oms. A powerful
German [A] kingdom arose which renewed the claims of Charles the Great to
the Western Roman Empire. Otto the Great was the first _German_ King who
took this momentous step. It involved him and his successors in a
quarrel with the Bishops of Rome, who wished to be not only Heads of the
Church, but lords of Italy, and did not hesitate to falsify archives in
order to prove their pretended title to that country.

[Footnote A: German (Deutsch=diutisk) signifies originally "popular,"
opposed to "foreign"--_e.g._, the Latin Church dialect. It was first
used as the name of a people, in the tenth century A.D.]

The Popes made good this right, but they did not stop there. Living in
Rome, the sacred seat of the world-empire, and standing at the head of a
Church which claimed universality, they, too, laid hold in their own way
of the idea of universal imperium. The notion was one of the boldest
creations of the human intellect--to found and maintain a
world-sovereignty almost wholly by the employment of spiritual powers.

Naturally these Papal pretensions led to feuds with the Empire. The
freedom of secular aspirations clashed with the claims of spiritual
dominion. In the portentous struggle of the two Powers for the
supremacy, a struggle which inflicted heavy losses on the German Empire,
the Imperial cause was worsted. It was unable to mould the widely
different and too independent subdivisions of the empire into a
homogeneous whole, and to crush the selfish particularism of the
estates. The last Staufer died on the scaffold at Naples under the axe
of Charles of Anjou, who was a vassal of the Church.

The great days of the German-Roman Empire were over. The German power
lay on the ground in fragments. A period of almost complete anarchy
followed. Dogmatism and lack of patriotic sentiment, those bad
characteristics of the German people, contributed to extend this
destruction to the economic sphere. The intellectual life of the German
people deteriorated equally. At the time when the Imperial power was
budding and under the rule of the highly-gifted Staufers, German poetry
was passing through a first classical period. Every German country was
ringing with song; the depth of German sentiment found universal
expression in ballads and poems, grave or gay, and German idealism
inspired the minnesingers. But with the disappearance of the Empire
every string was silent, and even the plastic arts could not rise above
the