to use the clergy for purposes
of secular government, and to control the episcopacy as one of the
organs of secular administration. But the fact remains that a scheme
which rested on a Teutonic emperor and a Roman pontiff was already a
thing internally discordant, before these other and deeper dissensions
appeared to increase the discord.

Such were the bases on which the unity of mediaeval civilization had to
depend. There was a contracted world, which men could regard as a unity,
with a single centre of coherence. There was a low stage of economic
development, which on the one hand meant a general uniformity of life,
in fief and manor and town, and on the other hand meant a local
isolation, that needed, and in the unity of the Church found, some
method of unification. With many varieties of dialect, there was yet a
general identity of language, which made possible the development, and
fostered the dissemination, of a single and identical culture.
Nationalism, whether as an economic development, or as a way of life and
a mode of the human spirit, was as yet practically unknown. Races might
disagree; classes might quarrel; kings might fight; there was hardly
ever a national conflict in the proper sense of the word. The mediaeval
lines of division, it is often said, were horizontal rather than
vertical. There were different estates rather than different states. The
feudal class was homogeneous throughout Western Europe: the clerical
class was a single corporation through all the extent of Latin
Christianity; and the peasantry and the townsfolk of England were very
little different from the peasantry and the townsfolk of France. We have
to think of a general European system of estates rather than of any
balance of rival powers.

II

The unity which rested on these bases begins to appear, as a reality and
not only an idea, about the middle of the eleventh century, and lasts
till the end of the thirteenth. That unity, as we have seen, was
essentially ecclesiastical. It was the product of the Church: we may
almost say that it was the Church. Before 1050 the Catholic Church,
however universal in theory, had hardly been universal in fact. The
period of the Frankish, the Saxon, and the early Salian emperors had
been a period of what German writers call the _Landeskirche_. The power
of the Bishop of Rome had not yet been fully established; and the great
churches of Reims and Mainz and Milan were practically independent
ce