Against the application of the term ‘empire’ to the dominion of Henry II more cogent reasons may be urged. It rests, so far as I know, upon no contemporary authority, and even if the phrase could be found by some chance in a writer of the twelfth century, it would carry with it no weight. Western Europe in the Middle Ages knew but one empire, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation--from one point of view neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as Voltaire long afterward remarked, yet, as revived by Charlemagne and Otto the Great, representing to the mind of the Middle Ages the idea of universal monarchy which they had inherited from ancient Rome. To the men of the twelfth century the emperor was Frederick Barbarossa; he could not be Henry II. Nor will the government of the Norman-Angevin ruler square with the modern definition of an empire as “a state formed by the rule of one state over other states.”[27] His various dominions, if we except Ireland, were not dependencies of England, or Anjou, or Normandy. King in England, duke in Normandy, count in Anjou and Maine, duke again in Aquitaine, Henry ruled each of his dominions as its feudal lord--very much as if the German Emperor to-day combined in himself the titles of king of Prussia and of Bavaria, grand duke of Baden, duke of Brunswick, prince of Waldeck, and so on throughout the members of the German confederation. Such a government is not an empire in the sense of the ancient Roman or the modern British empires, for it has no dependencies. It is an empire only in the broader and looser sense of the word, a great composite state, larger than a mere kingdom and imperial in extent if not in organization.