FlowingData com Data Visualization Set 1st

Edition Nathan Yau pdf download

https://ebookname.com/product/flowingdata-com-data-visualization-
set-1st-edition-nathan-yau/

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookname.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Python Data Visualization Cookbook Milovanovi■

https://ebookname.com/product/python-data-visualization-cookbook-
milovanovic/

Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web 1st

Edition Hinderman

https://ebookname.com/product/building-responsive-data-
visualization-for-the-web-1st-edition-hinderman/

Visual Data Mining Techniques and Tools for Data

Visualization and Mining 1st Edition Tom Soukup

https://ebookname.com/product/visual-data-mining-techniques-and-
tools-for-data-visualization-and-mining-1st-edition-tom-soukup/

TCP IP Tutorial and Technical Overview 8th Edition

Lydia Parziale

https://ebookname.com/product/tcp-ip-tutorial-and-technical-
overview-8th-edition-lydia-parziale/
Handbook of Research on Managerial Thinking in Global
Business Economics 1st Edition Debasish Batabyal

https://ebookname.com/product/handbook-of-research-on-managerial-
thinking-in-global-business-economics-1st-edition-debasish-
batabyal/

Cultivating Ch i A Samurai Physician s Teachings on the

Way of Health Kaibara Ekiken

https://ebookname.com/product/cultivating-ch-i-a-samurai-
physician-s-teachings-on-the-way-of-health-kaibara-ekiken/

Role Based Access Control Second Edition David F.

Ferraiolo

https://ebookname.com/product/role-based-access-control-second-
edition-david-f-ferraiolo/

Earthquakes and coseismic surface faulting on the

Iranian Plateau a historical social and physical
approach First Edition Manuel Berberian

https://ebookname.com/product/earthquakes-and-coseismic-surface-
faulting-on-the-iranian-plateau-a-historical-social-and-physical-
approach-first-edition-manuel-berberian/

Production and Operations Analysis 7th Edition Steven

Nahmias

https://ebookname.com/product/production-and-operations-
analysis-7th-edition-steven-nahmias/
The Social Worker as Manager A Practical Guide to
Success Seventh Edition. Edition Robert W. Weinbach

https://ebookname.com/product/the-social-worker-as-manager-a-
practical-guide-to-success-seventh-edition-edition-robert-w-
weinbach/
 CONTENTS

VISUALIZE THIS

Chapter 1: Telling Stories with Data 1

Chapter 2: Handling Data 21
Chapter 3: Choosing Tools to Visualize Data 53
Chapter 4: Visualizing Patterns over Time 91
Chapter 5: Visualizing Proportions 135
Chapter 6: Visualizing Relationships 179
Chapter 7: Spotting Differences 227
Chapter 8: Visualizing Spatial Relationships 271
Chapter 9: Designing with a Purpose 327

DATA POINTS

Chapter 1: Understanding Data 1

Chapter 2: Visualization: The Medium 43
Chapter 3: Representing Data 91
Chapter 4: Exploring Data Visually 135
Chapter 5: Visualizing with Clarity 201
Chapter 6: Designing for an Audience 241
Chapter 7: Where to Go from Here 277
Visualize This
Visualize This
The FlowingData Guide to Design,
Visualization, and Statistics

Nathan Yau
Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics
Published by
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
10475 Crosspoint Boulevard
Indianapolis, IN 46256
www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2011 by Nathan Yau
Published by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
Published simultaneously in Canada
ISBN: 978-0-470-94488-2
ISBN: 978-1-118-14024-6 (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-118-14026-0 (ebk)
ISBN: 978-1-118-14025-3 (ebk)
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sec-
tions 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Pub-
lisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222
Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permis-
sion should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ
07030, (201) 748-6011, fax (201) 748-6008, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties
with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warran-
ties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or
extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for
every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal,
accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent
professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising
herefrom. The fact that an organization or Web site is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential
source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the
organization or website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that
Internet websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and
when it is read.
For general information on our other products and services please contact our Customer Care Department
within the United States at (877) 762-2974, outside the United States at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Not all content that
is available in standard print versions of this book may appear or be packaged in all book formats. If you have
purchased a version of this book that did not include media that is referenced by or accompanies a standard print
version, you may request this media by visiting http://booksupport.wiley.com. For more information about
Wiley products, visit us at www.wiley.com .
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011928441
Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/
or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. All
other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc. is not associated with any
product or vendor mentioned in this book.
To my loving wife, Bea
About the Author

Since 2007, Nathan Yau has written and created graphics for FlowingData, a site on
visualization, statistics, and design. Working with groups such as The New York Times,
CNN, Mozilla, and SyFy, Yau believes that data and information graphics, while great for
analysis, are also perfect for telling stories with data.
Yau has a master’s degree in statistics from the University of California, Los Angeles,
and is currently a Ph.D. candidate with a focus on visualization and personal data.
About the Technical Editor

Kim Rees is co-founder of Periscopic, a socially conscious information visualization

firm. A prominent individual in the visualization community, Kim has over seventeen
years of experience in the interactive industry. She has published papers in the Parsons
Journal of Information Mapping and the InfoVIS 2010 Proceedings, and has spoken at the
O’Reilly Strata Conference, WebVisions, AIGA Shift, and Portland Data Visualization. Kim
received her bachelor of arts in Computer Science from New York University. Periscopic
has been recognized in CommArts Insights, Adobe Success Stories, and awarded by the
VAST Challenge, CommArts Web Picks, and the Communication Arts Interactive Annual.
Recently, Periscopic’s body of work was nominated for the Cooper-Hewitt National
Design Awards.
Credits

Executive Editor Vice President and Executive Group

Carol Long Publisher
Senior Project Editor Richard Swadley
Adaobi Obi Tulton Vice President and Executive Publisher
Technical Editor Barry Pruett
Kim Rees Associate Publisher
Senior Production Editor Jim Minatel
Debra Banninger Project Coordinator, Cover
Copy Editor Katie Crocker
Apostrophe Editing Services Compositor
Editorial Director Maureen Forys,
Robyn B. Siesky Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Editorial Manager Proofreader

Mary Beth Wakefield Nancy Carrasco

Freelancer Editorial Manager Indexer

Rosemarie Graham Robert Swanson

Marketing Manager Cover Image

Ashley Zurcher Nathan Yau

Production Manager Cover Designer

Tim Tate Ryan Sneed
Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without the work by the data scientists before me who
developed and continue to create useful and open tools for everyone to use. The soft-
ware from these generous developers makes my life much easier, and I am sure they
will keep innovating.
My many thanks to FlowingData readers who helped me reach more people than I ever
imagined. They are one of the main reasons why this book was written.
Thank you to Wiley Publishing, who let me write the book that I wanted to, and to Kim
Rees for helping me produce something worth reading.
Finally, thank you to my wife for supporting me and to my parents who always encour-
aged me to find what makes me happy.
Contents

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv

1 Telling Stories with Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

More Than Numbers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
What to Look For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

2 Handling Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Gather Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Formatting Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

3 Choosing Tools to Visualize Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53

Out-of-the-Box Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
Programming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62
Illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76
Mapping . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
Survey Your Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

4 Visualizing Patterns over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

What to Look for over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
Discrete Points in Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Continuous Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132

5 Visualizing Proportions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

What to Look for in Proportions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
Parts of a Whole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136
xiv C ont e nts

Proportions over Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161

Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

6 Visualizing Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179

What Relationships to Look For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Correlation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180
Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200
Comparison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226

7 Spotting Differences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227

What to Look For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Comparing across Multiple Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Reducing Dimensions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258
Searching for Outliers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

8 Visualizing Spatial Relationships . . . . . . . . . . . . 271

What to Look For . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Specific Locations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 272
Regions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285
Over Space and Time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 302
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

9 Designing with a Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

Prepare Yourself . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 328
Prepare Your Readers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 330
Visual Cues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334
Good Visualization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340
Wrapping Up . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343
Introduction

Data is nothing new. People have been quantifying and tabulating things for centuries.
However, while writing for FlowingData, my website on design, visualization, and sta-
tistics, I’ve seen a huge boom in just these past few years, and it keeps getting better.
Improvements in technology have made it extremely easy to collect and store data,
and the web lets you access it whenever you want. This wealth in data can, in the right
hands, provide a wealth of information to help improve decision making, communicate
ideas more clearly, and provide a more objective window looking in at how you look at
the world and yourself.
A significant shift in release of government data came in mid-2009, with the United
States’ launch of Data.gov. It’s a comprehensive catalog of data provided by federal
agencies and represents transparency and accountability of groups and officials. The
thought here is that you should know how the government spends tax dollars. Whereas
before, the government felt more like a black box. A lot of the data on Data.gov was
already available on agency sites scattered across the web, but now a lot of it is all in
one place and better formatted for analysis and visualization. The United Nations has
something similar with UNdata; the United Kingdom launched Data.gov.uk soon after,
and cities around the world such as New York, San Francisco, and London have also
taken part in big releases of data.
The collective web has also grown to be more open with thousands of Application Pro-
gramming Interfaces (API) to encourage and entice developers to do something with all
the available data. Applications such as Twitter and Flickr provide comprehensive APIs
that enable completely different user interfaces from the actual sites. API-cataloging
site ProgrammableWeb reports more than 2,000 APIs. New applications, such as
­Infochimps and Factual, also launched fairly recently and were specifically developed
to provide structured data.
At the individual level, you can update friends on Facebook, share your location on Four-
square, or tweet what you’re doing on Twitter, all with a few clicks on a mouse or taps on
a keyboard. More specialized applications enable you to log what you eat, how much you
xvi I ntroduc T ion

weigh, your mood, and plenty of other things. If you want to track some-
thing about yourself, there is probably an application to help you do it.
With all this data sitting around in stores, warehouses, and databases,
the field is ripe for people to make sense of it. The data itself isn’t all
that interesting (to most people). It’s the information that comes out of
the data. People want to know what their data says, and if you can help
them, you’re going to be in high demand. There’s a reason that Hal Var-
ian, Google’s chief economist, says that statistician is the sexy job of the
next 10 years, and it’s not just because statisticians are beautiful people.
(Although we are quite nice to look at in that geek chic sort of way.)

Visualization
One of the best ways to explore and try to understand a large dataset is with
visualization. Place the numbers into a visual space and let your brain or
your readers’ brains find the patterns. We’re good at that. You can often find
stories that you might never have found with just formal statistical methods.
John Tukey, my favorite statistician and the father of exploratory data analy-
sis, was well versed in statistical methods and properties but believed that
graphical techniques also had a place. He was a strong believer in discover-
ing the unexpected through pictures. You can find out a lot about data just by
visualizing it, and a lot of the time this is all you need to make an informed
decision or to tell a story.
For example, in 2009, the United States experienced a significant increase
in its unemployment rate. In 2007, the national average was 4.6 percent.
In 2008, it had risen to 5.8 percent. By September 2009, however, it was
9.8 percent. These national averages tell only part of the story though.
It’s generalizing over an entire country. Were there any regions that had
higher unemployment rates than others? Were there any regions that
seemed to be unaffected?
The maps in Figure I-1 tell a more complete story, and you can answer the
preceding questions after a glance. Darker-colored counties are areas
that had relatively higher unemployment rates, whereas the lighter-
­colored counties had relatively lower rates. In 2009, you see a lot of
regions with rates greater than 10 percent in the west and most areas in
the east. Areas in the Midwest were not hit as hard (Figure I-2).
 I ntroduc T ion xvii

Figure I-1 ​Maps of unemployment in the United States from 2004 to 2009

Figure I-2 ​Map of unemployment for 2009

xviii I ntroduc T ion

You couldn’t find these geographic and temporal patterns so quickly with
just a spreadsheet, and definitely not with just the national averages. Also,
although the county-level data is more complex, most people can still
interpret the maps. These maps could in turn help policy makers decide
where to allocate relief funds or other types of support.
The great thing about this is that the data used to produce these maps is
all free and publicly available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Albeit
the data was not incredibly easy to find from an outdated data browser, but
the numbers are there at your disposal, and there is a lot sitting around
waiting for some visual treatment.
The Statistical Abstract of the United States, for instance, exists as hun-
dreds of tables of data (Figure I-3), but no graphs. That’s an opportunity
to provide a comprehensive picture of a country. Really interesting stuff. I
graphed some of the tables a while back as a proof of concept, as shown in
Figure I-4, and you get marriage and divorce rates, postal rates, electricity
usage, and a few others. The former is hard to read and you don’t get any-
thing out of it other than individual values. In the graphical view, you can
find trends and patterns easily and make comparisons at a glance.
News outlets, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post do a
great job at making data more accessible and visual. They have probably
made the best use of this available data, as related stories have come and
passed. Sometimes data graphics are used to enhance a story with a dif-
ferent point of view, whereas other times the graphics tell the entire story.
Graphics have become even more prevalent with the shift to online media.
There are now departments within news organizations that deal only with
interactives or only graphics or only maps. The New York Times, for exam-
ple, even has a news desk specifically dedicated to what it calls computer-
assisted reporting. These are reporters who focus on telling the news with
numbers. The New York Times graphics desk is also comfortable dealing
with large amounts of data.
Visualization has also found its way into pop culture. Stamen Design, a
visualization firm well known for its online interactives, has provided a
Twitter tracker for the MTV Video Music Awards the past few years. Each
year Stamen designs something different, but at its core, it shows what
people are talking about on Twitter in real-time. When Kanye West had his
little outburst during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech in 2009, it was obvi-
ous what people thought of him via the tracker.
 I ntroduc T ion  xix

Figure I-3 ​Table from the Statistical Abstract of the United States

xx I ntroduc T ion

Figure I-4 ​A graphical view of data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States
 I ntroduc T ion xxi

At this point, you enter a realm of visualization less analytical and more
about feeling. The definition of visualization starts to get kind of fuzzy. For
a long time, visualization was about quantitative facts. You should recog-
nize patterns with your tools, and they should aid your analysis in some
way. Visualization isn’t just about getting the cold hard facts. Like in the
case of Stamen’s tracker, it’s almost more about the entertainment factor.
It’s a way for viewers to watch the awards show and interact with others
in the process. Jonathan Harris’ work is another great example. Harris
designs his work, such as We Feel Fine and Whale Hunt, around stories
rather than analytical insight, and those stories revolve around human
emotion over the numbers and analytics.
Charts and graphs have also evolved into not just tools but also as vehi-
cles to communicate ideas—and even tell jokes. Sites such as GraphJam
and Indexed use Venn diagrams, pie charts, and the like to represent pop
songs or show that a combination of red, black, and white equals a Com-
munist newspaper or a panda murder. Data Underload, a data comic of
sorts that I post on FlowingData, is my own take on the genre. I take every-
day observations and put it in chart form. The chart in Figure I-5 shows
famous movie quotes listed by the American Film Institute. It’s totally
ridiculous but amusing (to me, at least).
So what is visualization? Well, it depends on who you talk to. Some people
say it’s strictly traditional graphs and charts. Others have a more liberal P Find more Data
view where anything that displays data is visualization, whether it is data Underload on
FlowingData at
art or a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel. I tend to sway more toward the
http://datafl
latter, but sometimes find myself in the former group, too. In the end, it
.ws/underload
doesn’t actually matter all that much. Just make something that works for
your purpose.
Whatever you decide visualization is, whether you’re making charts for
your presentation, analyzing a large dataset, or reporting the news with
data, you’re ultimately looking for truth. At some point in time, lies and
statistics became almost synonymous, but it’s not that the numbers lie.
It’s the people who use the numbers who lie. Sometimes it’s on purpose
to serve an agenda, but most of the time it’s inadvertent. When you don’t
know how to create a graph properly or communicate with data in an unbi-
ased way, false junk is likely to sprout. However, if you learn proper visu-
alization techniques and how to work with data, you can state your points
confidently and feel good about your findings.
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
states were at length persuaded to consent to its reunion to the
crown from which it had been separated, though to some extent
dependent, since the death of Lothar I (son of Lewis the Pious). On
Rudolf's death in 1032, Eudes, count of Champagne, endeavoured to
seize it, and entered the north-western districts, from which he was
dislodged by Conrad with some difficulty. Unlike Italy, it became an
integral member of the Germanic realm: its prelates and nobles sat
in imperial diets, and retained till recently the style and title of
Princes of the Holy Empire. The central government was, however,
seldom effective in these outlying territories, exposed always to the
intrigues, finally to the aggressions, of Capetian France.
Under Conrad's son Henry the Third the Empire
Henry III.
attained the meridian of its power. At home Otto
the Great's prerogative had not stood so high. The
duchies, always the chief source of fear, were allowed to remain
vacant or filled by the relatives of the monarch, who himself
retained, contrary to usual practice, those of Franconia and (for
some years) Swabia. Abbeys and sees lay entirely
His reform of the
Popedom.
in his gift. Intestine feuds were repressed by the
proclamation of a public peace. Abroad, the feudal
superiority over Hungary, which Henry II had gained by conferring
the title of King with the hand of his sister Gisela, was enforced by
war, the country made almost a province, and compelled to pay
tribute. In Rome no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A
disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair had
shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all,
and appointed their successor: he became hereditary patrician, and
wore constantly the green mantle and circlet of gold which were the
badges of that office, seeming, one might think, to find in it some
further authority than that which the imperial name conferred. The
synod passed a decree granting to Henry the right of nominating the
supreme pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the
respect of the world even more by habitual simony than by the
flagrant corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German
after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful,
so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments alarmed his
own nobles no less than the Italians, and the reaction, which might
have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor. A mere
chance, as some might call it, determined the course of history. The
great Emperor died suddenly in A.D. 1056, and a
Henry IV, A.D. 1056-
1106.
child was left at the helm, while storms were
gathering that might have demanded the wisest
hand.
 CHAPTER X.

STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.

Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy

had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the schemes of
polity shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of
the last age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest
mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to
their completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power
against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became
the centre of the subsequent history of both. While the nature of the
struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their previous
connection, the vastness of the subject warns one from the attempt
to draw even its outlines, and restricts our view to those relations of
Popedom and Empire which arise directly out of their respective
positions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal Christian
state.
The eagerness of Christianity in the age
Growth of the Papal
power.
immediately following her political establishment
to purchase by submission the support of the civil
power, has been already remarked. The change from independence
to supremacy was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine,
healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Sylvester, and
retired to Byzantium that no secular prince might interfere with the
jurisdiction or profane the neighbourhood of Peter's chair, worked
great effects through the belief it commanded for many centuries.
Nay more, its groundwork was true. It was the removal of the seat
of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus that made the Pope
the greatest personage in the city, and in the prostration after
Alaric's invasion he was seen to be so. Henceforth he alone was a
permanent and effective, though still unacknowledged power, as
truly superior to the revived senate and consuls of the phantom
republic as Augustus and Tiberius had been to the faint continuance
of their earlier prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted the universal
jurisdiction of his see[171], and his persevering successors slowly
enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, Africa, dexterously
confounding their undoubted metropolitan and patriarchal rights
with those of œcumenical bishop, in which they were finally merged.
By his writings and the fame of his personal sanctity, by the
conversion of England and the introduction of an impressive ritual,
Gregory the Great did more than any other pontiff to advance
Rome's ecclesiastical authority. Yet his tone to Maurice of
Constantinople was deferential, to Phocas adulatory; his successors
were not consecrated till confirmed by the Emperor or the Exarch;
one of them was dragged in chains to the Bosphorus, and banished
thence to Scythia. When the iconoclastic controversy and the
intervention of Pipin broke the allegiance of the Popes to the East,
the Franks, as patricians and Emperors, seemed to step into the
position which Byzantium had lost[172]. At Charles's coronation, says
the Saxon poet,
'Et summus eundem
Præsul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim
Principibus fuit antiquis.'

Their relations were, however, no longer the same.

Relations of the
Papacy and the
If the Frank vaunted conquest, the priest spoke
Empire. only of free gift. What Christendom saw was that
Charles was crowned by the Pope's hands, and
undertook as his principal duty the protection and advancement of
the Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the Great's
coronation gave an even more favourable opening to sacerdotal
claims, for it was a Pope who summoned him to Rome and a Pope
who received from him an oath of fidelity and aid. In the conflict of
three powers, the Emperor, the pontiff, and the people—represented
by their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the hour—the
most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure eventually to prevail.
The Popedom had no minorities, as yet few disputed successions,
few revolts within its own army—the host of churchmen through
Europe. Boniface's conversion of Germany under its direct sanction,
gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest European state;
the extension of the rule of Charles and Otto diffused in the same
measure its emissaries and pretensions. The first disputes turned on
the right of the prince to confirm the elected pontiff, which was
afterwards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to Charles,
in the decree quoted as 'Hadrianus Papa[173].' This 'ius eligendi et
ordinandi summum pontificem,' which Lewis I appears as yielding by
the 'Ego Ludovicus[174] ,' was claimed by the Carolingians whenever
they felt themselves strong enough, and having fallen into
desuetude in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was
formally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We
have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by
his grandson Otto III, last of all, and most despotically, by Henry III.
Along with it there had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the
Papal chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In
submitting to a fresh coronation, Lewis the Pious admitted the
invalidity of his former self-performed one: Charles the Bald did not
scout the arrogant declaration of John VIII[175], that to him alone
the Emperor owed his crown; and the council of Pavia[176], when it
chose him king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes
knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and Franconian
chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had not resented; but
the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid behind the
pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the moment
should come. There were also two other great steps which papal
power had taken. By the invention and adoption of the False
Decretals it had provided itself with a legal system suited to any
emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the
 Christian world in causes spiritual and over
Temporal power of
the Popes.
persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical ingenuity found
it easy in one way or another to make this include
all causes and persons whatsoever: for crime is always and wrong is
often sin, nor can aught be anywhere done which may not affect the
clergy. On the gift of Pipin and Charles, repeated and confirmed by
Lewis I, Charles II, Otto I and III, and now made to rest on the
more venerable authority of the first Christian Emperor, it could
found claims to the sovereignty of Rome, Tuscany, and all else that
had belonged to the exarchate. Indefinite in their terms, these
grants were never meant by the donors to convey full dominion over
the districts—that belonged to the head of the Empire—but only as
in the case of other church estates, a perpetual usufruct or
dominium utile. They were, in fact, mere endowments. Nor had the
gifts been ever actually reduced into possession: the Pope had been
hitherto the victim, not the lord, of the neighbouring barons. They
were not, however, denied, and might be made a formidable engine
of attack: appealing to them, the Pope could brand his opponents as
unjust and impious; and could summon nobles and cities to defend
him as their liege lord, just as, with no better original right, he
invoked the help of the Norman conquerors of Naples and Sicily.
The attitude of the Roman Church to the imperial power at Henry
the Third's death was externally respectful. The right of a German
king to the crown of the city was undoubted, and the Pope was his
lawful subject. Hitherto the initiative in reform had come from the
civil magistrate. But the secret of the pontiff's strength lay in this:
he, and he alone, could confer the crown, and had therefore the
right of imposing conditions on its recipient. Frequent interregna had
weakened the claim of the Transalpine monarch and prevented his
power from taking firm root; his title was never by law hereditary:
the holy Church had before sought and might again seek a defender
elsewhere. And since the need of such defence had originated this
transference of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks, since to
render it was the Emperor's chief function, it was surely the Pope's
duty as well as his right to see that the candidate was capable of
fulfilling his task, to degrade him if he rejected or misperformed it.
The first step was to remove a blemish in the
Hildebrandine
reforms.
constitution of the Church, by fixing a regular
body to choose the supreme pontiff. This Nicholas
II did in A.D. 1059, feebly reserving the rights of Henry IV and his
successors. Then the reforming spirit, kindled by the abuses and
depravity of the last century, advanced apace. It had two main
objects: the enforcement of celibacy, especially on the secular clergy,
who enjoyed in this respect considerable freedom, and the extinction
of simony. In the former, the Emperors and a large part of the laity
were not unwilling to join: the latter no one dared to defend in
theory. But when Gregory VII declared that it was sin for the
ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions from a layman,
and so condemned the whole system of feudal investitures to the
clergy, he aimed a deadly blow at all secular authority. Half of the
land and wealth of Germany was in the hands of bishops and
abbots, who would now be freed from the monarch's control to pass
under that of the Pope. In such a state of things government itself
would be impossible.
Henry and Gregory already mistrusted each other:
Henry IV and
Gregory VII.
after this decree war was inevitable. The Pope
cited his opponent to appear and be judged at
Rome for his vices and misgovernment. The Emperor[177] replied by
convoking a synod, which deposed and insulted Gregory. At once the
dauntless monk pronounced Henry excommunicate, and fixed a day
on which, if still unrepentant, he should cease to reign. Supported
by his own princes, the monarch might have defied a mandate
backed by no external force; but the Saxons, never contented since
the first place had passed from their own dukes to the Franconians,
only waited the signal to burst into a new revolt, whilst through all
Germany the Emperor's tyranny and irregularities of life had sown
the seeds of disaffection. Shunned, betrayed, threatened, he rushed
into what seemed the only course left, and Canosa saw Europe's
 mightiest prince, titular lord of the world, a
A.D. 1077.
suppliant before the successor of the Apostle.
Henry soon found that his humiliation had not
served him; driven back into opposition, he defied Gregory anew, set
up an anti-pope, overthrew the rival whom his rebellious subjects
had raised, and maintained to the end of his sad and chequered life
a power often depressed but never destroyed. Nevertheless had all
other humiliation been spared, that one scene in the yard of the
Countess Matilda's castle, an imperial penitent standing barefoot and
woollen-frocked on the snow three days and nights, till the priest
who sat within should admit and absolve him, was enough to mark a
decisive change, and inflict an irretrievable disgrace on the crown so
abased. Its wearer could no more, with the same lofty confidence,
claim to be the highest power on earth, created by and answerable
to God alone. Gregory had extorted the recognition of that absolute
superiority of the spiritual dominion which he was wont to assert so
sternly; proclaiming that to the Pope, as God's vicar, all mankind are
subject, and all rulers responsible: so that he, the giver of the
crown, may also excommunicate and depose. Writing to William the
Conqueror, he says[178] : 'For as for the beauty of this world, that it
may be at different seasons perceived by fleshly eyes, God hath
disposed the sun and the moon, lights that outshine all others; so
lest the creature whom His goodness hath formed after His own
image in this world should be drawn astray into fatal dangers, He
hath provided in the apostolic and royal dignities the means of ruling
it through divers offices.... If I, therefore, am to answer for thee on
the dreadful day of judgment before the just Judge who cannot lie,
the creator of every creature, bethink thee whether I must not very
diligently provide for thy salvation, and whether, for thine own
safety, thou oughtest not without delay to obey me, that so thou
mayest possess the land of the living.'
Gregory was not the inventor nor the first propounder of these
doctrines; they had been long before a part of mediæval Christianity,
interwoven with its most vital doctrines. But he was the first who
dared to apply them to the world as he found it. His was that rarest
and grandest of gifts, an intellectual courage and power of
imaginative belief which, when it has convinced itself of aught,
accepts it fully with all its consequences, and shrinks not from acting
at once upon it. A perilous gift, as the melancholy end of his own
career proved, for men were found less ready than he had thought
them to follow out with unswerving consistency like his the principles
which all acknowledged. But it was the very suddenness and
boldness of his policy that secured the ultimate triumph of his cause,
awing men's minds and making that seem realized which had been
till then a vague theory. His premises once admitted,—and no one
dreamt of denying them,—the reasonings by which he established
the superiority of spiritual to temporal jurisdiction were unassailable.
With his authority, in whose hands are the keys of heaven and hell,
whose word can bestow eternal bliss or plunge in everlasting misery,
no other earthly authority can compete or interfere: if his power
extends into the infinite, how much more must he be supreme over
things finite? It was thus that Gregory and his successors were wont
to argue: the wonder is, not that they were obeyed, but that they
were not obeyed more implicitly. In the second sentence of
excommunication which Gregory passed upon Henry the Fourth are
these words:—
'Come now, I beseech you, O most holy and blessed Fathers and
Princes, Peter and Paul, that all the world may understand and know
that if ye are able to bind and to loose in heaven, ye are likewise
able on earth, according to the merits of each man, to give and to
take away empires, kingdoms, princedoms, marquisates, duchies,
countships, and the possessions of all men. For if ye judge spiritual
things, what must we believe to be your power over worldly things?
and if ye judge the angels who rule over all proud princes, what can
ye not do to their slaves?'
Doctrines such as these do indeed strike equally at
Results of the
struggle.
all temporal governments, nor were the Innocents
and Bonifaces of later days slow to apply them so.
On the Empire, however, the blow fell first and heaviest. As when
Alaric entered Rome, the spell of ages was broken, Christendom saw
her greatest and most venerable institution dishonoured and
helpless; allegiance was no longer undivided, for who could presume
to fix in each case the limits of the civil and ecclesiastical
jurisdictions? The potentates of Europe beheld in the Papacy a force
which, if dangerous to themselves, could be made to repel the
pretensions and baffle the designs of the strongest and haughtiest
among them. Italy learned how to meet the Teutonic conqueror by
gaining the papal sanction for the leagues of her cities. The German
princes, anxious to narrow the prerogative of their head, were the
natural allies of his enemy, whose spiritual thunders, more terrible
than their own lances, could enable them to depose an aspiring
monarch, or extort from him any concessions they desired. Their
altered tone is marked by the promise they required from Rudolf of
Swabia, whom they set up as a rival to Henry, that he would not
endeavour to make the throne hereditary.
It is not possible here to dwell on the details of the great struggle of
the Investitures, rich as it is in the interest of adventure and
character, momentous as were its results for the future. A word or
two must suffice to describe the conclusion, not indeed of the whole
drama, which was to extend over centuries, but of what may be
called its first act. Even that act lasted beyond the lives of the
original performers. Gregory the Seventh passed away at Salerno in
A.D. 1087, exclaiming with his last breath 'I have loved justice and
hated iniquity, therefore I die in exile.' Nineteen years later, in A.D.
1106, Henry IV died, dethroned by an unnatural son whom the
hatred of a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against him. But
that son, the emperor Henry the Fifth, so far from conceding the
points in dispute, proved an antagonist more ruthless and not less
able than his father. He claimed for his crown all the rights over
ecclesiastics that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at
his coronation in Rome, A.D. 1112, Pope Paschal II refused to
complete the rite until he should have yielded, Henry seized both
Pope and cardinals and compelled them by a rigorous imprisonment
to consent to a treaty which he dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as
was natural, disavowed his extorted concessions, and the struggle
was protracted for ten years longer, until nearly half a century had
elapsed from the first quarrel between Gregory VII and Henry IV.
The Concordat of Worms, concluded in A.D. 1122,
Concordat of
Worms, A.D. 1122.
was in form a compromise, designed to spare
either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the
Papacy remained master of the field. The Emperor retained but one-
half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. He
could never resume the position of Henry III; his wishes or intrigues
might influence the proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him
from open interference. He had entered the strife in the fulness of
dignity; he came out of it with tarnished glory and shattered power.
His wars had been hitherto carried on with foreign foes, or at worst
with a single rebel noble; now his steadiest ally was turned into his
fiercest assailant, and had enlisted against him half his court, half
the magnates of his realm. At any moment his sceptre might be
shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host of enemies
spring up from every convent and cathedral.
Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed.
The Emperor was alienated from the Church at the most unfortunate
of all moments, the era of the Crusades. To
The Crusades.
conduct a great religious war against the enemies
of the faith, to head the church militant in her
carnal as the Popes were accustomed to do in her spiritual strife, this
was the very purpose for which an Emperor had been called into
being; and it was indeed in these wars, more particularly in the first
three of them, that the ideal of a Christian commonwealth which the
theory of the mediæval Empire proclaimed, was once for all and
never again realized by the combined action of the great nations of
Europe. Had such an opportunity fallen to the lot of Henry III, he
might have used it to win back a supremacy hardly inferior to that
which had belonged to the first Carolingians. But Henry IV's
proscription excluded him from all share in an enterprise which he
must otherwise have led—nay, more, committed it to the guidance
of his foes. The religious feeling which the Crusades evoked—a
feeling which became the origin of the great orders of chivalry, and
somewhat later of the two great orders of mendicant friars—turned
wholly against the opponent of ecclesiastical claims, and was made
to work the will of the Holy See, which had blessed and organized
the project. A century and a half later the Pope did not scruple to
preach a crusade against the Emperor himself.
Again: it was now that the first seeds were sown of that fear and
hatred wherewith the German people never thenceforth ceased to
regard the encroaching Romish court. Branded by the Church and
forsaken by the nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the
faithful burghers of Worms and Liege. It soon became the test of
Teutonic patriotism to resist Italian priestcraft.
The changes in the internal constitution of Germany which the long
anarchy of Henry IV's reign had produced are
Limitations of
imperial
seen when the nature of the prerogative as it
prerogative. stood at the accession of Conrad II, the first
Franconian Emperor, is compared with its state at
Henry V's death. All fiefs are now hereditary, and when vacant can
be granted afresh only by consent of the States; the jurisdiction of
the crown is less wide; the idea is beginning to make progress that
the most essential part of the Empire is not its supreme head but the
commonwealth of princes and barons. The greatest triumph of these
feudal magnates is in the establishment of the elective principle,
which when confirmed by the three free elections of Lothar II,
Conrad III, and Frederick I, passes into an
Lothar II, 1125-
1138.
undoubted law. The Prince-Electors are mentioned
in A.D. 1156 as a distinct and important body[179].
The clergy, too, whom the policy of Otto the Great and Henry II had
raised, are now not less dangerous than the dukes, whose power it
was hoped they would balance; possibly more so, since protected by
their sacred character and their allegiance to the Pope, while able at
the same time to command the arms of their countless vassals. Nor
were the two succeeding Emperors the men to retrieve those
disasters. The Saxon Lothar the Second is the willing minion of the
Pope; performs at his coronation a menial service unknown before,
and takes a more stringent oath to defend the Holy See, that he
may purchase its support against the Swabian faction in his own
dominions. Conrad the Third, the first Emperor of
Conrad III, 1138-
1152. the great house of Hohenstaufen[180], represents
the anti-papal party; but domestic troubles and an
unfortunate crusade prevented him from effecting anything in Italy.
He never even entered Rome to receive the crown.
 CHAPTER XI.

THE EMPERORS IN ITALY: FREDERICK BARBAROSSA.

The reign of Frederick the First, better known

Frederick of
Hohenstaufen,
under his Italian surname Barbarossa, is the most
1152-1189. brilliant in the annals of the Empire. Its territory
had been wider under Charles, its strength
perhaps greater under Henry the Third, but it never appeared in
such pervading vivid activity, never shone with such lustre of
chivalry, as under the prince whom his countrymen have taken to be
one of their national heroes, and who is still, as the half-mythic type
of Teutonic character, honoured by picture and statue, in song and in
legend, through the breadth of the German lands. The reverential
fondness of his annalists and the whole tenour of his life go far to
justify this admiration, and dispose us to believe that nobler motives
were joined with personal ambition in urging him to assert so
haughtily and carry out so harshly those imperial rights in which he
had such unbounded confidence. Under his guidance the Transalpine
power made its greatest effort to subdue the two antagonists which
then threatened and were fated in the end to destroy it—Italian
nationality and the Papacy.
Even before Gregory VII's time it might have been
His relations to the
Popedom.
predicted that two such potentates as the Emperor
and the Pope, closely bound together, yet each
with pretensions wide and undefined, must ere long come into
collision. The boldness of that great pontiff in enforcing, the
unflinching firmness of his successors in maintaining, the supremacy
of clerical authority, inspired their supporters with a zeal and
courage which more than compensated the advantages of the
Emperor in defending rights he had long enjoyed. On both sides the
hatred was soon very bitter. But even had men's passions permitted
a reconciliation, it would have been found difficult to bring into
harmony adverse principles, each irresistible, mutually destructive.
As the spiritual power, in itself purer, since exercised over the soul
and directed to the highest of all ends, eternal felicity, was entitled
to the obedience of all, laymen as well as clergy; so the spiritual
person, to whom, according to the view then universally accepted,
there had been imparted by ordination a mysterious sanctity, could
not without sin be subject to the lay magistrate, be installed by him
in office, be judged in his court, and render to him any compulsory
service. Yet it was no less true that civil government was
indispensable to the peace and advancement of society; and while it
continued to subsist, another jurisdiction could not be suffered to
interfere with its workings, nor one-half of the people be altogether
removed from its control. Thus the Emperor and the Pope were
forced into hostility as champions of opposite systems, however fully
each might admit the strength of his adversary's position, however
bitterly he might bewail the violence of his own partisans. There had
also arisen other causes of quarrel, less respectable but not less
dangerous. The pontiff demanded and the monarch refused the
lands which the Countess Matilda of Tuscany had bequeathed to the
Holy See; Frederick claiming them as feudal suzerain, the Pope
eager by their means to carry out those schemes of temporal
dominion which Constantine's donation sanctioned, and Lothar's
seeming renunciation of the sovereignty of Rome had done much to
encourage. As feudal superior of the Norman kings of Naples and
Sicily, as protector of the towns and barons of North Italy who
feared the German yoke, the successor of Peter wore already the air
of an independent potentate.
No man was less likely than Frederick to submit to
Contest with
Hadrian IV.
these encroachments. He was a sort of imperialist
Hildebrand, strenuously proclaiming the immediate
dependence of his office on God's gift, and holding it every whit as
sacred as his rival's. On his first journey to Rome, he refused to hold
the Pope's stirrup[181], as Lothar had done, till Pope Hadrian the
Fourth's threat that he would withhold the crown enforced
compliance. Complaints arising not long after on some other ground,
the Pope exhorted Frederick by letter to shew himself worthy of the
kindness of his mother the Roman Church, who had given him the
imperial crown, and would confer on him, if dutiful, benefits still
greater. This word benefits—beneficia—understood in its usual legal
sense of 'fief,' and taken in connection with the picture which had
been set up at Rome to commemorate Lothar's homage, provoked
angry shouts from the nobles assembled in diet at Besançon; and
when the legate answered, 'From whom, then, if not from our Lord
the Pope, does your king hold the Empire?' his life was not safe from
their fury. On this occasion Frederick's vigour and the remonstrances
of the Transalpine prelates obliged Hadrian to explain away the
obnoxious word, and remove the picture. Soon after the quarrel was
renewed by other causes, and came to centre itself round the Pope's
demand that Rome should be left entirely to his government.
Frederick, in reply, appeals to the civil law, and closes with the
words, 'Since by the ordination of God I both am called and am
Emperor of the Romans, in nothing but name shall I appear to be
ruler if the control of the Roman city be wrested from my hands.'
That such a claim should need assertion marks the change since
Henry III; how much more that it could not be enforced. Hadrian's
tone rises into defiance; he mingles the threat of excommunication
with references to the time when the Germans had not yet the
Empire. 'What were the Franks till Zacharias welcomed Pipin? What
is the Teutonic king now till consecrated at Rome by holy hands?
The chair of Peter has given, and can withdraw its gifts.'
The schism that followed Hadrian's death
With Pope
Alexander III.
produced a second and more momentous conflict.
Frederick, as head of Christendom, proposed to
summon the bishops of Europe to a general council, over which he
should preside, like Justinian or Heraclius. Quoting the favourite text
of the two swords, 'On earth,' he continues, 'God has placed no
more than two powers: above there is but one God, so here one
Pope and one Emperor. The Divine Providence has specially
appointed the Roman Empire as a remedy against continued
schism[182].' The plan failed; and Frederick adopted the candidate
whom his own faction had chosen, while the rival claimant,
Alexander III, appealed, with a confidence which the issue justified,
to the support of sound churchmen throughout Europe. The keen
and long doubtful strife of twenty years that followed, while
apparently a dispute between rival Popes, was in substance an effort
by the secular monarch to recover his command of the priesthood;
not less truly so than that contemporaneous conflict of the English
Henry II and St. Thomas of Canterbury, with which it was constantly
involved. Unsupported, not all Alexander's genius and resolution
could have saved him: by the aid of the Lombard cities, whose
league he had counselled and hallowed, and of the fevers of Rome,
by which the conquering German host was suddenly annihilated, he
won a triumph the more signal, that it was over a prince so wise and
so pious as Frederick. At Venice, who, inaccessible by her position,
maintained a sedulous neutrality, claiming to be independent of the
Empire, yet seldom led into war by sympathy with the Popes, the
two powers whose strife had roused all Europe were induced to
meet by the mediation of the doge Sebastian Ziani. Three slabs of
red marble in the porch of St. Mark's point out the spot where
Frederick knelt in sudden awe, and the Pope with tears of joy raised
him, and gave the kiss of peace. A later legend, to which poetry and
painting have given an undeserved currency[183], tells how the
pontiff set his foot on the neck of the prostrate king, with the words,
'The lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet[184].' It
needed not this exaggeration to enhance the significance of that
scene, even more full of meaning for the future than it was solemn
and affecting to the Venetian crowd that thronged the church and
the piazza. For it was the renunciation by the mightiest prince of his
time of the project to which his life had been devoted: it was the
abandonment by the secular power of a contest in which it had
twice been vanquished, and which it could not renew under more
favourable conditions.
Authority maintained so long against the successor
Revival of the study
of the civil law.
of Peter would be far from indulgent to rebellious
subjects. For it was in this light that the Lombard
cities appeared to a monarch bent on reviving all the rights his
predecessors had enjoyed: nay, all that the law of ancient Rome
gave her absolute ruler. It would be wrong to speak of a re-discovery
of the civil law. That system had never perished from Gaul and Italy,
had been the groundwork of some codes, and the whole substance,
modified only by the changes in society, of many others. The Church
excepted, no agent did so much to keep alive the memory of Roman
institutions. The twelfth century now beheld the study cultivated
with a surprising increase of knowledge and ardour, expended chiefly
upon the Pandects. First in Italy and the schools of the South, then
in Paris and Oxford, they were expounded, commented on, extolled
as the perfection of human wisdom, the sole, true, and eternal law.
Vast as has been the labour and thought expended from that time to
this in the elucidation of the civil law, the most competent
authorities declare that in acuteness, in subtlety, in all those
branches of learning which can subsist without help from historical
criticism, these so-called Glossatores have been seldom equalled and
never surpassed by their successors. The teachers of the canon law,
who had not as yet become the rivals of the civilian, and were
accustomed to recur to his books where their own were silent,
spread through Europe the fame and influence of the Roman
jurisprudence; while its own professors were led both by their
feeling and their interest to give to all its maxims the greatest weight
and the fullest application. Men just emerging from barbarism, with
minds unaccustomed to create and blindly submissive to authority,
viewed written texts with an awe to us incomprehensible. All that
the most servile jurists of Rome had ever ascribed to their despotic
princes was directly transferred to the Cæsarean majesty who
inherited their name. He was 'Lord of the world,' absolute master of
the lives and property of all his subjects, that is, of all men; the sole
fountain of legislation, the embodiment of right and justice. These
doctrines, which the great Bolognese jurists, Bulgarus, Martinus,
Hugolinus, and others who constantly surrounded Frederick, taught
and applied, as matter of course, to a Teutonic, a feudal king, were
by the rest of the world not denied, were accepted in fervent faith
by his German and Italian partisans. 'To the Emperor belongs the
protection of the whole world,' says bishop Otto of Freysing. 'The
Emperor is a living law upon earth[185].' To Frederick, at Roncaglia,
the archbishop of Milan speaks for the assembled magnates of
Lombardy: 'Do and ordain whatsoever thou wilt, thy will is law; as it
is written, "Quicquid principi placuit legis habet vigorem, cum
populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem
concesserit[186]." The Hohenstaufen himself was not slow to accept
these magnificent ascriptions of dignity, and though modestly
professing his wish to govern according to law rather than override
the law, was doubtless roused by them to a more vehement
assertion of a prerogative so hallowed by age and by what seemed a
divine ordinance.
That assertion was most loudly called for in Italy.
Frederick in Italy.
The Emperors might appear to consider it a
conquered country without privileges to be
respected, for they did not summon its princes to the German diets,
and overawed its own assemblies at Pavia or Roncaglia by the
Transalpine host that followed them. Its crown, too, was theirs
whenever they crossed the Alps to claim it, while the elections on
the banks of the Rhine might be adorned but could not be
influenced by the presence of barons from the southern
kingdom[187]. In practice, however, the imperial power stood lower
in Italy than in Germany, for it had been from the first intermittent,
depending on the personal vigour and present armed support of
each invader. The theoretic sovereignty of the Emperor-king was
nowise disputed: in the cities toll and tax were of right his: he could
issue edicts at the Diet, and require the tenants in chief to appear
with their vassals. But the revival of a control never exercised since
Henry IV's time, was felt as an intolerable hardship by the great
Lombard cities, proud of riches and population equal to that of the
duchies of Germany or the kingdoms of the North, and accustomed
for more than a century to a turbulent independence. For
republicanism and popular freedom Frederick had little sympathy. At
Rome the fervent Arnold of Brescia had repeated,
Rome under Arnold
of Brescia.
but with far different thoughts and hopes, the part
of Crescentius[188]. The city had thrown off the
yoke of its bishop, and a commonwealth under consuls and senate
professed to emulate the spirit while it renewed the forms of the
primitive republic. Its leaders had written to Conrad III[189], asking
him to help them to restore the Empire to its position under
Constantine and Justinian; but the German, warned by St. Bernard,
had preferred the friendship of the Pope. Filled with a vain conceit of
their own importance, they repeated their offers to Frederick when
he sought the crown from Hadrian the Fourth. A deputation, after
dwelling in highflown language on the dignity of the Roman people,
and their kindness in bestowing the sceptre on him, a Swabian and a
stranger, proceeded, in a manner hardly consistent, to demand a
largess ere he should enter the city. Frederick's anger did not hear
them to the end: 'Is this your Roman wisdom? Who are ye that
usurp the name of Roman dignities? Your honours and your
authority are yours no longer; with us are consuls, senate, soldiers.
It was not you who chose us, but Charles and Otto that rescued you
from the Greek and the Lombard, and conquered by their own might
the imperial crown. That Frankish might is still the same: wrench, if
you can, the club from Hercules. It is not for the people to give laws
to the prince, but to obey his mandate[190].' This was Frederick's
version of the 'Translation of the Empire[191].'
He who had been so stern to his own capital was
The Lombard Cities.
not likely to deal more gently with the rebels of
Milan and Tortona. In the contest by which
Frederick is chiefly known to history, he is commonly painted as the
foreign tyrant, the forerunner of the Austrian oppressor[192],
crushing under the hoofs of his cavalry the home of freedom and
industry. Such a view is unjust to a great man and his cause. To the
despot liberty is always licence; yet Frederick was the advocate of
admitted claims; the aggressions of Milan threatened her
neighbours; the refusal, where no actual oppression was alleged, to
admit his officers and allow his regalian rights, seemed a wanton
breach of oaths and engagements, treason against God no less than
himself[193]. Nevertheless our sympathy must go with the cities, in
whose victory we recognize the triumph of freedom and civilization.
Their resistance was at first probably a mere aversion to unused
control, and to the enforcement of imposts less offensive in former
days than now, and by long dereliction apparently obsolete[194].
Republican principles were not avowed, nor Italian nationality
appealed to. But the progress of the conflict developed new motives
and feelings, and gave them clearer notions of what they fought for.
As the Emperor's antagonist, the Pope was their natural ally: he
blessed their arms, and called on the barons of Romagna and
Tuscany for aid; he made 'The Church' ere long their watchword,
and helped them to conclude that league of mutual support by
means whereof the party of the Italian Guelfs was formed. Another
cry, too, began to be heard, hardly less inspiriting than the last, the
cry of freedom and municipal self-government—freedom little
understood and terribly abused, self-government which the cities
who claimed it for themselves refused to their subject allies, yet both
of them, through their divine power of stimulating effort and
quickening sympathy, as much nobler than the harsh and sterile
system of a feudal monarchy as the citizen of republican Athens rose
above the slavish Asiatic or the brutal Macedonian. Nor was the fact
that Italians were resisting a Transalpine invader without its effect;
there was as yet no distinct national feeling, for half Lombardy,
towns as well as rural nobles, fought under Frederick; but events
made the cause of liberty always more clearly the cause of
patriotism, and increased that fear and hate of the Tedescan for
which Italy has had such bitter justification.
 The Emperor was for a time successful: Tortona
Temporary success
of Frederick.
was taken, Milan razed to the ground, her name
apparently lost: greater obstacles had been
overcome, and a fuller authority was now exercised than in the days
of the Ottos or the Henrys. The glories of the first Frankish
conqueror were triumphantly recalled, and Frederick was compared
by his admirers to the hero whose canonization he had procured,
and whom he strove in all things to imitate[195]. 'He was esteemed,'
says one, 'second only to Charles in piety and justice.' 'We ordain
this,' says a decree: 'Ut ad Caroli imitationem ius ecclesiarum statum
reipublicæ et legum integritatem per totum imperium nostrum
servaremus[196].' But the hold the name of Charles had on the
minds of the people, and the way in which he had become, so to
speak, an eponym of Empire, has better witnesses than grave
documents. A rhyming poet sings[197] :—
 'Quanta sit potentia vel laus Friderici
Cum sit patens omnibus, non est opus dici;
Qui rebelles lancea fodiens ultrici
Repræsentat Karolum dextera victrici.'

The diet at Roncaglia was a chorus of gratulations over the re-

establishment of order by the destruction of the dens of unruly
burghers.
This fair sky was soon clouded. From her
Victory of the
quenchless ashes uprose Milan; Cremona,
Lombard league.
scorning old jealousies, helped to rebuild what she
had destroyed, and the confederates, committed to an all but
hopeless strife, clung faithfully together till on the field of Legnano
the Empire's banner went down before the carroccio[198] of the free
city. Times were changed since Aistulf and Desiderius trembled at
the distant tramp of the Frankish hosts. A new nation had arisen,
slowly reared through suffering into strength, now at last by heroic
deeds conscious of itself. The power of Charles had overleaped
boundaries of nature and language that were too strong for his
successor, and that grew henceforth ever firmer, till they made the
Empire itself a delusive name. Frederick, though harsh in war, and
now balked of his most cherished hopes, could honestly accept a
state of things it was beyond his power to change: he signed
cheerfully and kept dutifully the peace of Constance, which left him
little but a titular supremacy over the Lombard towns.
At home no Emperor since Henry III had been so
Frederick as
German king.
much respected and so generally prosperous.
Uniting in his person the Saxon and Swabian
families, he healed the long feud of Welf and Waiblingen: his
prelates were faithful to him, even against Rome: no turbulent rebel
disturbed the public peace. Germany was proud of a hero who
maintained her dignity so well abroad, and he crowned a glorious life
with a happy death, leading the van of Christian chivalry against the
Mussulman. Frederick, the greatest of the Crusaders, is the noblest
type of mediæval character in many of its shadows, in all its lights.
Legal in form, in practice sometimes almost absolute, the
government of Germany was, like that of other feudal kingdoms,
restrained chiefly by the difficulty of coercing refractory vassals. All
depended on the monarch's character, and one so vigorous and
popular as Frederick could generally lead the majority with him and
terrify the rest. A false impression of the real strength of his
prerogative might be formed from the readiness with which he was
obeyed. He repaired the finances of the kingdom, controlled the
dukes, introduced a more splendid ceremonial, endeavoured to exalt
the central power by multiplying the nobles of the second rank,
afterwards the 'college of princes,' and by trying to substitute the
civil law and Lombard feudal code for the old Teutonic customs,
different in every province. If not successful in this project, he fared
better with another. Since Henry the Fowler's day
The German cities.
towns had been growing up through Southern and
Western Germany, especially where rivers offered
facilities for trade. Cologne, Treves, Mentz, Worms, Speyer,
Nürnberg, Ulm, Regensburg, Augsburg, were already considerable
cities, not afraid to beard their lord or their bishop, and promising
before long to counterbalance the power of the territorial oligarchy.
Policy or instinct led Frederick to attach them to the throne,
enfranchising many, granting, with municipal institutions, an
independent jurisdiction, conferring various exemptions and
privileges; while receiving in turn their good-will and loyal aid, in
money always, in men when need should come. His immediate
successors trode in his steps, and thus there arose in the state a
third order, the firmest bulwark, had it been rightly used, of imperial
authority; an order whose members, the Free Cities, were through
many ages the centres of German intellect and freedom, the only
haven from the storms of civil war, the surest hope of future peace
and union. In them national congresses to this day sometimes meet:
from them aspiring spirits strive to diffuse those ideas of Germanic
unity and self-government, which they alone have kept alive. Out of
so many flourishing commonwealths, four[199] have been spared by
foreign conquerors and faithless princes. To the primitive order of
German freemen, scarcely existing out of the towns, except in
Swabia and Switzerland, Frederick further commended himself by
allowing them to be admitted to knighthood, by restraining the
licence of the nobles, imposing a public peace, making justice in
every way more accessible and impartial. To the south-west of the
green plain that girdles in the rock of Salzburg, the gigantic mass of
the Untersberg frowns over the road which winds up a long defile to
the glen and lake of Berchtesgaden. There, far up among its
limestone crags, in a spot scarcely accessible to human foot, the
peasants of the valley point out to the traveller the black mouth of a
cavern, and tell him that within Barbarossa lies amid his knights in
an enchanted sleep[200], waiting the hour when the ravens shall
cease to hover round the peak, and the pear-tree blossom in the
valley, to descend with his Crusaders and bring back to Germany the
golden age of peace and strength and unity. Often in the evil days
that followed the fall of Frederick's house, often when tyranny
seemed unendurable and anarchy endless, men thought on that
cavern, and sighed for the day when the long sleep of the just
Emperor should be broken, and his shield be hung aloft again as of
old in the camp's midst, a sign of help to the poor and the
oppressed.
 CHAPTER XII.

IMPERIAL TITLES AND PRETENSIONS.

The era of the Hohenstaufen is perhaps the fittest point at which to

turn aside from the narrative history of the Empire to speak shortly
of the legal position which it professed to hold to the rest of Europe,
as well as of certain duties and observances which throw a light
upon the system it embodied. This is not indeed the era of its
greatest power: that was already past. Nor is it conspicuously the
era when its ideal dignity stood highest: for that remained scarcely
impaired till three centuries had passed away. But it was under the
Hohenstaufen, owing partly to the splendid abilities of the princes of
that famous line, partly to the suddenly-gained ascendancy of the
Roman law, that the actual power and the theoretical influence of
the Empire most fully coincided. There can therefore be no better
opportunity for noticing the titles and claims by which it announced
itself the representative of Rome's universal dominion, and for
collecting the various instances in which they were (either before or
after Frederick's time) more or less admitted by the other states of
Europe.
The territories over which Barbarossa would have declared his
jurisdiction to extend may be classed under four heads:—
First, the German lands, in which, and in which alone, the Emperor
was, up till the death of Frederick the Second, effective sovereign.
Second, the non-German districts of the Holy Empire, where the
Emperor was acknowledged as sole monarch, but in practice little
regarded.
Third, certain outlying countries, owing allegiance to the Empire, but
governed by kings of their own.
Fourth, the other states of Europe, whose rulers, while in most cases
admitting the superior rank of the Emperor, were virtually
independent of him.
Thus within the actual boundaries of the Holy
Limits of the
Empire were included only districts coming under
Empire.
the first and second of the above classes, i.e.
Germany, the northern half of Italy, and the kingdom of Burgundy or
Arles—that is to say, Provence, Dauphiné, the Free County of
Burgundy (Franche Comté), and Western Switzerland. Lorraine,
Alsace, and a portion of Flanders were of course parts of Germany.
To the north-east, Bohemia and the Slavic principalities in
Mecklenburg and Pomerania were as yet not integral parts of its
body, but rather dependent outliers. Beyond the march of
Brandenburg, from the Oder to the Vistula, dwelt pagan Lithuanians
or Prussians[201], free till the establishment among them of the
Teutonic knights.
Hungary had owed a doubtful allegiance since the
Hungary.
days of Otto I. Gregory VII had claimed it as a fief
of the Holy See; Frederick wished to reduce it
completely to subjection, but could not overcome the reluctance of
his nobles. After Frederick II, by whom it was recovered from the
Mongol hordes, no imperial claims were made for so many years
that at last they became obsolete, and were confessed to be so by
the Constitution of Augsburg, A.D. 1566[202].
Under Duke Misico, Poland had submitted to Otto
Poland.
the Great, and continued, with occasional revolts,
to obey the Empire, till the beginning of the Great
Interregnum (as it is called) in 1254. Its duke was present at the
election of Richard, A.D. 1258. Thereafter Primislas called himself
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookname.com