The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09 : $b Italy
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 09 : $b Italy
World history
The crown of Conrad the Salian passed in a direct line to his son,
grandson, and great-grandson. The first, Henry III, reigned from 1039 to
1056; the second, Henry IV, from 1056 to 1106; the third, Henry V, from
1106 to 1125. The last two reigns were troubled by the bloody quarrel
between the empire and the court of Rome, called the war of investitures.
Rome had never made part of the monarchy of the Lombards. This ancient
capital of the world, with the territory appertaining to it, had, since
the conquest of Alboin, formed a dukedom, governed by a patrician or
Greek duke, sent from Constantinople. The bishop of Rome, however, who,
according to the ancient canonical forms, was elected by the clergy, the
senate, and the people of his diocese, had much more authority over his
flock than this foreign magistrate.
[Sidenote: [717-1125 A.D.]]
The pontiff, however, who now began to take exclusively the name of pope,
had more than once successfully defended Rome with his spiritual arms
when temporal ones had failed. When, in the year 717, an iconoclast, or
enemy of images, filled the throne of Constantinople, the popes under the
pretence of heresy rejected his authority altogether; a municipality, at
the head of which were a senate and consuls, then governed Rome nearly as
an independent state; the Greeks, occupied with their own dissensions,
seemed to forget it; and Rome owed to this forgetfulness fifty years of
a sort of liberty. The Romans found once more a faint image of their
past glory; sometimes even the title of Roman Republic was revived. They
approved, notwithstanding, of Pope Stephen II conferring on the princes
of the Franks the dignity of patricians, in order to transfer to them the
authority which the Greek magistrate exercised in their city in the name
of the emperor of Constantinople; and the people gladly acquiesced when,
in the year 800, Leo III crowned Charlemagne as augustus, and restorer of
the Western Empire. From that period Rome became once more the capital of
the empire. At Rome the chiefs of the empire were henceforth to receive
the golden crown from the hands of the pope, after having received the
silver one of the kingdom of Germany at Aachen, and the iron crown of
Lombardy at Milan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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