Past Elder : January 2015

Festschrift on the Anniversary of the Roman Empire, 16 January 27 BC.

Preface.

Judas H blogging Priest, who writes a blog post THIS long then calls it a Festschrift and starts it with a Preface?

Well, me. There's a little explanation then of how this post came about as a "textual note" at the end.

Introduction.

This is the keynote post, as it were, of this entire blog. Long as it is, this post demonstrated a simple point.

Which is, what we have in Western Christianity is simply the continuation of the state religion of the Western Roman Empire and in Eastern Christianity the continuation of the sl religion of the Eastern Roman Empire. Both of them the continuation of the state church created mutually by both halves of the Roman Empire in the Edict of Thessalonica in 380. The reformation of the faith and church to its true self would then need to happen outside the former empire, which it did in the Lutheran Reformation, originating in Germany, restoring the faith and church of Jesus Christ from its "Babylonian Captivity" while retaining those later developments that do not contradict the Gospel, and not mistaking some of the former for the latter and rejecting them, as did the later Reformation.

Plus some pretty amazing stuff that you'd think was a sensational novel but it's what happened, and, explains why and what things are now.

This post will examine this development in fifteen sections.

I. The Founding of the Roman Empire on 16 January, 27 BC.
II. Diocletian Splits the Empire into East and West, July 285.
III. Constantine, 306.
IV. Constantine is Emperor both East and West, 325,
V. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Opens New State Religion, 380.
VI. Who Is Damasus?
VII. The New State Religion, The Catholic Church, Tries To Shore Things Up. Jerome.
VIII. Elsewhere in 380, The New Church Gets A New Guy Named Gus.
IX. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Closes Old State Religion, 392/3.
X. Western Empire Collapses in 476, Eastern Empire Continues to 1453.
XI. West Makes Comeback As Holy Roman Empire, 800, Lasts Until 1806.
XII. Successor Empires East And West Last Until World War I.
XIII. Where Are They Now?
XIV. Summation nostra aetate, In Our Time.
XV. Conclusion.

I. The Founding of the Roman Empire on 16 January, 27 BC.

Rome was founded from early settlements on 21 April 753 BC by the twin brothers Romulus (hence the name) and Remus. Romulus was the first of seven kings, the remaining six being elected. He divided the men into those fit for military service and those not, then from those not, he established the Senate as an advisory council of 300 men, 100 from each of the three Roman tribes, the Ramnes or Latins, the Tities or Sabines, and the Luceres or Etruscans, from the best men as he saw it. The word senate comes from the same root as senile, btw, meaning old man, take that as you will, and he called its members patres, fathers, their descendants being patricians. He also established a legislative body, the Comitia Curiata. If you're hearing modern English words committee and curia, you're right: it literally means a co-meeting of an assembly of men. There were 30 curiae, 10 for each tribe. The Senate proposed the new king to the Comitia Curiata, then the people voted and if successful the candidate would be determined by an augur to see if it was God's will, and if so he would then ask the Curia to grant him imperium, rule. The new king (rex) was pretty much everything -- top executive, lawmaker, judge, and king of sacred rites or rex sacrorum.

In 510 BC, the Senate and people of Rome changed this and established Res publica romana, the Roman Republic. The Senate governed, and the king's power was split, held by two consules (singular, consul) for a one year term, and the rex sacrorum as well as other chief priests and the virgins of Vesta were run by a new office, pontifex maximus, the supreme bridge builder literally, and in emergencies a dictator could be chosen for a six month term. Yes, there's still a pontifex maximus in Rome.

Some consider the Roman Empire to have begun with Julius Caesar's appointment by the Senate as dictator in perpetuity in 44 BC. Julius accepted this position in the Temple of Venus Genetrix, and the denarius was minted with his image and "dictator perpetuus" on one side and the goddess Ceres -- goddess of growth, agriculture and maternal love, the Roman version of the Greek Demeter -- and the title "augur pontifex maximus", high priest of the college of pontiffs, the highest position in the Roman religion, on the other. He did not rise to accept his position, and Senators fearful that he would make himself king assassinated him in the Senate on the Ides, aka the 15th, of March 44 BC.

Others consider the Roman Empire to have begun 2 September 31 BC when Octavian defeated his rival Marc Antony and his ally Cleopatra of Egypt at the naval Battle of Actium in the Ionian Sea, and also ordered the execution of Cleopatra's son Caesarion, who was 17 and was held to be, and very likely was, the son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar, though Julius had named Octavian, actually his grand nephew, his son and heir.

Others yet, and these are the guys who are right, consider the Empire to have begun with the Senate giving Octavian, or Octavius, the title augustus (honoured, or august, one) on 16 January 27 BC. With any rival claimants dead by suicide, execution or military defeat, Caesar Augustus, Octavian, was the undisputed ruler, and became pontifex maximus in 13 BC. And the rest is history, as they say.

Caesar Augustus was the first real Roman Emperor, though for some time the facade of the Roman Republic continued. Despite frontier fighting with those outside the Empire, the Empire itself enjoyed a peace, the pax augustana or pax romana, that would last from 27 BC to 180 AD, attaining its greatest extent under the emperor Trajan (98-117).

But by the third century, things became unworkable. The sheer size of the empire, the lack of any clear method of succession of power, and consequently frequent civil war, and the inability of the military to preserve internal order since they were concentrated on the borders to preserve external order, which in turn became impossible to maintain against invaders, about destroyed the empire.

II. Diocletian Splits the Empire into East and West, July 285.

Diocletian put a band aid on things, and in July 285 in Milan, then called Mediolanum, split the Empire in two, making his friend and fellow general officer Maximian first as "Caesar" of the West, then on 1 April 286 Maximus as "Augustus" of the Western half too, and Diocletian remained "Augustus" of the Eastern part. Diocletian set up Nicomedia, in modern Turkey, as the Eastern Roman capital in 286, and Milan as the Western Roman capital in 293, though Maximian largely ruled from Trier, then called Augusta Treverorum, in modern Germany. However, Maximian would commit suicide on Constantine's (we'll get to him) orders, and Diocletian it seems committed suicide over that, so retirement wasn't so good.

Diocletian also considered the expansion of Christianity a threat to the state and launched possibly the most violent persecutions in history, certainly the most violent since Nero.

The arrangement yielded no new pax romana, although the persecutions would end with Galerius in 311. The underlying problems remained. Running such a far flung empire would be a big job to-day, but then there was no Internet, no TV, no radio, no phones, no air travel, no railroads, no motor vehicles, etc. The split of the empire to manage it better resulted in an arrangement called the Tetrarchy: each half would have its Augustus, with a Caesar as an assistant. Diocletian was the last Emperor of an undivided Roman Empire. Going forward, Diocletian was Augustus in the East, with Galerius the Caesar, and Maximian was Augustus in the West, with a guy named Constantius the Caesar.

On 1 May 305, Diocletian and Maximian retired as Emperors simultaneously in Milan and Nicomedia -- the first to leave power voluntarily. This left the Caesars to become the Augusti, Galerius ruling the East and Constantius ruling the West.

Now, this Constantius had this wife Helena. Well, maybe. I mean, he had this Helena, but whether she was wife or concubine is not documented. Anyway, they had this son in 272 and he was named Constantine. But, in 293 when Diocletian named Constantius as Western Caesar, part of the deal was he divorce Helena and marry Theodora, the step-daughter of Maximian, the Augustus whose Caesar he was to be. Which he did. Helena did not remarry and lived afterward in obscurity, though her son Constantine was very devoted to her, and also wanted to become Caesar, but a military officer named Severus got the nod instead at the insistence of Galerius, the Eastern Augustus.

III. Constantine, 306.

Constantine served with his father's military campaigns in England, where he was trying to solve part of the mess described above, which historians call the Third Century Crisis. Their base of operations was a town called Eboracum.

Eboracum was the name of a city founded by the Romans in AD 71 in England. The Romans began conquering what is now England in AD 43. A group called the Brigantes originally collaborated with the Romans but became more troublesome and eventually the Roman Ninth Legion under General Quintus Petillius Cerialis was sent to put and keep them in order. This accomplished, a fort was established and given a Latinised version of the native Celtic name for the place, "field of yew trees". General Cerialis was named Governor of Britain by Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled from 69 until he died in 79, and was himself a distinguished military officer and had participated in the original Roman invasion in 43. Eboracum was a centre of Roman power in England for some time to come.

When Constantius died there on 25 July 306, his army immediately proclaimed Constantine his son Augustus, but, Galerius said Severus had the job. Constantine notified Galerius, and Galerius got so mad he about burned the portrait Constantine had sent. In the end, he gave him the title Caesar, not Augustus, which still went to Severus.

Constantine conquered his way back toward Rome, showing an ever more clear disgust for the "barbarians" beyond the Empire's frontiers. In Rome he was put down as the son of a harlot, a reference to Helena's unclear status, and Maxentius, son of Maximian, claimed the title Emperor. Maximian proposed a deal -- his daughter Fausta would be Constantine's wife, though he already had one, but hey, and he gets the title Augustus and will lay off Maxentius.

Constantine took the deal, dumped his wife and married Fausta in Augusta Treverorum (Trier) in 307. The next year Galerius was so concerned about the West's inability to settle down that he called a council with himself, Maximian and the retired Diocletian, whose compromises no-body accepted. By 310 Maximian was in open revolt, said Constantine was dead, took back the royal purple, but the army remained true to Constantine, who was of course very much alive. In July 310, captured at Massilia (now Marseille, France), Maximian hanged himself. At first Constantine said it was a personal tragedy, but then said it was the result of a conspiracy to kill him and he was offered suicide rather than be tried and executed, then issued a damnatio memoriae, a damnation of memory, sort of the original airbrushing out of the photos, where all coins, statues, inscriptions etc with a person's name were defaced or destroyed, against him.

When Diocletian, in retirement in a palace he had built in his native Dioclea (hence his name) near Salona, Dalmatia (modern Split, Croatia), heard of this he went into a deep despondency, and seeing the Tetrarchy once hailed as bringing order to the whole world in ruins through the actions of Constantine and his longtime friend and colleague Maximian dead, he died on 3 December 311, most likely by suicide too. So retirement didn't work out too well for either retired emperor.

This though left Constantine without the prop of legitimacy through Maximian, whose son Maxentius was ready to take up the fight, and on 25 July Constantine began to appeal to a supposed ancestry and a vision from Apollo as the authority for his rule rather than the tetrarchy and councils. Constantine won over Maxentius' forces throughout Italy and took Rome.

Constantine went to Milan, the Western Roman capital, to forge an alliance with the new guy in the East, Licinius. That was the marriage of Constantine's sister to Licinius. Supposedly this meeting is the origin of the Edict of Milan, granting tolerance to Christianity. Actually, it wasn't an edict, wasn't from Milan and wasn't the granting of tolerance. Galerius had done that just before his death in 311, and the Edict of Milan is actually a letter to the governor of Bithynia, a Roman province in what is now Turkey containing a town named Nicaea, by Licinius granting tolerance to all religions and restoration to Christians of property taken from them during persecutions, and signed by both emperors. The "Edict" was more of a middle ground from tolerance per se into a favoured status with special provisions for Christians, leading to the eventual proclamation of Christianity as the state religion.

But the alliance fell apart. War broke out between the two, Constantine in the West and Licinius in the East, and by 320 Licinius began persecuting Christians again, allied with Goths of the native pagan religions, and by 324 full scale civil war was underway. Constantine's forces won, sporting a symbol said to have been revealed to him, the labarum, or chi-rho. Licinius surrendered, on a deal that his life be spared, but Constantine had him killed the next year anyway.

IV. Constantine is Emperor both East and West, 325.

That next year, 325, was a big one. From that point on, Constantine was the emperor both West and East. He began to rebuild Byzantium, close by Nicomedia, as the second or New Rome (Nova Roma), later renaming it Constantinople, Constantinopolis actually, meaning Constantine's City, imagine that. The ceremony of dedication on 11 May 330 was partly Christian and partly pagan -- and you thought Yankee Stadium was syncretism! He also, though not a bishop, not a priest, not even a baptised Christian, called a church council to settle correct theology about Jesus against primarily the Arians. Well, it just might have helped him politically to have one religion for his realm too. You get to do that when you rule your known world.

To top that, next year in 326 he did something even more amazing than calling a council of the Christian church when you're not a Christian -- that is, if you believe Baptism is a means of grace uniting one to the life of Christ rather than through a personal decision -- namely, he had his son and wife killed, with his mother's prodding. Exactly what that was all about will probably never be known, but it was one of two things. Supposedly Fausta his wife was raped by Crispus his son (how classically Greek) or the two were having an affair, and either he discovered this and had them both killed, or, Fausta lied that it happened to keep Crispus, who was not her son, from being named emperor over her sons, he believed it and had his son killed, then found out she lied and had her killed. Either way, wow.

Days Of Our Lives and then some more. Crispus was the son of Constantine and his wife Minervina, whom Constantine divorced to marry Fausta to get on with his upward career mobility. And here's Helena his mother, who got dumped by gramps Constantius for exactly the same reason. How bizarre is that? Fausta won though -- Crispus was executed but her three sons all became Roman emperors. Oddly, none of them revoked the damnatio memoriae of her enacted by Constantine. At any rate, the whole thing changed Constantine forever, and he never set foot in the Western Empire again.

So he who was first proclaimed emperor in a far flung northwest outpost of the Western Empire by an authority that had no authority to do it, the army, ends up solidifying the Roman Empire in the East as the West slowly crumbles. By 337 Constantine was wearing out from being Great and all, and he finally sought Baptism on 22 May just before he died, from not one of the victorious Trinitarians at the Council of Nicaea he called, but from Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, long a court favourite despite a brief exile and chief apologist for Arius. Really. I'm not making this up.

Not to mention Constantine retained the title pontifex maximus, the title of Roman emperors as head of the pre-Christian Roman pagan state religion priesthood. Maybe that's why there's no pope in the East. Well, actually there are "popes" in the East, but in the pontifex sense, not in the pontifex maximus sense of the one in Rome. After Constantine's death, the Western Empire was split between two of his sons, and the East went to his middle son, all three having variants of his name. Constant power struggle from within and invasions from without destabilised everything.

Eventually, a Spanish military officer in the Roman army named Theodosius became Augustus/Emperor in the East in August 378 by Gratian the Western Emperor after Valens the Eastern Emperor was killed in battle. Later, when Valentinian II, the remaining Western ruler, was found hanged on 15 May 392 -- the preacher at his funeral in the Western capital Milan, the bishop thereof, who had been its territorial governor before he changed jobs, Ambrose, as in "Saint" Ambrose, steering clear of whether it was murder or suicide -- he became Emperor of both East and West, the last to do that. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.

V. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Opens A New State Religion, 380.

While the end of the persecutions was welcome per se, the favoured status of Christianity also transformed the religion from one for whose truth one would rather die than betray to a religion one joined for political and social gain. The transformation of Christianity's status was complete on 27 February 380, when the Eastern Emperor Theodosius, in concert with his Western co-Emperor counterparts Gratian and Valentinian II, issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which declared that Nicene Christianity is the official state religion of the Roman Empire overall, that all subjects of the Empire must hold this faith as delivered from the Apostles to Rome and preserved by then current Pope Damasus I and then current Bishop of Alexandria Peter, that these alone shall be called "Catholic Christians", because they alone would be of the catholic, meaning universal, faith of the Empire, and that all others are heretics and not even churches, subject to such punishment as the Empire should choose to visit upon them. He deposed some bishops and appointed others in the new state religion, and ended state subsidy for the former state religion. Goodbye my kingdom is not of this world, hello apostolic succession in communion with the Roman state pope. Goodbye catholic church, hello Catholic Church.

VI. Who Is Damasus?

So who's this Damasus dude in Rome? Man, papal elections just ain't what they used to be. Twice over actually. Once upon a time, they were a matter of the clergy and people of the area choosing a bishop, or overseer, with overseers from nearby areas confirming it. But by this time we have Constantine, and Christianity attaining respectable state-recognised status, and the Emperor confirmed newly elected bishops. That's helpful because sometimes more than one guy claimed to be elected, sometimes in more than one election!

That's what happened with Damasus. When Pope Liberius, whom the Emperor Constantine had thrown out of Rome, died on 24 September 366, one faction supported Ursinus, the previous pope's deacon, while another, which had previously supported a rival pope, Felix II, supported Damasus. The patrician class, the old noble families of Rome, supported Damasus, but the plebian class, the regular folks, and the deacons supported Ursinus. Each was elected, in separate elections. Some real apostolic succession there, oh yeah.

It gets worse. There was outright rioting between supporters of the two, each side killing the other, so bad that the prefects of the city had to be called on to restore order. Damasus got formally recognised, and then his supporters commenced a slaughter of 137 of Ursinus' supporters, right in a church. Damasus was accused of murder, and hauled up on charges before a later prefect, but, being the favourite of the wealthy class, they bought the support of the Emperor and got Damasus off. He was known as Auriscalpius Matronarum, the ladies' ear scratcher.

Damasus was "pope" from 366 until he died on 11 December 384. It was during this "papacy", we have to remember to really get what was going on here, the Emperors East and West made the church as headed by Damasus, and Peter in Antioch, the official state church and the one recognised as "catholic", in the Edict of Thessalonica on 27 February 380. That date, and not the words "tu es Petrus" in the Gospel, not Pentecost, or any sort of succession from the Apostles but simply from the Roman Empire, is the birthday of the Catholic Church, as distinct from the catholic church. It was also during Damasus' papacy that the Emperor Gratian. one of the signatories to the Edict of Thessalonica, refused the traditional title of pontifex maximus, which then became associated with the bishop of Rome as the chief priest of the Roman state religion. In sum, this is the era of the beginning of the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (Babylon of course being a figure for Rome).

VII. The New State Religion, The Catholic Church, Tries To Shore Things Up. Jerome.

In 382, Damasus called a guy named Jerome back to Rome to help him shape things up. What was being shaped up was the new Catholic Church, which by Imperial edict was now the only church entitled to the name, all others being heretics and deserving of such punishment as the Empire should choose to inflict and this "Catholic Church" the official state religion. The Western Roman Empire was falling apart and just decades away from going under, so, as with Constantine, a lot of this was politically motivated and had to do with staving that off.

So who's this Jerome dude? Jerome was born a pagan in a town called Stridon, which was in the Roman territory called Dalmatia. The town no longer exists because the Goths trashed it in 379, and no-body knows exactly where it was, except that it was in Dalmatia, which was more or less modern Croatia and Bosnia and Slovenia. As a young man he went to Rome to pursue classical education, and by his own account pursue the various extra-curricular activities often found in student life then as now. Somewhere along the line he converted to Christianity and was baptised.

After some years in Rome he set out for France, well, Gaul, and ended up in Trier. Man, everything happens in Trier, which is about the most magnificent and enchanting place it has been my good fortune to visit, ever, anywhere. Just the place itself blew me away when I was there and I didn't know even half of this stuff then. Anyway, here in this most wonderful place Jerome seems to have taken up theology. Then about 373 or so he sets out for what is now called the Middle East, particularly Antioch, in what is now Turkey and one of the oldest centres of Christianity. It was there that he came to give up secular learning altogether and focus on the Bible, learning Hebrew from Jewish Christians, and, apparently seized with remorse for his past behaviour, got into all sorts of ascetic penitential practices. Always a danger -- the Good News just isn't news enough, gotta have works in there to really be forgiven and saved!

But in 382 he goes back to Rome again, this time as assistant to Pope Damasus I. Jerome was no slouch at matronly ear tickling himself, and once back soon had a little group of wealthy patrician widows around him, whose money supported him, a Paula in particular. And he had this ascetic works-righteousness thing going, into which he got them all. Nothing like having lots of someone else's money to support you if you want a monastic ascetic life. Hell yes.

In fact, the daughter of Paula, a lively young woman named Blaesilla, after just four months of having to live this way, died! Yeah, died. On top of which Jerome tells Paula not to mourn her daughter. This got the Romans really pissed, there was an inquiry into just what was really going on between Jerome and Paula, and then when Damasus died in 384, with that support gone, Jerome was forced out of Rome!

So where's he go? Where else, the Eastern Empire, where they really get into all this monkery and fasting and stuff. Paula and her money follow. The whole sham of a works based sparse life funded by patrician wealthy-class money. There's some real apostolic stuff for you. Lemme tell ya, if somebody wants to convince you of their mistaking the physiological effects of self induced glucose denial for some sort of spiritual state of attainment, you'd be better off running right to the nearest McDonald's and ordering a double quarter pounder, which, if memory serves, is combo 4 on the menu. Personally I like Burger King or Arby's or our Nebraska favourite Runza better.

This sort of stuff is not self-denial, it's life denial. Utterly pathological. It is no curb whatever to excess and greed, but rather an equally odious extreme reaction to it, both extremes equally devoid of the Gospel altogether. It comes rather from an empire about to collapse under the tension of its classic past and Christian present and efforts to reconcile them from within, with huge civil unrest in its wake, and threats from without in the West. Which was bad enough, but in the East, which did not collapse for another thousand years or so, this nonsense continued unabated, which is equally bad. The opposite of greed and excess is not this pathological repression, but Judas H Priest, just eat a normal balanced diet and go about a life of use to God and your fellow Man, stay in your parish where you find everything that made the saints saints, the Word, the Word preached, the Sacrament, and your fellow Christians.

VIII. Elsewhere in 380, The New Church Gets A New Guy Named Gus.

A Roman citizen, from what are now called Berbers, named Augustine is teaching in Carthage in 380, seven years away from being baptised by the state bishop, Ambrose, of the state church in the state's Western capital by then, Milan. Remember, Emperor Diocletian, the last of an undivided Roman Empire, had made Milan, then called Mediolanum, the Western capital in 293 and Nicomedia, now Izmit Turkey, the Eastern capital in 286. And, btw, called his new provincial units diocese, after himself. A secular unit, not a church one, and the modern church diocese is but an echo of the religious part of the Roman Imperial state unit.

Constantine moved the Eastern capital to Byzantium, renamed it Constantinople, which is now Istanbul Turkey. The Roman Senate, however, still in Rome, was not shall we say comfortable with this new state religion in the two capitals of the Empire, and lots of academic disputes and apologetics on both sides went back and forth, but no violence. During this unsettled time Augustine gets appointed to the most prestigious professorship in his world, at the Western capital Milan in 384, and is all caught up in the swirling controversy between the old state religion and classic philosophy and the new state Catholic Church, just four years old.

He also gets caught up in his mother Monica's designs for his career. Now with a prestigious academic position, his longstanding relationship with a woman he never names but called "the one", of some 14 years complete with son, called Adeodatus, meaning "given by God", hasta go according to mom. So he caves and sends her away, she saying she will never be with another man, he finding a new concubine to tide him over until the proper social marriage his mom, "Saint" Monica, arranges with a then 11 year old girl, can happen. I'm not making this up!

And about concubines. Ain't what you think. A concubine in ancient Rome was simply a wife that Roman law forbade you to marry due to your or her social class. These marriages denied legality by Imperial law were rather common, and the church didn't come down on them since it wasn't the couple's fault they weren't legally married. Something to keep in mind when "the one" gets called concubine in the modern sense, their relationship passed off as merely lustful, and the son as "illegitimate".

No wonder the dude was confused! His whole world swirling in unsettled controversy and mom's running his life like a beauty pageant mom. And then, as he's all upset about his life, he has this really weird experience where he hears a kid's voice saying "Take, read" (the famous tolle, lege). Now what he was told to take and read you won't likely find in your local Christian bookstore, but was among the most widely read books, first in the Imperial Christian state church and then through the Middle Ages, being a Life of St Anthony of the Desert, written by St Athanasius about 360, the original in Greek but best known in a Latin translation made about ten or so years later.

Hoo-boy, old Tony. He was a wealthy Egyptian who became Christian at about age 34, so far so good, sold everything and took up with a local hermit. Tony in NO way was the "Founder of Monasticism", as religious hermits of various religions were common on the outskirts of cities; Philo the Jewish-Egyptian writer mentions them all, sharing the Platonic idea of having to get out of the world to get into an ideal. Pure Platonist Idealism. Sure glad Jesus didn't do that or let his Apostles do it either when they wanted to, but went back to Jerusalem where real life had things for them to do.

But old Tony went the other direction, and left even the outskirts for the desert itself to get away from it all to get into it all. But the crowds followed -- everybody loves an exotic "holy man" -- and Tony took on the more advanced cases of this mania and left the rest to his associates, a Christian Oracle of Delphi, which "guidance" was later variously collected as the Sayings of the Desert Fathers, or Apophthegmata, if you want a word to impress somebody in a combox or something.

Anyhoo, Gus reads this in 386, and on the Easter Vigil of 387, Ambrose baptises Gus and his son. The next year, 388, he determines to return home to North Africa. Which he did, but along the way both his mother and his son died, so he arrives alone in the world, and understandably unsure of himself once again. Next he sells the family stuff and gives the money away, except the house which he turns into a sort of lay monastery. I guess that's what you do when you read about dudes in the desert, rather than go through the grief and live on in the world of people.

Meanwhile, the struggling Roman Empire and its new state Catholic Church are on a roll. The Imperial state Catholic Church destroys the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390 and the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, in which same year Augustine was ordained presbyter, or priest, in the official state church, in 391 in Hippo, now Annaba, Algeria.

This mostly academic and political controversy, in which Gus' unsettled life had its context and of which it is typical, changed when Western Emperor Valentinian II was found hanged in his home on 16 May 392, as we saw above. His half brother and co-Emperor Gratian was already dead, killed 25 August 383 in Lyon France by forces of Roman generals who thought he was losing his grip. The official word was Valentinian was a suicide, but his wife and others though he was done in by his military power behind the throne, the Frank Arbogastes, and the Imperial Milan court church's bishop, Ambrose, as we saw left the question open, suicide being a no-no for a Christian Emperor held up as a hero.

IX. Theodosius, Last Emperor East and West, Closes Old State Religion, 392/3.

On 22 August 392, Arbogastes, who being a Frank and not Roman could not be Emperor, names a Roman Christian named Eugenius Western Emperor, who though Christian was sympathetic to traditional Roman religion and started replacing officials sympathetic to the Eastern Empire in the West. The Eastern Empire put off recognition of the new Western regime, and finally in January of 392 Theodosius declared his two-year-old son Honorius as Western Emperor and begins preparing an invasion of the Western Empire, which began in May 394 and concluded in the victory at The Frigidus 6 September 394. Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

Also in 392, Theodosius and his Roman Empire and its Catholic Church shut down the Eleusinian Mysteries. Huh? What the hell were they and why is shutting them down a big deal? The Eleusinian Mysteries were one of the two great foundational rituals of Rome dating actually from ancient Greece before it, the other being the Olympic Games (yeah, they get shut down too, but we'll get to that shortly).

The basis for the Eleusinian Mysteries was the story about Hades seeing Persephone out one day picking flowers, went nuts for her and took her away to, well, Hades, the realm of death, with the OK of Zeus, her dad. Her mom Demeter, aka Ceres by the Romans, goddess of life, therefore fertility and agriculture, went looking for her and abandoned her duties, causing famine and drought, and finally with the help of Zeus found her and thus ended the calamity of the first Winter with the first Spring. However, Persephone had to abide by certain terms. She had to spend four months with Hades in the Underworld, four months with Demeter, and the last four she could choose, and she chose Demeter. The four months with Hades are the hot, dry Greek Summer, prone to drought and forest fires, during which the saddened Demeter neglects her duties until Persephone comes back.

So what were The Mysteries? Nobody knows the details for sure. They were secret initiation rites into the deal about Demeter and Persephone, thought to unite the initiate with the gods, with divine power and a good outcome in the afterlife. Nobody knows exactly how they started, but they drew from all over, open to all, free and slave, male or female, as long as you hadn't murdered anyone and weren't a barbarian, which is not what you may think, it's someone who can't speak Greek and instead makes stupid sounds like bar-bar, literally. There were Greater and Lesser Mysteries, the Lesser being done every year around March, when Summer is just around the corner, and the Greater every five years in late Summer, when the Fall rains and planting come and the new year (in the local calendar) begins.

Next, in 393, Theodosius, his Roman Empire and its Catholic Church, shut down the Olympic Games? OK, what the hell were they and why was shutting them down a big deal?

The Olympic Games began in 776 BC. The Greek city states were almost constantly at war, but for the Games, there was peace. In addition to athletic qualification, one had to be male, of the free class, and Greek speaking to participate. There are several myths as to why the games began, but why the games ended is clear. The Emperor Theodosius I, aka Theodosius the Great, the last Emperor of both the Eastern and Western Roman Empire, outlawed them after the games of 393 AD as part of the establishment of Christianity as defined at the Council of Nicea as the state religion, as we saw.

This also ended a practical effect of the games -- time was counted in Olympiads, the four year interval between games, giving a unity to the various calendars of the city-states, and this of course ended with the games no longer being held. The site remained, however, until it was destroyed in an earthquake in the Sixth Century. In the 2004 modern Olympic Games, the shot put contest was held in the ancient stadium. What's a stadium? Where the stade (stadion) race is run, the original single event of the Olympics, a sprint of somewhere around 200 metres, the exact length unknown. Over time other events were added, and the games were one of the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the other being the Eleusinian Mysteries.

The Games of course have their modern version, though one no longer needs to be male or Greek speaking to participate. Or wait for Summer -- there's Winter Games now too! So we now can have something like neither the Greeks nor the entire ancient world ever had, the incomparable Katarina Witt. Beyond her many accomplishments in the Olympics and since, the free programme at the 1994 Winter Olympics to "Sag mir wo die Blumen sind" (Where Have All The Flowers Gone) was not only a stunning accomplishment of art and athletics, an expression of a Germany re-united from the latest of its many sad episodes throughout history, a message of peace and hope to Sarajevo, then torn by war and the site of her first Olympic gold medal, but, Sarajevo being the match for the fire that consumed the remnants of the Holy Roman Empire made from the remnants of the Roman Empire that had emerged from the Greek and Roman antiquity before it resulting in two horrific world wars and the emergence of the contemporary world from the ruins of all that, connects to and is expressive of the enduring human spirit through the entire march of events we are covering here.

You might say, this post is exactly about where the flowers went.

Theodosius, as we saw, shut down the Eleusinian Mysteries too the year before in 392 There were a few holdouts from the Nicene Christian end, but they were stomped out four years later by Alaric, King of the Goths, who was an Arian Christian. So, between Nicene and Arian Christianity and an earthquake, the more or less thousand year era of the Olympic Games and two thousand year era of the Eleusinian Mysteries came to an end.

And speaking of forest fires, in Persephone's four months with Hades, aka Summer, of 2007, massive forest fires nearly destroyed the site of the ancient Olympics, which hosted one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the twelve metre tall ivory and gold Statue of Zeus, but thanks to modern firefighting, unless you think Zeus relented to save what's left and let Persephone come back and then Demeter got active again, what's left is still left and made it through this most recent threat.

On 6 September 394 the Eastern Emperor Theodosius I defeated the Western Emperor Eugenius at the conclusion of the two-day Battle of The Frigidus. Judas, more stuff, what the hell is that? It's the conclusion of Theodosius' preparation to stamp out Western resistance the Edict of Thessalonica. The Frigidus is a river, the Latin name means "cold" as its English descendant "frigid" suggests. It is in northeastern Italy and Slovenia and is now called the Vipacco in Italian and the Vipava in Slovene, and of course I gotta tell ya it is called the Wipbach in modern German, or, as b and p get sort of interchangeable in German sometimes, the Wippach. At the end of which, remember, Arbogastes commits suicide and Eugenius is beheaded by the Catholic forces of Theodosius.

Right after that, the same year, 394, the Imperial state Catholic Church, still on a roll -- having destroyed the Temple of Apollo at the Oracle of Delphi in 390 and the Serapeum and Great Library in Alexandria in 391, the year Augustine was ordained a priest in the official church, and having ended the two great rituals of ancient Greece, the Eleusinian Mysteries in 392 and the Olympic Games after the ones in 393 -- puts out the fire considered essential to Rome's survival at the Temple of Vesta, and disbands the women who were personally selected by the pontifex maximus, when that meant the head of the traditional Roman religion rather than the head of the new state Catholic religion.

Hey, Vestal Virgins, I've heard of that! Well, there's more that just the pop culture reference and the jokes. The Temple of Vesta. So who was Vesta, why build her a temple and who did it. Vesta, though she resembles somewhat the Greek goddess Hestia, is a real Roman thing moreso than the Olympic Games and the Eleusinian Mysteries. Vesta is the goddess of hearth and home, but, not just one's own hearth and home, but the whole Roman thing too, and her sacred fire was the connexion to life itself, and the gods.

The original temple, called Aedes Vestae in Latin, was built by Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, from 715 to 673 BC. The fire was tended by women specially selected by the pontifex maximux and bound to celibacy for 30 years. One of the early ones, Rhea Silvia, according to Livy in Ab Urbe Condita -- which means "from the city (Rome, of course) having been founded" -- was found by the god of war Mars in the forest, had sex, and gave birth to the twins Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, but, as she wasn't supposed to be doing stuff like this, and when her uncle Amulius heard of it ordered a servant to kill the boys, but the servant instead put them in a basket in the River Tiber, whereupon they were discovered by a wolf, who, having just lost her own cubs, raised them.

So this whole thing goes right to the heart of Rome's self-concept, individually and corporately. To shut it down is to shut down Rome, people, city, empire, the works. So when Theodosius shut it down, what with his Catholic Church he himself proclaimed and all as the new Roman religion, this was either the end of everything, or a last step in the victory of the new religion over its pagan past.

Theodosius had started out fairly tolerant of pagans, whose support particularly among the ruling class he needed, but got himself excommunicated by St Ambrose, Bishop of Milan, in 390. His governor in Thessalonica had been assassinated, and he ordered massacres in retaliation, but after excommunication did public penance for months and his orders against pagan institutions probably were an extension of this.

Guess what? The next year, 395, Augustine becomes religious head, which is called bishop, of the Roman Imperial administrative unit called a diocese, in Hippo. Guess Gus knew on which side his bread is buttered. You damn well better believe because of the authority of the "Catholic Church" when it has the authority to pull off stuff like this!

The Battle of The Frigidus effectively ended any Western resistance to the new state church. But, this enormous civil war though left the Western Empire greatly weakened, and it collapsed a thousand years before the Eastern Empire did, starting with the Visigoths, under their King Alaric, an Arian Christian, sacking Rome on 24 August 410. Augustine, by then 56 and still Bishop of Hippo, then writes more Platonism to assure the shocked Romans that though the joint was a mess, the real and ideal City of God was the real winner despite the total mess. Ideal behind the apparent real, neo Platonic junk like that, rather than one reality, some of which we see and some we don't, but all one thing, and none of it to be despised because God made it all.

What's of Lutheran interest about this? Well, whaddya think, on Sunday morning do we have a toned down Greek mystery religion filtered through Nicene Christianity and the new Imperial state religion, loosely based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Jewish messianism that would have passed into history long ago were it not so reinvented through Greek mythology, or, do we have the revealed religion of God through Jesus Christ, completing and fulfilling the incomplete hints of it found in human religion in Greek antiquity and everywhere and in the previously revealed religion of the Old Covenant?

I'll go with the latter. And I'm glad the site of the classic Games made it through the 2007 fires.

But those old Roman families knew a thing or two about survival and they became papal families, eventually supplying Pope Gregory (another Great), made Pope 3 September 590, who ruled the state church like a real Roman indeed though the state whose church it was, was in ruins.

X. Western Empire Collapses in 476, Eastern Empire Continues to 1453.

The Western Empire continued until 4 September 476, when Romulus Augustus (what a name, combining one of the traditional founders of Rome with Octavian its first emperor!) was deposed deposed by the Germanic king Odoacer and never succeeded. So he was the last Western Roman Emperor. Well, sort of. His father, Flavius Orestes, was appointed by Julius Nepos as a senior general officer, magister militum, working with the Germanic foederati. The foederati -- see the word federal in there? -- were non-Roman tribes bound by a treaty (foedus) where though they weren't citizens they weren't colonies either. But they had to supply troops to Rome, and by this time the Western Roman military relied heavily on them. Orestes struck a deal with a Germanic foederati king, Odoacer, to overthrow Julius Nepos, which they did on 28 August 475 in Ravenna, which had become the Western capital in 402. Nepos fled to, guess where, Dalmatia, same as old Diocletian. Orestes put his son Romulus Augustus on the throne though he was barely a teen. But then Odoacer turned on Orestes and captured and killed him on 28 August 476, then deposed Romulus on 4 September 476, though letting him live in consideration of his young age. The Roman Senate, acting for Odoacer, asked the Eastern Emperor Zeno to reunite the Empire, but Zeno said Julius Nepos was the rightful ruler, yet allowed Odoacer to rule in Zeno's name though Nepos was recognised as Emperor.

So, you could say Julius Nepos was the last Western Emperor too. Nepos, btw, was killed in exile by his own soldiers, caught in the middle of his own efforts to retake power from Odoacer and the efforts of the Emperor before him, Glycerius, to exact revenge. Glycerius was not a rightful Emperor, having been appointed by a previous magister militum, Gundobad, rather than the rightful appointer, the Eastern Emperor Leo I, who eventually appointed his nephew Nepos (from which we get out word nepotism). Glycerius surrendered to him without a fight, Gundobad having abandoned him, in consideration for which Nepos made him bishop of Salona, Dalmatia. When Nepos was killed 25 April 480, Odoacer, who wasn't even a Nicene Christian but an Arian, made him bishop of Milan, Ambrose's old seat. Helluva deal.

Ah yes, bishops in a direct line of succession from the Apostles.

Didn't go so well for old Odoacer though. His popularity with what was left of the Romans and his treaties with the Franks and Visigoths (more Germans) got the Eastern Emperor really worried. So he started a political campaign against Odoacer in 488, which in the end got the Ostrogoths (East Goths, more Germans) under Zeno convinced they had to get rid of Odoacer. So, the king of the Ostrogoths, Theodoric (another Great), a vassal of the Eastern Emperor, takes up arms against Odoacer, also a vassal of the Eastern Emperor, with the promise he would get Italy if successful, which would conveniently too get rid of the Ostrogoths for Zeno. By 490, Theodoric had defeated Odoacer in three major battles, and laid seige to Odoacer's capitol Ravenna, which lasted three years, but neither side could totally defeat the other. So, on 2 February 493 the two signed a treaty to share rule, and a banquet was arranged to celebrate peace. At the banquet, Theodoric proposes a toast, then personally kills Odoacer, becoming the sole ruler in the West, based in Ravenna! Both these guys were Arian Christians btw.

Theodoric, though technically a vassal of the Eastern Empire, in effect was the new if unofficial Western emperor. But the tensions between the old Roman culture and the new Roman culture imposed from the East remained. Being an Arian, he was not an insider with the Nicene East, and became suspicious of his Western Nicene subjects, to the extent that he had his own magister officiorum, director of government services, a Roman named Boethius, who was a man of great learning and largely responsible for the passing of ancient learning to the Middle Ages, executed in 525. Many other similar but lesser Romans followed. All of them, Roman and Germanic types alike, were real big on preserving the old Roman world (Rome is in the West after all!) but now modified by its new synthesis with Christianity, to carry on into the future.

With the Western Roman Empire gone, the surviving Eastern Roman Empire tried to hold Rome, and Italy and the old Western Empire generally, to-gether against the onslaught of Germanic types, mainly Lombards, and the Islamic Caliphate, by means of exarchs, which were direct representatives of the Eastern, and now only, Roman Emperor, in Constantinople. The Emperor Maurice (Flavius Mauricius Tiberius Augustus, actually) established two such exarchs, one in 584 in Ravenna, the last capital of the Western Empire before its collapse, and one in Carthage in 590 to administer northern Africa and Spain.

This preserved something of the old full Roman Empire, and re popes, this preserved the approval of the "bishop" of Rome by the emperor of Rome. The Exarchate of Africa lasted until 698 when it was defeated by forces of the Umayyad Caliphate (capital, Damascus). The Exarchate of Ravenna lasted from 584 until 751, when the last exarch (guy named Eutychius) was killed by the Lombards, whereupon the Franks under their king, Pippin, Charlemagne's dad and Charles Martel's son, more on them later, took over and gave the exarchate's lands to the pope in 756, which began the Patrimonium Sancti Petri, the Patrimony of Saint Peter. These papal states continued in one form or another until 1929, when the Lateran Treaty between the pope (Pius XI) via his secretary of state and the king of Italy (Victor Emmanuel III, the last one, he and all male members of the House of Savoy were ordered permanently out of Italy by the referendum in 1946 to establish a republic) via his prime minister, Benito Mussolini, abolished them and established as the only papal state the Vatican City State which exists to-day.

But the East/West, Arian/Nicene, Roman/Germanic tensions were enormous, and it would take several centuries for the effort to preserve and or reconstruct the old Roman Empire to come to fruition, which story we shall see below, with the coronation of Charlemagne in 800, and then of Otto and the Holy Roman Empire in 962, as the final transfer of imperial succession from the old to the new Rome, with "apostolic succession" in the state church part of the imperial succession.  But, this successor had a pretty long run, about 1000 years, until 1806, outlasting the Eastern Empire which fell in 1453, and the state churches of both still survive without their states!

The Eastern Empire considered itself and called itself Roman to the end. Latin was for some time its official language, as we saw in Emperor Maurice's official name, though Greek was used outside the court and eventually became official. Yet in Rome, the elite spoke Greek, though in time that passed too. Each half, while sharing many common elements, took on its own culture even though the Roman borrowed much from the Greek, and the eventual prominence of each's language both symbolises and contributes to the outcome.

The East outlasted the West by about a thousand years. It continued until its defeat by the Ottomans in 1453. The Ottoman Empire itself lasted from 1299 to 1922 when the British Empire, having won World War I, partioned it into the Middle Eastern countries that are in the news almost daily right now.

After the Eastern Empire fell, Czarist Russia, having long since become Eastern Orthodox from the Eastern Roman Empire, considered itself the "third" Rome -- Rome itself being the first and Constantinople being the second. Constantinople, the Eastern Empire capital itself a rename of Byzantium by Constantine after Constantine, got renamed again as Istanbul on 28 March 1930 by the secular Republic of Turkey, which would no longer deliver mail addressed to "Constantinople" and had moved the capital of Turkey to Ankara, the new name for Angora.

XI. West Makes Comeback as Holy Roman Empire, 800, Lasts Until 1806.

Hey, whatever happened to Eboracum, where his father's army had proclaimed Constantine Emperor? It's still there! After the Western Empire fell in 476, the Angles -- more Germans (and my ancestors) -- invaded and took over and called the city Eoferwic. Then the Vikings -- not more Germans exactly, but Germanic -- blew in in 866 and called it Jorvik, probably a re-pronunciation easier on Viking ears. Then in 1066 the Normans -- not a bunch of guys named Norman but people from Normandy just across the English Channel -- really blew in and took over, William the Conqueror sacking the place, and in time the name morphed from Jorvik to York, with variant spellings. And that's what it is to-day -- York, England. And everyone knows about the new York in, well, New York. Guess what, there's a York here in Nebraska too!

So what's that all about, a French smoothing over of rough Germanic edges? Some see it that way, but that's not really the deal. The Normans themselves result from Vikings -- there you go, more Germanic types -- raiding the area, joining up with the locals, providing a hedge against yet more Vikings raiding the area, taking on the local culture and adding their original one, and becoming The Northmen, from which the names Norman and Normandy derive.

So it's Frenched-over Vikings on top of Vikings on top of Germans on top of Romans on top of Celts on top of, some say, the Old Ones. That's where my ancestors came from. And they say the US is a melting pot! True that, but where we came from is a melting pot too.

Back on the European continent, the end of the Exarchate of Ravenna in 751 didn't end the ratification of "bishops" by the "Roman" emperor btw. The empire of the Frank general Charles Martel would evolve into The Holy Roman Empire, Imperium Romanum Sacrum, and see itself as the continuation, the transfer of rule, translatio imperii, of the full Roman Empire, by which they meant not just from the end of the Western Roman Empire with the deposing of Romulus Augustus by Odoacer in 476, as is often noted, but of the whole pie, from Caesar Augustus on 16 January 27 BC through the deposing of Emperor Constantine VI of the Eastern Roman Empire in 797.

Huh? Who are these guys? OK, first Charles Martel.  He lived from 23 August 686 to 22 October 741. His name means "Charles the Hammer", from the Latin Carolus Martellus, Karl Martell in German.  Boniface said he couldn't have evangelised the Germans without him (and his army). He was one of the greatest generals anywhere anytime. He held off the Islamic invasion of Western Europe in October 732 (you didn't think this Islamicist thing was anything new, did you?) at Tours, defeating vastly superior forces, which is how he got the name "the Hammer". But, he was not all hung up on being king or emperor of anything.

His son Pippin was though, and, the Eastern Empire had failed, exarchates and anything else, to protect the West against the Lombards or the Islamic Caliphate. Plus, Emperor Constantine VI, who had become Eastern Emperor at age 9 and presided over the Second Council of Nicaea at age 16 (hey, when you're emperor with a state church you get to do stuff like that), kept losing battles, which led to a revolt he crushed severely. Then he divorced his wife for not producing a son (happens a lot, too bad they didn't know anything about genetics) and married his mistress, which lost him what little support he had left.

His mom Irene hadn't relinquished regent powers over him and kept the title Empress, so her supporters blinded and deposed him on 19 April 797. So now, on top of the inability of the remainder of the Roman Empire to hold things to-gether in the West with the exarchates, it's gonna be led by a woman, and everybody knows that can't be! I mean, a woman can be Empress by being the wife of the Emperor (Empress Consort), or by being the widow of an Emperor (Empress Dowager) and if she's also the mother of the current Emperor (Empress Mother), but rule in her own right (Empress Regnant), no. So, the next big Western step was, against all this, the crowning of Charles Martel's grandson Charlemagne as Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III on Christmas Day 800 in St Peter's (the old one Constantine built, not the one there now), Which kinda worked both ways, as Charlemagne had just bailed old Leo out from being blinded by the Romans themselves!

Yes this was the first Roman Emperor in the West in about 300 years, but the coronation was explicit; this wasn't just a restoration of the Western Roman Empire that ceased in 476, Charlemagne was the rightful successor to the Eastern Roman Emperor Constantine VI too, so he and not Irene was straight up Roman Emperor, period. For a while Irene thought marrying Charlemagne might fix this, but that idea never made it to first date, although Charlemagne's fourth and last wife, Luitgard, had died 4 June 800, so he was eligible.

So now there were now two "Roman" emperors, not as in West and East, but rather each claiming rightful rule over the whole thing in continuous succession. Neither one of them actually Roman, but hey. Nonetheless, with this, the West had finally emerged from what are called the Dark Ages, starting from the Fall of Rome in 476 until the coronation of Charlemagne in 800. This happened on Christmas Day 800 when Leo III, the Bishop of Rome, the office popularly called pope, an office which to this day bears the title pontifex maximus, crowned the King of the Franks Charlemagne Holy Roman Emperor (imperator augustus, to be exact; yes, it was in Latin).

This conscious attempt to re-establish the Western Roman Empire -- though someone famously said it was neither Roman nor holy nor an empire -- lasted about a thousand years, until the last Holy Roman Emperor, Francis II, dissolved it in the Napoleonic Wars in 1806.

Things were off to a roaring good start, with the chief religious functionary of the state religion crowning the head of state and all. Charlemagne put to-gether a pretty good empire, emphasising -- in case you thought this was a new idea with the current European Union -- a pan-European identity. This was so about being the Roman Empire that, while now we generally call it the Holy Roman Empire, the "holy" thing didn't get added for about 350 years, it was just straight up Roman Empire.

But we all die, even emperors, and Charlemagne died 28 January 814 in Aachen (Germany), his capital. He was buried the same day in Aachen Cathedral -- hell, call it right, the Kaiserdom, Imperial Cathedral -- which he had begun as his palace chapel and was consecrated in Mary's (as in Jesus' mother) honour by Pope Leo III in 805. In 1978 it was among the 12 places designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. An eyewitness account says when Emperor Otto III opened the vault in 1000, Charlegmagne was sitting upright as if still ruling, only the tip of his nose having decomposed. It's been opened since without similar report.

Now it's kinda hard to preserve an empire when you gotta split it up among your kids, so things bobbled for a century or so.  Charlemagne, the year before he died, had named his only surviving son who wasn't a bastard -- not what you think, I mean in the technically correct sense of not the legitimate offspring of a husband and wife -- his successor. Well, sort of. It's always "sort of" when it's "Roman". Charlemagne was actually married to Desiderata, princess daughter of the Lombard (a Germanic tribe in northern Italy) king Desiderius as part of a peace with him, in 770, but the next year the marriage was annulled, Pope Stephen III having said Pepin said he was to be married to someone Frankish, and she went home to her dad's court and war came in 774. This getting rid of inconvenient first wives is sort of a pattern, isn't it -- right along with the church finding it OK, in case you thought Henry VIII started it. But, there were no kids and the next year he married the 13 year old daughter of Swabian (Southern Germany) Count Gerold, Hildegard. There were nine kids, though he appears to have had this Himiltrude in there somewhere as a wife or concubine, so maybe Hildegard was Wife #3. Oh well.

Anyway, this son and successor is Louis, known as the Pious. Originally, following the usual custom, Louis was to share his father's rule divided with his brothers, and such were Charlemagne's provisions in the Divisio regnorum (Division of the Rule) of 806, but by 814 his two brothers who also weren't bastards were dead so Louis got the whole pie. He rushed to Aachen and crowned himself, though on 5 October 816 Pope Stephen IV, who followed after Leo III who had crowned his father, crowned him officially in Rheims. Then ordered everyone to be loyal to Louis.

Louis tried real hard, but most of his rule was plagued by continual frontier wars with those outside his realm and civil wars, three of them, with those inside his realm. Starting to sound like the problems that always get Roman Empires -- running a big realm with no modern communications or travel, keeping the lid on externally and internally, and specifically re internally providing for an orderly succession, Gets 'em every time. Louis had his unmarried sisters and bastard brothers enter convents and monasteries, to avoid power brokering marriages -- he also ordered all cloisters to follow the Rule of St Benedict, kick ass Louis! -- and provided for an orderly succession in his ordinatio imperii of 817, which both followed the custom of dividing among sons and also the custom of the first-born taking pride of place, that being Lothair who would be Emperor.

But there were problems. His nephew Bernard was also in on the succession deal, but when he revolted and wanted more, Louis had him blinded, from which he died two days later. So in 822 he does public penance before the Pope (Paschal I this time), and let his relatives out of their monastic orders, both of which lost him his cred with the nobles and pretty much everyone. On top of that, his wife Ermengarde died in 818, whom he seems to have genuinely loved, and in 820 he marries Judith, daughter of Count Welf of Altdorf (way southern Germany, called Weingarten since 1865 from the name of the wealthy abbey, Benedictine of course, founded there in 1065), which leads to a son Charles in 823. Which led to the civil wars, the existing sons of the deceased wife having none of this new guy horning in on what's theirs. Louis died on 20 June 840 and war over who got what continued for three years until the Treaty of Verdun in 843 settled things among the three surviving sons and pretty much set the Europe we know now, along with its conflicts. Lothair got the Emperor title and the Middle Frankish Kingdom, Louis "the German" got the Eastern Frankish Kingdom which is pretty much Germany now, and Charles "the Bald" got the Western Frankish Kingdom which is pretty much France now.

But no real empire emerged. The Middle Frankish Kingdom fell apart and the other two and about anyone else with some money and an army were at it all the time, including the damn Vikings from the North. The guy who really re-established things was Otto I, son of Heinrich der Vogler (Henry the Fowler) out of East Francia, Louis the German's third. Heinrich ensured the recognition of West Francia by East Francia which was still under Carologian rulers. But when his son Otto was crowned with the title Emperor the translatio imperii, the transfer of rule, in which this German empire was considered -- especially by those who ran it and/or hoped to benefit from it -- as the new Roman Empire in direct succession from the old Roman Empire, though of course the actual Eastern Roman Empire was still up and running at the time, was complete.

This happened on 2 February 962, when the German king Otto became der Große, the Great. Having overcome all opposition from anybody, he was crowned King of Germany in Aachen, Charlemagne's old capital, on 7 August 936, and on 2 February 962 was crowned Romanorum Imperator, Emperor of the Romans, in Rome at St Peter's (still the old one) by Pope John XII -- whose control over the Papal States (remember that, I told you this stuff all hangs to-gether eventually!) he had just secured. John though soon sent emissaries to the Eastern Empire, Otto got wind of it, went back to Rome and had a pope more suitable to him selected, a layman in fact, who became Pope Leo VIII. Poor old Pope John went off with one of his mistresses and died of a heart attack during sex, though other accounts say her jealous husband killed him.

Apostolic succession, indeed. BTW, "Pope Joan" legends come from one of Pope John's mistresses who had a real influence on him.

Anyway, with this, Otto is considered by some the real first Holy Roman Emperor. The Holy Roman Empire -- Das Heiliges Roemisches Reich in German, or Sacrum Romanum Imperium in Latin -- earned the quip of not being holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire by largely being held to-gether by the same three forces Otto put it to-gether. One was his control over bishops and abbots and their investiture into office not to mention selection for office; Two was proprietary churches, meaning they belonged to the ruler who owner the land on which they stood unless otherwise agreed by charter; Three was the use of an appointed rather than hereditary advocatus, or Vogt in German, to run church properties and estates. Power was a balance of concessions to local rulers for support in order to have power over local rulers, with the Pope in the balance too.

For example --  as if Pope John XII who had crowned Otto turning on him, Otto going back to Rome, deposing John and having a layman elected Pope as Leo VII weren't example enough -- later John attempted a comeback, but died and was followed by Benedict V, so Otto heads back to Rome again, to get rid of Benedict and make them promise to quit electing popes without the Emperor's approval!

Silver and gold have I none indeed.

The "holy" thing got added a couple hundred years after Otto, when Frederick the Red Beard (ok Barbarossa) was crowned, as it's done, first King of the Germans (ie Romans) in Aachen on 9 March 1152 and then Emperor in Rome (where else?) by the pope (who else?, this time Eugene III) on 18 June 1155. Fred btw asked for and got an annulment of his marriage to his wife, Adelheid, in 1153, on the grounds that they were too closely related (that's called consanguinity) to be married; they were only fourth cousins but the consanguinity became suddenly an issue after she kept not having kids, imagine that, then he tried to get a wife from somebody at the Eastern Empire court in Constantinople to further express the whole one Rome thing, but that didn't work out, so on 9 June 1156 he married a nice French girl, well countess actually, who became Empress Consort (remember what that is) and they had 12 kids, one of whom became the next "Roman" Emperor (Henry VI).

So on it goes, back and forth. Eventually, the Golden Bull of 1356, passed by the Reichastag, the legislature of the HRE, and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, fixed the election of "Roman Emperors" to be by seven electors who would elect a "King of the Romans" (rex romanorum, roemischer Koenig) in Frankfurt in the old East Francia. Emperor-elect was sufficient for rule, but the Pope would then officially crown the King of the Romans Holy Roman Emperor. The electors are: the Archbishops (who were also temporal rulers, hence the term Princes of the Church) of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier, the Count Palatine of the Rhine, the King of Bohemia, the Duke of Saxony, and the Margrave of Brandenburg. The papal coronation was not specified, and the last HRE to be crowned by a Pope was Charles V, crowned HRE by Pope Clement VII in Bologna in 1530.

Charles V, he to whom the Augsburg Confession is addressed? Yes, the same. He was Spanish too -- yay -- the son of Felipe I and Joanna (sometimes called The Mad) of Castille, though he was born and raised in Ghent, Flanders (modern Begium then under Spanish control) and never did speak Spanish very well despite being King of Spain too, as Charles I. He is said to have said "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse".

Charles' reign would have been peaceful except for a few things: by his time the Eastern Roman Empire had collapsed in defeat to the Ottomans in 1453, who were then threatening to conquer Europe itself; colonisation of the Americas and the Pacific had opened up an entirely new world to manage, literally, and the combination of Christian, non-Christian, and political elements from the state religion of the Roman Empire through the same state religion of the Holy Roman Empire had finally sparked an effort to recall the church to its nature and mission as established by Christ, not by Romans of varying descriptions. And that effort is called the Lutheran Reformation.

Charles more and more left dealing with the Reformation to his brother Ferdinand. He hoped the Council of Trent would solve everything and put everything back to-gether. It didn't. How to handle the worldwide empire, and the wealth that flowed from it, in the Americas (including Nebraska where I am right now) and the Pacific, almost continual war with France, and almost continual war with the Ottoman Empire -- led by Suleiman the Magnificent, no less -- was an enormous job, and eventually took its toll, not to mention lifelong health problems such as epilepsy, arthritis, and an inability to eat well due to an enlarged lower jaw. Charles abdicated all his titles on 16 January 1556, leaving his son Felipe II King of Spain and its empire and his brother Fernando Holy Roman Emperor, and retired -- not as you or I do, but with an entourage of fifty or so to special apartments -- to the monastery of Yuste in Spain, not a Benedictine one but of the Hieronymites, the Order of St Jerome, a Spanish order which took St Jerome as its patron saint and lived under the Rule of St Augustine, like the Augustinians of whom Martin Luther was a member. He died there 21 September 1558.

16 January. Remember that? 16 January 27 BC, when the Roman Senate make Octavian Emperor, Augustus. 16 January 1556, Charles to whom the Augsburg Confession is addressed as a statement of Christian teaching abdicates everything.

The Holy Roman Empire continued until Napoleon. Francis II was the last Holy Roman Emperor, and after his defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz abolished the HRE on 6 August 1806. Ironically, the monastery of Yuste, where Charles V, also a Hapsburg, had retired was also destroyed in the Napoleonic Wars.

XII. Successor Empires East And West Last Until World War I.

Francis II though, thinking the HRE was about at an end, set up shop as Franz I, Emperor of Austria in 1804, "emperor" being "Kaiser", a Germanisation of "Caesar" expressing the idea of continuity with the HRE and the Roman Empire itself. This became the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867 during the reign (1848 - 1916) of the third Kaiser, Franz Joseph I and this Habsburg dynasty lasted until Karl I, the fourth and last Kaiser, when it was defeated in the First World War. On 11 November 1918, Armistice Day, he relinquished the throne, but he did not say abdicate, hoping to be recalled. He never was, the Austrian parliament enacted a law 3 April 1919 banning any Hapsburgs from Austria unless they accepted simple status as citizens, and he died in poverty in forced exile in Madeira, an island off Portugal, 1 April 1922.

Total span of this empire, 1804 - 1918.

The Germans per se went through decades of disunity and unrest before the establishment of the German Empire on 18 January 1871, under the leadership of the Kingdom of Prussia through the efforts of Otto von Bismarck, with the coronation of the King of Prussia of the House of Hohenzollern as Kaiser -- same deal on the word -- of the German Empire (Deutsches Kaiserreich). This lasted until the third and last German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, officially abdicated on 29 November 1918, though did not formally renounce his titles, fleeing to the neutral Netherlands, hoping to return someday. He never did, not even in death though the new German ruler, Hitler, who hated him, wanted his funeral in Germany to lend credence to the Nazi state as heir to the Kaiserreich, though his wish that no Nazi symbols be used was ignored at his Dutch funeral.

Total span of this empire, 1871 - 1918.

As to the Russians, we saw above that when the Eastern Roman Empire fell to the Ottoman Empire Moscow began to see itself as the "Third Rome" replacing it, even adopting the Eastern Empire's double headed eagle as its coat of arms. Peter the Great, Tsar of the Tsardom of Russia, sometimes called the Tsardom of Muscovy (as in Moscow) proclaimed the the Empire on 22 October 1721, if you use the Gregorian calendar, or 11 October if you use the older Julian calendar (and I ain't going into all this calendar stuff again, see the New Years post for that). Tsar, where did that word come from? A Russianisation of, guess what, Caesar! It lasted until the Bolshevik October Revolution overthrew it on 7 November 1917 -- how do you have an October Revolution in November, same calendar stuff, the day is 25 October in the old Julian calendar. The last Tsar, Nicholas II of the House of Romanov (hear "Rome" in there?) itself part of the north German House of Oldenburg, was executed with his family 16 July 1918.

Total span of this empire, 1721 (or 16 January 1547 if you include the Tsardom of Russia) - 1917.

As to the Ottoman Empire, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and its allies in World War I -- an irony in itself, the Ottoman Empire allied with, along with the Kingdom of Bulgaria, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the German Empire, the then current version of two powers it had scared the living hell out of for centuries -- the surrendering Sultan, Mehmed VI, hoped to preserve the sultanate by co-operating with the victors, and the caliphate too. However the Ottoman lands of the Middle East and Balkans had been structured into new countries by the Allies, the British in the lead, the countries we have to-day, and the Turkish National Assembly abolished the Sultanate, the imperial head of state, on 1 November 1922, Mehmed VI left the country on 17 November 1922, on 24 July 1923 the Assembly was internationally recognised by the Treaty of Lausanne, and it proclaimed a republic 29 October 1923 with Ankara the new capital, which was the end of the Ottoman Empire after 700 years but not the Ottoman Caliphate.

That happened when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, very Westernised in his thinking (he invited American educational reformer John Dewey to advise the reform of public education in the new country, for example) and the father of modern Turkey, had the National Assembly abolish the caliphate on 3 March 1924, sending the last caliph, Abdul Mejid II, along with any remaining members of the royal Ottoman family, the Osmans, into formal exile. This was despite appeals from other Islamic sources to retain the caliphate for the sake of Islam, which only fuelled opposition as foreign intervention and helped seal the fate of the caliphate. Although various efforts have been made to agree on a new caliphate, there has been no consensus to date.

Total span of this empire, 1299 - 1922/3, depending on which event one takes as final.

2014 marked a significant date in all this. At 1045 on Sunday 28 June 1914, Erzherzog (Archduke) Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, was assassinated along with his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, in what is now Bosnia but then part of Austria-Hungary. That didn't start "World War One" by itself, but set a series of things in motion that did, at the end of which an order that had been evolving for centuries ended, and we are still working out what's next.

XIII. Where Are They Now? Sag' mir wo die Blumen sind.

Yes, now. This stuff just didn't vanish. It's only been not yet quite 100 years since the whole thing fell apart, not a long period in terms of the whole of human history. We'll get to the main point, the religious implications, in the next section but for now, the current state of these ruling houses. Basically, winners kept theirs, losers lost theirs. But there's more to it than that. Here it is.

United Kingdom. The House of Windsor.

England hasn't figured much in this post, but as its monarchy is arguably the most visible in the world, here's the deal. There's been kings and some queens in the British Isles for bloody ever. For a time we (I'm of English descent, so "we") were part of the Roman Empire, hey, London is a Roman town, Londinium, but the various English kingdoms more or less came to-gether under Alfred the Great of the House of Wessex in the 880s. It's been the houses of Wessex, Denmark, Wessex again, Denmark again, Wessex again again, then the damn Normans (1066), then the Blois, the Anjou, the Plantagenets (all the rivalry between the cadet branches, Lancaster and York), the Tudors, the Stuarts, then from 1707 with the Acts of Union (this is where you get the United Kingdom) the Stuarts until 1714 when Queen Anne died leaving no heirs, then the Hanovers from 1714 in a deal for the closest non-Roman Catholic to take the throne rather than a Catholic relative of Anne, until 1901 on the death of Queen Victoria, who left no heirs. There's still Hanovers in Germany; the current head of the house is Ernest Augustus, age 31. Hey, England, Germany, war -- right.

Hereditary kingdoms -- important point; kingdoms are not necessarily hereditary, from ancient Rome, some are elected, the question then being, elected by whom -- are usually reckoned through male descendants in birth order. This is called agnatic primogeniture, or Salic Law, from the Latin legal term terra salica, not Roman but in Latin from its first codification around 500 by Clovis, King of the Franks.  A variation of agnatic primogeniture is called semi-Salic law, wherein if their is no male heir, the nearest female in kinship succeeds. It should be noted that there is also uterine primogeniture, which is inheritance based on the mother, not the father. This was known in Roman law (Rome, always Rome), the principle being "mater semper certa est pater semper incertus est", the mother is always certain (and) the father is always uncertain. Uncommon in Europe, it is found among some African dynasties. In contemporary times, in-vitro fertilisation and DNA testing renders this principle inapplicable, but, the practice of reckoning from female, not male, descent does not depend on the principle. The opposite of agnatic primogeniture is cognatic primogeniture, in which kinship and heirs are determined male or female. For a time a variant form, male-preference cognatic primogeniture, as sort of a hybrid, in that preference was for a male heir, but, in the absence of one, a female may succeed, was most common in Europe. Now, what is called absolute primogeniture, no preference either male or female, was first established in constitutional monarchies by Sweden in 1980, followed by the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Denmark, and by Spain, by royal edict though it is a constitutional monarchy, in 2006, and both the United Kingdom and the entire Commonwealth of Nations, for those nations that are themselves monarchies, as of 2011 will practice absolute primogeniture as soon as all 16 members of the Commonwealth to whom it applies pass legislation in their respective legislatures. Essentially, then, all modern major monarchies are constitutional, a body of law above everyone including the sovereign, and practice absolute primogeniture.

That said, for its own sake as part of "where are they now" following, also places background for the relatively recent royal house of Britain. Queen Victoria, the last British monarch of the House of Hannover, was succeeded by Edward VII, who was the second child but eldest son of Victoria and her husband (and cousin), Albert, German-born of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (German: Haus Sachsen-Coburg und Gotha) so under the laws of the time Edward was reckoned from his father's house. High anti-German sentiment was prominent during WWI in England as well as the US, and in response to that, and no doubt seeing his cousin the Tsar of Russia deposed, Edward's son and successor, George V, by royal decree on 17 July 1917 renounced all German titles and changed the name of the house in England to Windsor, which is how it is known now. Another cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm II, though this funnier than hell, and joked that he thought Shakespeare's play should be called The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Doubly ironic: not only would absolute primogeniture avoid all this, but also, even so Victoria in her long reign saw much intermarriage with the various houses of Europe, a long-standing way so try to secure peace, and was called "the grandmother of Europe". The current monarch is of course Elizabeth II, to be followed, assuming no premature deaths, by her son Charles, his son William, and his son George. Had George been a girl instead, she would succeed under current law.

Austria. The House of Habsburg.

As to the Austrians, on 3 October 2004 Karl I was beatified, one step before being declared a saint, by Pope John Paul II on the basis of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints 2003 conclusion of his heroic virtue and one miracle through is intercession. He earnestly sought peace, and was the only leader to ban the use of then-new chemical warfare, poison gas at the time. JPII also declared 21 October, the date in 1911 of his marriage to Princess Zita, as his feast day. On 31 January 2008 a second miracle (one won't do it for sainthood) was formally certified, the miraculous cure through his intercession of a woman in Florida -- who was Baptist at the time! She has since converted to Catholicism.

His oldest son, Otto, headed the family for many years, opposed Hitler, who sentenced him to death, and was active as a Member of the European Parliament of the European Union until 1999, and in January 2007 passed the torch of head of the House of Hapsburg to his oldest son, Karl, though remaining Crown Prince and pretender to the throne. He lived in Bavaria until he died on 4 July 2010. Archduke Karl, born 11 January 1961, was also a member of the European Parliament, and served as director of the non governmental organisation (NGO) UNPO, Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation. Since 2008 he has served as president of Association of National Committees of the Blue Shield, which is dedicated to preserving cultural heritage from wars and disasters, He is also active in business, a co-founder of a Vienna based private investment firm.

Germany. The House of Hohenzollern.

As to the Germans, the current head of the House of Hohenzollern is Georg Friedrich, great-great grandson of Wilhelm II, born 10 June 1976 in Bremen, Germany. He became head of the house on 26 September 1994 when the previous pretender, his grandfather Louis Ferdinand I died, and survived lengthy legal challenges by his uncles in German courts for the role. He is quoted as saying he sees no need for change of the current political system in Germany, and as thinking he is probably happier than many of his ancestors. He was married on 27 August 2011, the 950th anniversary of the founding of the House of Hohenzollern. He works for a company helping academic institutions bringing their innovations to the market, and also directs the Princess Kira of Prussia-Foundation, a charitable organisation founded by his grandmother. The House of Hohenzollern website: www.hohenzollern.com/

The House of Oldenburg.

The House of Oldenburg has had kings on the thrones of Russia, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Greece and Iceland, as well as dukes of all sorts of duchies all over the place, including the land from which my ancestors the Angles moved to England, now known as Schleswig-Holstein. The current head of the ducal house as well as the whole House of Oldenburg is Christoph, born 22 August 1949, living in Schwansen, Schleswig-Holstein, with extensive business interests in agriculture and real estate, and is a founding member and chairman of the advisory board of GLC Glücksburg Consulting Group, a marketing and communications firm. Website: http://www.glc-group.com/ By a bunch of stuff I'm not even going to get into, except to say they result from Queen Victoria being among their ancestors, both he and Georg Friedrich are technically in line for the British throne too, though at 150+ in line (no official list is maintained to this extent) they are a bit of a long shot.

Matter of fact, there's Oldenburgs still on thrones, Margrethe II of Denmark and head of the state Lutheran church, and Harald V of Norway and head of the state Lutheran church, both of a cadet branch of the House of Oldenburg, the House of Glücksburg. Interesting how some of the most liberal countries in Europe, like Denmark, Norway and Sweden, also have monarchs and liberal state "Lutheran" churches. The King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, though, is not an Oldenburg but from the House of Bernadotte, set up by the French to be a client monarchy to Napoleon, and The Church of Sweden (Lutheran) only became independent of the state in 2000.

And, there's Queen Sofia of Spain, who may be queen there because she married Juan Carlos who became the king, but is the sister of the unpopular last king of Greece, the Oldenburg Constantine II, who was deposed in 1973, lived in exile in London for many years (Prince Charles is his second cousin), and was able to return to Greece in 2013. On 19 June 2014, Juan Carlos abdicated in favour of their son Don Felipe, and his wife, Doña Letizia, became queen, but the former monarchs retain the titles of king and queen.

The Netherlands. The House of Orange-Nassau.

The Dutch royal family is not Oldenburg either, but the House of Orange-Nassau. Not as in the Bahamas, though it is indirectly named after it, but in what is now Rheinland-Pfalz in modern Germany. The constitutional monarch is King Willem-Alexander, who took office on 30 April 2013 after his mother, Queen Beatrix, after 33 years as queen and at age 75, abdicated in his favour. His wife, Queen Maxima, shares some characteristics with another monarch taking office in 2013, Pope Francis: Argentine birth and Italian descent, though unlike Francis she also has Spanish and Basque ancestry. The predominant church formed on 1 May 2004, the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, as a liberal union of the longstanding Dutch Reformed Church and other non-Catholic bodies including "Lutheran".

Belgium. The House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Belgium is also a modern constitutional monarchy, and in 2013 also got a new monarch along with the Netherlands and the Vatican, here King Philippe. This monarchy is fairly recent, as is Belgium itself. It's a very new country with a very old name. Gallia Belgica was the Latin name for the Roman (everything always traces to Rome eventually) province established about 100 AD, drawing the name from the Belgae, the Latin name for tribes living in the area that nobody, from Julius Caesar who fought them to present-day historians, really knows who they were, sort of a Celtic and Germanic hybrid. After the Roman Empire fell apart, they were kicked around among the Spanish, French and Austrians, eventually ending up as the southern part of the Netherlands. When they became independent of the Netherlands after a revolution in 1830, Leopold of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, same guys who changed the name to Windsor in England, was made the first king. Lutherans, sorta kinda. The current Dutch and Belgian kings are relatively young as monarchs go: the Dutch being 46 and the Belgian being 53 at the time of taking the throne.

Bavaria. The House of Wittlesbach.

And in Bavaria, good old Bavaria, the kingdom of which has been kicked around a bit, the House of Wittlesbach was the ruling house from 1180 to 1918, including good old King Ludwig whose money got started in the New World where I got my university education, or if not that spent a hell of a few years. The current head of the House is Franz, Duke of Bavaria, born 14 July 1933 in Munich. Because of Wittlesbach opposition to the Nazis, he (age 11 at the time, 6 October 1944) and his family were arrested and put in concentration camps where they remained until liberated by the US Third Army in April 1945. He went to the school at Kloster Ettal in Bavaria, which is Benedictine so you know he's ok. He is active in many civic, charitable and religious organisations, and lives in an apartment in the former Summer palace of the monarchy, Schloss Nymphenburg (Nymph's Castle), which is also where, on its south pavillion, King Ludwig assembled Die Schönheitengalerie (The Gallery of Beauties), a collection of 36 portraits of what Ludwig considered the most beautiful women of his, um, acquaintance in varying degrees, including the actress Lola Montez, who inspired the catch phrase "Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets". Hey, who of us doesn't have a Gallery of Beauties on the south pavillion of his mind? Oh, and some (called Jacobites, from James II the last Stuart king of England) say he's heir to the House of Stuart and thus the true King of England instead of the House of Windsor, which is from Hanover in Germany, but as Franz himself doesn't get into that, I won't either.

Russia. The Romanovs.

As to the Russians, wow. There is dispute as to who, and if anyone, heads the house now. When the Grand Duke Vladimir died in Miami on 21 April 1992, a huge dispute ensued. His daughter and only child, Maria Vladimirovna Romanova, born 23 December 1953 in Madrid, claimed pretence to the Russian throne, with Vladimir the last male heir and her cousins invalid as the children of marriages with commoners, not nobility. However, Nicholas Romanov, her cousin, born 26 September 1922 in France, claimed headship as the senior male heir. He died 15 September 2014. And God bless me sideways if they all aren't also in line for the British throne, but way down the list way past any official count.

Complicating all this is the fall of the Soviet Union, the Communist regime that emerged from the overthrow of the Russian Empire, in 1991 and Russia's re-emergence as the Russian Federation. On 17 July 1998, the 80th anniversary of their murders, the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II and the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and the bodies of their children then discovered, were reburied with full state honours in the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in the imperial capital city known again by its name St Petersburg. Nicholas led the Romanov family members at the funeral, with the then president of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, there too. Maria had written to him, protesting that her cousins are not even legitimate family members, and did not attend. On 14 August 2000 the Russian Orthodox Church declared Nicholas and family saints, and on 16 June 2003 Russian Orthodox bishops consecrated what is known as the Church of the Blood on the site of their executions. So the "Third Rome".

Presently, Maria is recognised as the true heir by most monarchists, by the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. It should be noted that the current RO patriarch, Kirill I, in 2013 made it clear that recognition of succession is not the same as advocacy of restoration of the monarchy. By contrast, most notably at the 1998 St Petersburg ceremony mentioned above, the Romanov Family Association has the recognition of the Russian state at the few historical memorials where the former royal family might have a role. With the death of Nicholas Romanov late last year, who heads the house is not decided as of early this year, and at any rate they too are clear that succession applies only to the house and is not advocacy of restoration of the monarchy.

A third and more recent factor emerged on 20 July 2011, when Anton Bakov, prominent businessman, politician, inventor and Doctor of Philosophy, formed the Sovereign State Imperial See, out of far-flung islands abandoned by their Russian Imperial discoverers, and on 7 April 2012 formed the Monarchist Party, which does advocate the restoration of the monarchy and the empire as well, but, on a modern constitutional democratic basis.  Their determination, in 2013, of the rightful successor to the Russian throne was neither Maria nor Nicholas but Karl Emich of Leiningen. (Leiningen is in Germany, in the same general area as Trier, magnificent Trier.)

There's real ironies here. 1) He converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy on 1 June 2013, and while unlike other such German converts from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, he does have Romanov descent, such converts have been spectacular in Russian history, see my post on the "other" St Nicholas for that. 2) The Romanovs are relatively recent in Russian history. The foundation of "Russia", or Rus', dates from 862 with Prince Rurik, and the House of Rurik ruled until 1598, after which the Romanovs came along, and still survives in cadet branches, with modern Russia, Ukraine and Belarus tracing themselves to it. More on that in a bit.

Turkey. The House of Osman.

As to the Turks, on 23 September 2009, at age 97, as our media were all abuzz about upcoming speeches at the UN by Middle Eastern leaders, Ertugrul Osman died. Were there still an Ottoman Empire, he would have been known as Osman V, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire and Caliph of Islam. He will be now the last pretender to the throne to have been alive when the throne was abolished by the modern secular Turkish state on 19 November 1922, and the last to have been born in the Ottoman Empire.

The current head of the House of Osman, the 44th, and pretender to the throne, Bayezid Osman, was born 23 July 1924 in Paris, the first to be born in exile. He moved to the United States in 1941, even serving in the US Army. Were there still an Ottoman Empire, he would be known as Sultan Bayezid III and Caliph of Islam (or at least the Sunni part of it). He's 90, is not married and has no children, and heir will be Duendar Aliosman, born in Damascus, Syria on 30 December 1930. He married, but has no children.

Italy. The House of Savoy.

This house (Casa Savoia) was the Italian royal family. Thing is, Italy as a nation is pretty recent too. The house was founded in 1003 by Umberto I (Humbert) in the Alpine region called Savoy in English, "Italy" as such was centuries away from existing, when a unified Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed in 1861 with Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy as king. The house's relatively short duration as the royal house of Italy (1861-1946) was not particularly distinguished: the second of the four kings was assassinated in 1900 by the brother of a woman killed in a state-sponsored massacre in Milan in 1898, who came back from the United States to do it; the third king was weak in opposing the rise of Mussolini and his abdication for the fourth and last king was not enough to save the monarchy, which was abolished in 1946 and the house banned from the new republic, which was lifted in 2002 as long as no claims to the throne were made. Headship of the house now is unclear, and one of the two cousins claiming it was arrested on prostitution charges in 2006.

Spain. The House of Borbón.

Hey, dontcha mean Bourbon? Yes I do and no I don't. The Spanish House of Borbón derived from the French House of Bourbon, itself derived from the House of Capet, founded by Hugh Capet, elected by French nobility to be king of France and installed on 3 July 987, with Hugh's ancestors documented to his great grandfather Robert the Strong, who died 2 July 866. From little influence beyond the "Island of France" (Ile de France), basically Paris, over centuries it became one of the two most powerful European dynasties on (continental) Europe, the other being the House of Habsbutg. The Capetians, in one branch or another, ruled France from 987 to 1848. The Bourbon Capetians began rule in 1268, were overthrown by the French Revolution in 1792, given the simple surname "Capet", then Louis XVI was executed by beheading in the French manner called guillotine on 21 January 1793 and his wife the queen consort Marie Antoinette, guillotined on 16 October 1793. BTW, Marie Antoinette was herself a Habsbug(!), the name "Marietta" in American names originates with a nickname for her in honour of their support for the American Revolution, and, she never said "Let then eat cake", the phrase coming from a popular assumption that a line applied to her in the notoriously inaccurate autobiography, Les Confessions, of that monumental idiot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and at any rate, it's brioche, not cake, in that line. The Bourbons were restored after the "first empire" fell in 1814/5, then overthrown again in 1830 for a cadet branch (House of Orleans) who were overthrown in 1848. There is more than one pretender to the throne, depending on which branch one holds to be the valid claimant.

The first Bourbon to become King of Spain is Felipe V, on 1 November 1700. He was a grandson of Louis XIV of France, the "sun king", admired even by Napoleon, who despised the monarchy, and called him the only king worthy of the name. When the previous king (Carlos II) died without any clear heir according to the laws of succession, Felipe had the strongest case and became king. However, as the same house on two major thrones (France and Spain) would create problems, it was agreed by all sides that the Spanish side became distinct. Philippe became Felipe (he did not speak Spanish, but later learned). The Borbóns have had an up and down history, being overthrown and restored three times, most recently in 1975, after Franco. The current king of Spain, Felipe VI, is a Borbón and thus a Capetian.

The European Union.

Belgium, created toward the end of the old order, has been at the forefront of what has emerged so far for a new order. The idea of what we call Europe as a single entity is ancient, but such efforts, from the Romans on, were either by force of conquest or intermarriage of ruling dynasties. Belgium, along with The Netherlands, Luxembourg, France, Italy and West Germany began a process which has resulted in the European Union. Look at the list: six nations who were either losers, or winners too small to defend themselves by themselves, in WWII. The process started with treaties to make sure coal and steel production necessary to heavy armament production would be under international control and supervision so that no-one could unilaterally re-arm, especially Germany.

That, combined with later agreements, resulted in the present European Union of 28 countries, whose capitol is Brussels, Belgium. Presently, the EU seems intent on incorporating former satellite countries of the Soviet Union, putting it right on the doorstep of the western side of Russia, the physically largest country in the world, whose origins as a distinct entity are in 882, with Prince Rurik (Roderick) who established Rus' ruled from Novgorod and whose successor Oleg moved to Kiev. Yeah, Ukraine, recently a Soviet satellite, with over a thousand years of complicated history of disputed who's what before that. You didn't think the current Russian/EU/Ukraine thing just blew up, did you?

Well -- this is the fourth century now where Europe in whole or part has tried to re-invent itself by eradicating what it saw as the cause(s) of its problems. In the 18th Century, France executed its king and a good many of its nobles as enemies of "the people", read the new government, the "Republic", which led to the same man (Robespierre) who said "liberty, equality and fraternity" having a bloody Reign of Terror against any suspected of opposing it, in turn leading in the 19th Century to a dictatorial empire under Napoleon that engulfed Europe in war once again. In the 20th Century, Russia executed its emperor (tsar) and family and banished or executed other nobles and people attached to the court, as enemies of the "people" with a short-lived republic leading to a dictatorial regime, the Soviet Union, which murdered millions more internally than Hitler and Nazi Germany. Austria banned its emperor (Karl I) from ever entering Austria, and all of his house unless they specifically accepted ordinary citizen status, and abolished all nobility: Otto, mentioned above, represented Germany, not Austria, in the European Parliament. Germany exiled its emperor (Kaiser), abolished all royalty and nobility and gives no legal recognition to any titles, under the new republic, which was followed by arguably the most infamous dictatorial regime in all human history, the "Third Reich" (counting the HRE as the first and the German Empire as the second), or Nazi Germany as it is often called in English.

Herein we see one of, perhaps the, supreme irony of human history: that republican or democratic movements designed to eradicate what was seen as the cause of past miseries led in turn to regimes that brought about even greater miseries, requiring another and worse world war and then a "cold" war to be rid of them, and no-one held the old order in more contempt than the most notorious author of misery, Hitler. The European Union has its basis in an attempt to make sure Germany can never re-arm, and Germany's strong and vibrant economy has become the driving force of the European Union. Whether another attempt based on removing what it saw as any possible resurrection of previous national disasters will work, this time, remains to be seen. Peace is something more than the absence of war, though short term, the absence of war will do until peace comes along, so far in the long term it never has. Ever.

Thus the disposition of the royal houses and their current heads, but now on to the disposition of their churches.

XIV. Summation nostra aetate, In Our Time.

The Roman Empire, the Eastern and the Western Roman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire, spanned over 1,800 years, and are now gone. Great guys like Otto and Karl, Georg Friedrich, Christoph and Franz, seem worlds removed from the carryings-on of some of their ancestors. We all seem worlds removed. Recent popes haven't crowned any emperors -- although the Prayer for the Holy Roman Emperor that concludes the Exultet (no s; I don't use Rome's recent spelling) at the Easter Vigil hadn't been said since 1806 when Napoleon abolished the HRE but still was on the books until Pope Pius XII removed it as part of his 1955 liturgical revisions. So what has this we've gone through above to do with anything at all now?

The state religion of the Roman Empire, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Western Roman Empire, Czarist Russia and the Holy Roman Empire after them, respectively, has outlasted the empire which created them, and is still with us in their respective churches. Tu es Petrus, thou are Peter, Christ said to Peter in the phrase often cited for their legitimacy. Legitimacy? Who in their right minds looking at all we've looked at find the slightest thing about Thou art Peter about it? Who in their right minds would find such fleshly goings-on at all related to God become Man in the flesh? Yet this perversion of the Incarnation from a truth and an event into a theological and ecclesiastical principle, a fabrication for the benefit of those who would benefit from it by those who would benefit from it, is a captivity from "Babylon" that continues to captivate many. Until it is recognised as such.

What one finds is Christian elements mixed up with pagan elements of the old state religion, largely focussed on matters of succession, the longstanding bane of the empires, with generous helpings of political necessity and expediency thrown in too, into a hybrid or synthesis continuing to this day.

This is not at all to say that the faith of Jesus Christ delivered to the Apostles disappeared. It is to say that Christianity took on much, some of which it would regard as essential and not cultural, from the state which adopted it as its new state religion, the Roman Empire East and West.

Tertullian first applied the pagan Roman religious term pontifex to a "bishop" about 225 when the Roman bishop, aka pope, Callistus relaxed the penance for adulterers -- as a derogatory reference, not a good thing, describing him as acting like a pagan religious leader. Pope Damasus (366-384) is said to have been the first to use the term, though others say this is unsubstantiated. Nonetheless, Theodosius, he who ended the Olympic Games etc, called him pontifex, and the term became a reference to a bishop, summus pontifex or the original phrase pontifex maximus for the bishop of Rome, the pope. Leo I and Gregory I are also cited in this regard.

And behave like the officers and head of the old pagan religion they did, for centuries, as we saw. The idea of a bunch of pontifices in a collegium pontificum headed by a pontifex maximus/summus derives not at all from the institution of Christ but from the morphing of leadership and ministry in the church after the Roman Imperial state religion appropriated the model for its pastors as Christianity took on the role of state religion, then further took on its Eastern and Western characters due to the collapse of the Western Empire and its subsequent history centuries before the collapse of the Eastern Empire.

The differences between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism as a religious image of the differences between the culture of the Eastern and Western Roman Empire. The Western Church, complete with a pontifex maximus, inherited Rome's administrative and legal bent, and the Eastern Church inherited Constantinople's more philosophical and artistic bent. The formal schism between the two in 1054 had immediate theological causes, but was culturally inevitable, bound to happen theology or not.

Remember, in the East, the Eastern Empire still existed at this time, but the Western Empire was gone, with the intended reincarnation as the Holy Roman Empire in its place, and the recognition of the bishop of Rome as "first among equals" at world-wide, called ecumenical from the Greek, church councils was then also extended to the bishop of Constantinople, the new Rome. In the lands of the former Western Empire the modern languages spoken are derived from Latin, which remained its liturgical language, whereas in the lands of the former Eastern Empire the languages are not derived from Greek, which was not its liturgical language other than for Greeks.

Thus the primary remains of this in the West is the Roman administrative, legalistic flair, and in the East the philosophical, mystical flair. In Roman Catholicism, even with the moderating and revisionist slant given it by Vatican II, one hears the religion of the Western Roman Empire, and in Eastern Orthodoxy one hears the religion of the Eastern Roman Empire.

While the Roman Empire, as a unified whole and as a divided empire, has passed into history, their eventual religions have not. And so the reformation of the church, the freeing of it from the accretions of Imperial culture East and West, was to happen from outside the Empire, had to happen from outside the Empire. And so it did, the Reformation being then not an event in the Western Church surviving the Western Empire, but an event in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church from outside the Empire, undivided, Eastern, or Western.

And about those accretions. They aren't necessarily bad. What's bad is if they contradict the books the church has said we can rely on, the Bible. Not if they are not found in the Bible, if they contradict the Bible. Big difference. What's also bad is, whether they do or don't contradict the Bible, if they are made into essentials. On these points, the Reformation would go well beyond the Lutheran Reformation to a near eradication of them, and then a replacement of them with other forms of righteousness before God through works rather than Jesus Christ, either way confusing justification before God with santification, personal growth in faith and grace -- confusing participation in the sacraments, personal decisions for Christ, avoidance of immorality and doing good works in general, with justification before God through faith given by the Holy Spirit apart from any external or internal work or act on my part in the saving Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

This post- and non-Lutheran Reformation resulted first in new state churches, sometimes forcibly including Lutheran ones (the Prussian Union comes to mind) and later in churches influenced by the "Enlightenment" political and theological theories which have become the unofficial state religions of the modern Western secular liberal states, abandoning even their prior confessions of faith, one broad group representing the religious Left and another the religious Right.

XV. Conclusion.

So, confessional Lutheran churches uphold and teach the faith of Jesus Christ taught in the Bible and accurately stated in the Book of Concord, and uphold and maintain the usual customs, rejecting only what contradicts the Gospel and recognising that the rest are customs, not Gospel or even Law. We are the churchly echo of neither the ancient empire nor the contemporary liberal state. And we worship accordingly, in the historical liturgy of the Divine Service, where God the Divine serves us his Word and Sacrament, not the other way around.

And after all this stuff, the great thing is, all you really need to know is laid out in the Little Catechism. The thing I like in poking around in all this stuff is that you appreciate ever more fully that all you really need to know is laid out in the Little Catechism, and that, in view of all this stuff that happened, what a miracle of the Holy Spirit it is that we have it!

Some asides. You pick up some interesting tidbits along the way too. Like the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres, a figure of which tops the capital of Nebraska, is why we call it cereal. Or that July is for Julius Caesar and August for Caesar Augustus. You get to have your own month when you're a founding emperor and then proclaimed a god, otherwise we'd call the old fifth and sixth Roman months Quintember and Sextember, as we still do the remaining months September (7th), October (8th), November (9th) and December (10th). So besides all the big stuff we just waded though, this stuff is still in our lives right down to what's for breakfast and what we call what day it is.

Textual note.  This post first appeared on 1 September 2007. It became the most consistently hit page on this blog. As time went on I posted material related to it in "A Wonder of the World and Forest Fires" on 27 August 2007, "25 July A.D. 306 in Eboracum, Britannia" on 25 July 2008, and "More Twelve Days of Christmas, 2008" on 27 December 2008. And there was more stuff not included in any of the four.

So, in 2009 this post appeared as an entirely new entity, consisting of the new material and material rewritten from the four earlier posts, within the structure of the original Eastern/Western post, and published on 16 January, the date of the founding of the Roman Empire. For 2010, additional new material on the current state of the old secular powers was included. For 2011, the post was expanded yet again within the original format, to include related material from posts on Jerome, Augustine, and Boethius and their times that I posted in 2010. The 2012 - 2015 versions have only slight revisions, mostly updates on "where are they now".

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