In the meantime powerful opponents sprung up in this newly-formed world.  The Latin race grew up by degrees out of the admixture of the Germans with the Roman world and the nations subdued by them, and separated itself from the Germans, who kept themselves pure on the north of the Alps and in the districts of Scandinavia.  At the same time the idea of the Universal Empire, which the Ancient World had embraced, continued to flourish.

In the East the Byzantine Empire lasted until A.D. 1453.  In the West, however, the last Roman Emperor had been deposed by Odoacer in 476.  Italy had fallen into the hands of the East Goths and Lombards successively.  The Visigoths had established their dominion in Spain, and the Franks and Burgundians in Gaul.

A new empire rose from the latter quarter.  Charles the Great, with his powerful hand, extended the Frankish Empire far beyond the boundaries of Gaul.  By the subjugation of the Saxons he became lord of the country between the Rhine and the Elbe; he obtained the sovereignty in Italy by the conquest of the Lombards, and finally sought to restore the Western Roman Empire.  He was crowned Emperor in Rome in the year 800.  His successors clung to this claim; but the Frankish Empire soon fell to pieces.  In its partition the western half formed what afterwards became France, and the East Frankish part of the Empire became the later Germany.  While the Germans in the West Frankish Empire, in Italy and Spain, had abandoned their speech and customs, and had gradually amalgamated with the Romans, the inhabitants of the East Frankish Empire, especially the Saxons and their neighbouring tribes, maintained their Germanic characteristics, language, and customs.  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.