[151] Pütter, _Dissertationes de Instauratione Imperii Romani_; cf. Goldast's _Collection of Constitutions_; and the proclamations and other documents collected in Pertz, _M. G. H._ legg. I. [152] Pütter (_De Instauratione Imperii Romani_) will have it that upon this mistake, as he calls it, of Otto's, the whole subsequent history of the Empire turned; that if Otto had but continued to style himself 'Francorum Rex,' Germany would have been spared all her Italian wars. CHAPTER IX. SAXON AND FRANCONIAN EMPERORS. He who begins to read the history of the Middle Ages is alternately amused and provoked by the seeming absurdities that meet him at every step. He finds writers proclaiming amidst universal assent magnificent theories which no one attempts to carry out. He sees men who are stained with every vice full of sincere devotion to a religion which, even when its doctrines were most obscured, never sullied the purity of its moral teaching. He is disposed to conclude that such people must have been either fools or hypocrites. Yet such a conclusion would be wholly erroneous. Every one knows how little a man's actions conform to the general maxims which he would lay down for himself, and how many things there are which he believes without realizing: believes sufficiently to be influenced, yet not sufficiently to be governed by them. Now in the Middle Ages this perpetual opposition of theory and practice was peculiarly abrupt. Men's impulses were more violent and their conduct more reckless than is often witnessed in modern society; while the absence of a criticizing and measuring spirit made them surrender their minds more unreservedly than they would now do to a complete and imposing theory. Therefore it was, that while everyone believed in the rights of the Empire as a part of divine truth, no one would yield to them where his own passions or interests interfered. Resistance to God's Vicar might be and indeed was admitted to be a deadly sin, but it was one which nobody hesitated to commit. Hence, in order to give this unbounded imperial prerogative any practical efficiency, it was found necessary to prop it up by the limited but tangible authority of a feudal king. And the one spot in Otto's empire on which feudality had never fixed its grasp, and where therefore he was forced to rule merely as emperor, and not also as king, was that in which he and his successors were never safe from insult and revolt. That spot was his capital. Accordingly an account of what befel the first Saxon emperor in Rome is a not unfitting comment on the theory expounded above, as well as a curious episode in the history of the Apostolic Chair. [Sidenote: Otto the Great in Rome.]