Guizot (_Histoire de la Civilisation en France_, 13e éd. i, 75, 76) notes the fundamental difference in the attitude of the Church under the old and eastern emperors and under the Teutonic rule. Symonds (_Renaissance in Italy_, 2nd ed. i, 43) thinks this was a result of Theodoric's not having made Rome his headquarters, and his having treated it with special respect. But the clergy of Gaul at once gained an ascendency over the Frankish kings, and the popes would probably have done as well with resident emperors as with absentees. Their great resource was that of playing one Christian monarch against another--a plan not open to the patriarch of Constantinople.] That the Empire could still at a push raise armies and find for them generals who could beat back the barbarians was sufficiently shown in the careers of Stilicho and Aetius and Belisarius; but the extreme parsimony with which Justinian supported his great commander in Italy is some proof of the economic difficulty of keeping up, even in a period of prudent administration,[229] a paid force along the vast frontiers of what had been Hadrian's realm. Only as ruled by one central system, inspired by an ideal of European empire, and using the finance and force of the whole for the defence of any part, could that realm have been preserved; and when Diocletian, while holding mechanically by the ideal of empire, began the disintegration of its executive, he began the ending of the ideal. The creation of an eastern capital was now inevitable; and when once the halving of the Empire had become a matter of course, the west, hollow at the core, was fated to fall. We should thus not be finally wrong in saying that "the Roman idea" died out before the Western Empire could fall; provided only that we recognise the economic and other sociological causation of the process.