more than a thousand years.
The world-church idea as exemplified in the papal church is not the goal of Christianity. Such might hold dominion over men in the barbaric ages of the world, but its universal sway has ceased. The Inquisition will never be reestablished. The unity of the church is not to be found in an imperial hierarchy. Nor is Christian unity to be obtained by adherence to the historic creeds.
The "Holy Roman Empire of the German nation," the great political institution of the middle ages, was now established. In theory it was the union of the world-state and the world-church, an undivided community under Emperor and Pope, its heaven-appointed secular and spiritual heads.
In the first place, the tendency of such a union is toward imperialism, the creation on the federation plan of another world-church.
When Roman society with its selfishness, lust and worldliness, swept in through the open doors of the church and took possession of the sanctuary, those who had cherished the ascetic ideal gave up the fight against the world, and the flight from the world-church began. They could not tolerate this union of the church with a pagan state and an effete civilization.
Evidently they had no conception of that moral and spiritual dominion of Christ by which alone he governs his church a 'kingdom that is not of this world. They therefore abandoned the world-church idea reluctantly, and not until the opposition of the hierarchy drove them to separation. When the issue was clearly drawn, they of course decided to obey God rather than man.
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