he piracies of a
disordered and unruled country; of the Dane and the Norman descents
upon the coasts of France, Germany, and England, and of their burning,
killing, and carrying into captivity; of the Saracens scouring the
Mediterranean coasts and sacking Rome itself; of the Wends and Czechs,
Hungarian bands who dashed in upon the eastern frontiers of the now
helpless and amorphous empire of Charlemagne, all the way from the
Baltic to the Danube; of the quarrel between Henry IV and that Jupiter
Ecclesiasticus, Hildebrand, or Gregory VII, who has left us his
biography in the single phrase, "To go to Canossa"; of Genghis Khan
and his Mongol hordes; of the long fight between popes and emperors
over the right of investiture; of Rudolph of Hapsburg; of the throwing
off of their allegiance to the Empire of the Kings of Burgundy,
Poland, Hungary, and Denmark; of the settlement of the question of the
legal right to elect the emperor by Charles IV, who fixed the power in
the persons of seven rulers: the King of Bohemia, the Count Palatine
of the Rhine, the Duke of Saxony, the Margraf of Brandenburg, and the
three Archbishops of Mayence, Treves, and Cologne; of the independence
of the great cities of northern Italy; of Otto the Great, whose first
wife was a granddaughter of Alfred the Great, and who was the real
founder of the Holy Roman Empire, in the sense that a German prince
rules over both Germany and Italy with the approval of the Pope, and
in the sense that he, a duke of Saxony, appropriates the western
empire (962), goes to Rome, delivers the Pope, subdues Italy, and
fixes the imperial crown in the name and nation of Germany; of the
beginning of that hope of a world-church and a world-state, of a
universal church and a universal kingdom, which took form in what is
known as the Holy Roman Empire; of that greatest of all forgeries, the
Donation of Constantine by the monk Isidor, discovered and revealed by
Cardinal Nicolaus, of Cura, in which it is pretended that Constantine
handed over Rome to the Pope and his successors forever, with all the
power and privileges of the Caesars, and of the effects of this, the
most successful lie ever told in the world, during the seven hundred
years it was believed: it is in these years of turbulence and change
that one must trace the threads of history, from the first appearance
of the Germans, down to the time when what is now Prussia became a
frontier post of the empire under the rule of