The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
History
The Chief Periods of European History: Six lectures read in the University of Oxford in Trinity term, 1885
Freeman, Edward A. (Edward Augustus)
Europe -- History
that the Roman Church can still boast herself of not a few Teutonic
and Slavonic subjects. It is no less plain that there are here and
there, though in smaller numbers, men of Latin speech, both in East
and West, who are not her subjects. Still the general proposition
is none the less true in its general sense. It marks, to say the
least, general tendencies which run a certain course wherever there
is no special cause to hinder them. If we look narrowly into each
case of exception, we shall often see some special cause, commonly
some political cause, which accounts for the anomaly. We may note
further that, as the Empire became more purely German and the Papacy
became more purely Latin, the old feuds between Empire and Papacy
died out. The Austrian Emperors, Catholic chiefs of an Empire mainly
Protestant, had no such warfare to wage with the Roman see as had
been waged by the Franconians and the Swabians. But as Empire and
Papacy alike came to be thus shut up within narrowed and definite
limits, neither could any longer act as a common centre, even for
the Western lands. For better or for worse, the world has fallen
back on an older state of things. Instead of a single Rome as the
acknowledged head of all, instead of two rival Romes, each claiming
the headship of its own half of the civilized world, it is now open
to every nation, as in the earlier day it was open to every city,
to do, as far as it finds to do it, that which is right in its own
eyes. Every nation now, as every city then, may play the part of Rome
for the years or for the moments through which it may keep enough of
physical strength to play that part.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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