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Text in [square brackets] was added especially for this online publication by Ellopos
III - THE EMPIRE AND THE NEW MONARCHIES (800-1000 A. D.)
Page 11
The effect which these disasters produced on the minds of the sufferers is nowhere more clearly visible than in England. Here the House of Alfred was able, within a century of the partition made at Wedmore between the West Saxon kingdom and the Danes (878), to establish a kingdom of imperial pretensions, loosely knit together but more durable and more highly organised than any power which had arisen in Britain since the Roman period. In Germany the Saxon line, beginning with Henry the Fowler (919-936), was permitted to make the royal title hereditary, and to assert an effective suzerainty over the other tribal dukes. In France the House of Paris, after ruling for many years in the name of a degenerate Carolingian line, was invited in the person of Hugh Capet to assume the royal dignity (987). We have here a European movement in favour of monarchy; and on the heels of it follows another for the restoration of the Empire. The new royal dynasties did good work; even the weakest among them, that of France, served as a symbol of unity, as a rallying point for the clergy and all other friends of peace; but both on practical grounds and on grounds of sentiment they left much to be desired.
National monarchy meant national wars and the right of national churches to misgovern themselves according to their several inclinations. Every year the rent in the seamless robe of Christendom grew wider; political unity was disappearing, and religious unity would soon go the same way. The kingly title made but a slight appeal to the imagination or the conscience; with whatever ceremonies a King was crowned, the real source of his power was the position which he held, independently of his office, as a chief of a tribal or a feudal group; of men who, as St. Odo bitterly remarked, being oppressed took to themselves a lord that with his help they might become oppressors. Sovereign power had lost all poetry and dignity; it was being perverted to serve petty ends. An Emperor was needed to restore a higher sense of justice, to exalt the spiritual above the material side of life.
The Western Medieval Europe: Table of Contents
url: www.ellopos.net/politics/medieval-europe/
Cf. Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) * Ancient Rome * Ancient Greece * The Making of Europe
