is the memorable controversy, waged by or invented for Basil of the East and Lewis of the West, while the grounds of the dispute were still fresh. It was a moment of pride for Charles the Great himself when Nikêphoros waived his claim to universal rule, when he admitted the Frankish king as his equal and bade his ambassadors adore him as _Imperator_ and βασιλεύς. A conflict of claims like this, in which each of the two greatest princes of Christendom gave himself out to be the one head of Christendom, might have been expected to lead to something more than constant disputes and jealousies; it might have been expected to lead to constant wars. As a matter of fact, formal wars between the two Empires were not common; there was little to gain by them on either side. But rivalry and ill-feeling went on between the princes of the West and of the East, between the men of the West and of the East, to the great damage of Christendom in more than one hour of need. The truest view of the event of 800 is that the existing Empire was split asunder, and that the western fragment, that which acknowledged the Frankish king as its Emperor, was in form enlarged by the addition of the territories of the Frankish king. The Empire was now really split asunder; it was split asunder between two rivals, each of whom held himself to be the one lawful representative of their common predecessors. This state of things must not be confounded with the state of things in the fifth century. The Empire was now divided in quite another way from that in which it had been divided between the sons of Theodosius. The division between the sons of Theodosius did not differ in form from the division between the sons of Constantine or the earlier division between Diocletian and Maximian. The division between Arcadius and Honorius, and the Emperors who followed them in the fifth century, was a division by consent; the administration of a single Empire was divided, as it had often been before, between two Imperial colleagues. But now it was divided between two rival potentates, each of whom was in theory bound to deny the rights of the other. Then the West was often willing to accept the prince named by the Emperor who reigned over the East; now assuredly no prince named by the lord of Constantinople, the “rex Græciæ,” would have been admitted to royal and imperial unction at Aachen, at Milan, and at Rome. But mark further that the Western division, the Western Empire, was not only parted from the Eastern, but was enlarged by the addition of new territories, over a great part of which no Emperor had ever reigned before. If Charles had kept his Frankish and Lombard kingdoms distinct from his Roman Empire, the last would have consisted only of Rome and Ravenna and the lands about those cities. No one so well deserved the somewhat grotesque title of his later successors, “zu allen Zeiten Mehrer des Reichs,” as the first Emperor who could have understood his own description