Part 857

The new feudal empire, constituted by the Crusaders and the Venetians, after their conquest of Constantinople, and having the great and venerable but half ruined capital of the Byzantines for its seat, received the name of the Empire of Romania. The reign of its first emperor, the excellent Baldwin of Flanders, was brought to a tragical end in little more than a year from his coronation. Summoned to quell a revolt at Adrianople, he was attacked by the king of Bulgaria, defeated, taken prisoner and murdered within a year by his savage captor. He was succeeded on the throne by his brother Henry, a capable, energetic and valiant prince; but all the ability and all the vigor of Henry could not give cohesion and strength to an empire which was false in its constitution and predestined to decay. On Henry's death, without children (A. D. 1216), his sister Yoland's husband, Peter of Courtenay, a French baron, was elected emperor; but that unfortunate prince, on attempting to reach Constantinople by a forced march through the hostile Greek territory of Epirus, was taken captive and perished in an Epirot prison. His eldest son, Philip of Namur, wisely refused the imperial dignity; a younger son, Robert, accepted it, and reigned feebly until 1228, when he died. Then the venerable John de Brienne, ex-king of Jerusalem, was elected emperor-regent for life, the crown to pass on his death to Baldwin of Courtenay, a young brother of Robert. "John de Brienne died in 1237, after living to witness his empire confined to a narrow circuit round the walls of Constantinople. Baldwin II. prolonged the existence of the empire by begging assistance from the Pope and the king of France; and he collected the money necessary for maintaining his household and enjoying his precarious position, by selling the holy relics preserved by the Eastern Church [such, for example, as the crown of thorns, the bonds, the sponge and the cup of the crucifixion, the rod of Moses, etc.]. He was fortunate in finding a liberal purchaser in St. Louis. … At length, in the year 1261, a division of the Greek army [of the empire of Nicæa] surprised Constantinople, expelled Baldwin, and put an end to the Latin power, without the change appearing to be a revolution of much importance beyond the walls of the city."

See GREEK EMPIRE OF NICÆA: A. D. 1204-1261

_G. Finlay, History of Greece from its Conquest by the Crusaders, chapter 4._

In the last days of the sham empire, Baldwin II. maintained his court "by tearing the copper from the domes of the public buildings erected by the Byzantine emperors, which he coined into money, and by borrowing gold from Venetian bankers, in whose hands he placed his eldest son Philip as a pledge."

_G. Finlay, History of the Byzantine and Greek Empires, from 716 to 1453, book 4, chapter 1, section 3 (volume 2)._

ALSO IN: _E. Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 61._

For an account of the creation of the Empire of Romania.

See BYZANTINE EMPIRE: A. D. 1204-1205.

ROMANOFFS, Origin of the dynasty of the.

See RUSSIA: A. D. 1533-1682.

ROMANS, King of the.

Henry II.,—St. Henry by canonization—the last of the German emperors of the House of Saxony (A. D. 1002-1024), abstained from styling himself "Emperor," for some years, until he had gone to Rome and received the imperial crown from the hands of the Pope. Meantime he invented and assumed the title of King of the Romans. His example was followed by his successors. The King of the Romans in later history was Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire in embryo.

_S. A. Dunham, History of the Germanic Empire, book 1, chapter 2 (volume 1)._

"It was not till the reign of Maximilian that the actual coronation at Rome was dispensed with, and the title of Emperor taken immediately after the election."

_H. Hallam, The Middle Ages, chapter 3, part 1._

ROMANUS, Pope, A. D. 897-898.

Romanus I. (colleague of Constantine VII.), Emperor in the East (Byzantine, or Greek), 919-944.

Romanus II., Emperor in the East (Byzantine, or Greek), 959-963.

Romanus III., Emperor in the East (Byzantine, or Greek), 1028-1034.

Romanus IV., Emperor in the East (Byzantine, or Greek), A. D. 1067-1071.

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A Logical Outline of Roman History

IN WHICH THE DOMINANT CONDITIONS AND INFLUENCES ARE DISTINGUISHED BY COLORS.

Physical or material. (orange) Social and political. (green) Intellectual, moral and religious. (brown)

Geographical position. (Orange)

Three Latin and Sabine tribes of an early day established their settlements on neighboring hills, by the banks of the Tiber, in the midland of Italy, which is the midland of the Mediterranean or midland sea. They were throned, as it were, at the center of the only wide dominion in which a virile and energetic civilization could rise in ancient times.

Patricians and Plebeians. (Green)

The union of these three tribes formed the patrician nucleus of Rome. Around them gathered another population of kindred blood, which acquired a certain footing of association with them, but not immediately on equal terms. The precedence and superiority of the primal families, in rank and in rights, was jealously maintained, and the later-coming plebs were received into a pseudo-citizenship which carried more burdens than privileges with it.

By what impulse of character, or through what favor of circumstance, at the beginning, this infant city-state grew masterful in war, over all its neighbors, none can tell. But as it did so, the sturdy plebeian populace which fought its battles resented more and more the greedy monopoly of offices and of conquered lands to which the patricians clung, and a struggle between classes occurred which shaped the domestic politics of Rome for more than two centuries.

B. C. 509, Founding of the Republic. B. C. 492, Tribunes o£ the Plebs.

Before that contest came to the surface of history, the oligarchy of the city had cast out the kings which were its early chiefs, and had put two yearly-chosen consuls in their place, thus founding the great Roman Republic, with a purely aristocratic constitution. Then the battle of the plebs for equality of rights and powers was promptly opened, and the long, significant process of the democratizing of the state began. By their first victory the commons seemed, for their own leadership and defense, a remarkable magistracy, protected by sanctities and armed with powers which never have been used in government elsewhere, before or since. With that great tribunician authority, invincible when capably and boldly wielded, they won their way, step by step, to equality in the high offices and sacred colleges of the state; to legislative equality in their assembly; to legality of intermarriage with the patrician class; and to participation in the public lands.

B. C. 480-275. Conquest of Italy. B. C. 264-202. Punic wars B. C. 214-146. Expanding Dominion.

But while plebs and patricians thus strove with each other at home, they were united against their neighbors in many wars, which seldom turned to their disadvantage. Æquians, Volscians, Etruscans, Latin allies, Samnites, Gauls, Greeks of south Italy, yielded in turn to their arms, until the whole Italian peninsula had been brought under Roman rule. Then followed intrusion in Sicily, collision with Carthage in that island, and the half century of Punic wars, which tried the Republic to the extremity of its powers, but which left it with no rival in the Mediterranean world, From that time the career of Roman conquest was rapidly pursued in widening fields. Sicily, Spain, Greece, Macedonia, Asia Minor, Southern Gaul, Northern Africa, submitted as provinces to the proconsuls of Rome.

Corruption. (brown)

But the health of the commonwealth waned as its greatness waxed. It was corrupted by the spoils of conquest and the streams of tribute money that flowed from three continents into its hands. It was leprous in its whole system with the infection of slavery.

Social and Political Degeneration. (green)

A middle class had practically disappeared. Freemen had been driven from industrial callings by servile competition; the small farms of rural Rome had been swallowed up in great slave worked estates; public lands had been drawn by one trick of law or another, into private hands. The greater mass of the common people had degenerated to a worthless mob. The democratic power which their ancestors won still belonged to them, but they had lost the sense and the spirit to exercise it, except fitfully and threateningly, for purposes that were generally base. A new nobility had risen out of the plebeian ranks; the senate, reinforced by it, and helped by the exigencies of the long period of war, had recovered control of government, keeping ascendancy over the mob by political arts and bribes.

B. C. 133-121. The Gracchi. B. C. 90-88. The Social War, B. C. 88-45. Civil Wars.

Thus came the fatal time when demagogues played with the passions of that fickle mob which bore the awful sovereignty of Rome in its keeping; and when patriots were forced to be as demagogues, if they sought to lift Roman citizenship from its muddy degradation. In the undertakings of the Gracchi, perhaps something of both demagogue and patriot was combined; but what they did only shook the decaying political fabric and unsettled it more. The extension of Roman citizenship to the Italian allies, which Caius Gracchus contended for, and which might have grounded the Republic on broad bases of nationality, was yielded in the next generation, but too late, and after a ruinous war. From the embers of that fiery Social War broke the flames of civil strife in which the old constitution was finally consumed. Marius, Sulla, Pompeius, Cæsar, were distinguished among its destroyers; Cicero and Cato earned their immortality in its defense.

B. C. 45-A. D. 486, The Empire.

By the genius of Cæsar a new sovereignty—an imperial autocracy—was founded, on the ruins of the shattered Republic. By the shrewdness of his wise nephew, Octavius, its enduring organization was shaped. The mighty fabric of the Roman Empire which then arose, to dominate the world for centuries, and to dominate the history of the world perhaps forever, owed its greatness altogether to the effective organization of government which it embodied. It inherited all the corruptions and diseases in society which had sickened and destroyed the Republic; but it extinguished factions at the seat of power, established authority there, and perfected a radiating mechanism of provincial administration such as had not been known in human experience before. Hence, emperors might be madmen or fiends or fools, as many among them were, and Rome might be a sink of all vices and miseries, as it commonly was, and the whole Empire might be grievously oppressed, as it seldom failed to be; but the working of the administrative system went on, with little disturbance or change,—so mighty and irresistible in its machinery that it seemed to mankind like a part of the natural world, and they lost the ability to think of any different political state.

Christianity. (brown)

Christianity, springing up in Judæa within the first century of the Empire, spread through and around it like an interlacing vine,—sweet and wholesome in its early fruits, strong as a bond, powerful as a regenerating influence. But when the ecclesiasticism of a politically fashioned Church had been grafted on the Christian vine, it bore then the evil seeds of new corruption, new discord, new maladies for the Roman world.

A. D. 476. Fall of the Empire in the West. (green)

So there came, at last, a time when the long-enduring frame of Roman government could no longer bear the increasing dead-weight of social paralysis within and the increasing pressure of barbaric enemies from without. Of real vitality in the Empire there had been little for half-a-century before its fall in the West.

A. D. 476-1453. Survival of the Eastern Empire.

It survived in the East, because its Greek capital was more impregnable, and more commandingly placed for the continued centralization of a waning power; and because habit and routine have more potency in the Eastern than in the Western world.

A. D. 800. Revival of the Western Empire.

Even Western Europe obeyed again, after more than four centuries, the obstinate habit of homage to Rome, when it restored the Empire of the Cæsars, though less in fact than in name.

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ROME: Start--------

ROME: The beginning of the City-State and the origin of its name. The three tribes of original Romans who formed the Patrician order.- The Plebs and their inferior citizenship.

"About fourteen miles up from the mouth of the river Tiber, hills of moderate elevation rise on both banks of the stream, higher on the right, lower on the left bank. With the latter group there has been closely associated for at least two thousand five hundred years the name of the Romans. We are unable, of course, to tell how or when that name arose; this much only is certain, that in the oldest form of it known to us the inhabitants of the canton are called not Romans, but (by a shifting of sound that frequently occurs in the earlier period of a language, but fell very early in abeyance in Latin) Ramnians (Ramnes), a fact which constitutes an expressive testimony to the immemorial antiquity of the name. Its derivation cannot be given with certainty; possibly Ramnes may mean 'foresters,' or 'bushmen.' But they were not the only dwellers on the hills by the bank of the Tiber. In the earliest division of the burgesses of Rome a trace has been preserved of the fact that that body arose out of the amalgamation of three cantons once probably independent, the Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, into a single commonwealth—in other words, out of such a 'synoikismos' as that from which Athens arose in Attica. The great antiquity of this threefold division of the community is perhaps best evinced by the fact that the Romans, in matters especially of constitutional law, regularly used the forms tribuere ('to divide into three') and tribus ('a third') in the general sense of 'to divide' and 'a part,' and the latter expression (tribus) like our 'quarter,' early lost its original signification of number. … That the Ramnians were a Latin stock cannot be doubted, for they gave their name to the new Roman commonwealth, and therefore must have substantially determined the nationality of the united community. Respecting the origin of the Luceres nothing can be affirmed, except that there is no difficulty in the way of our assigning them, like the Ramnians, to the Latin stock. The second of these communities, on the other hand, is with one consent derived from Sabina. … And, as in the older and more credible traditions, without exception, the Tities take precedence of the Ramnians, it is probable that the intruding Tities compelled the older Ramnians to accept the 'synoikismos.' … Long, in all probability, before an urban settlement arose on the Tiber, these Ramnians, Tities, and Luceres, at first separate, afterwards united, had their stronghold on the Roman hills, and tilled their fields from the surrounding villages. The 'wolf festival' (Lupercalia), which the gens of the Quinctii celebrated on the Palatine hill, was probably a tradition from these primitive ages—a festival of husbandmen and shepherds, which more than any other preserved the homely pastimes of patriarchal simplicity, and, singularly enough, maintained itself longer than all the other heathen festivals in Christian Rome. From these settlements the later Rome arose."

_T. Mommsen, History of Rome, book 1, chapter 4._

"Rome did not seem to be a single city; it appeared like a confederation of several cities, each one of which was attached by its origin to another confederation. It was the centre where the Latins, Etruscans, Sabellians, and Greeks met. Its first king was a Latin; the second, a Sabine; the fifth was, we are told, the son of a Greek; the sixth was an Etruscan. Its language was composed of the most diverse elements. The Latin predominated, but Sabellian roots were numerous, and more Greek radicals were found in it than in any other of the dialects of Central Italy. As to its name, no one knew to what language that belonged. According to some, Rome was a Trojan word; according to others, a Greek word. There are reasons for believing it to be Latin, but some of the ancients thought it to be Etruscan. The names of Roman families also attest a great diversity of origin. … The effect of this mixing of the most diverse nations was, that from the beginning Rome was related to all the peoples that it knew. It could call itself Latin with the Latins, Sabine with the Sabines, Etruscan with the Etruscans, and Greek with the Greeks. Its national worship was also an assemblage of several quite different worships, each one of which attached it to one of these nations."

_Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City, book 5, chapter 2._