Letters from foreign lands . about him than I did. Not contentwith this meagre recollection, and havingmy ouriosity aroused, I began the search forbetter information. Very soon I discoveredthat he was the central figure of Europesgreatness, for reasons that I am about togive. He stood in the center of a charmedcircle of human ideality that has made theearth much different from what it would havebeen without him and without the idea herepiesented. To understand him and thisidea to which reference is made we must goback, in imagination, to the year S00 A. E>.when Pope Leo III crowned Charlema
Letters from foreign lands . about him than I did. Not contentwith this meagre recollection, and havingmy ouriosity aroused, I began the search forbetter information. Very soon I discoveredthat he was the central figure of Europesgreatness, for reasons that I am about togive. He stood in the center of a charmedcircle of human ideality that has made theearth much different from what it would havebeen without him and without the idea herepiesented. To understand him and thisidea to which reference is made we must goback, in imagination, to the year S00 A. E>.when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne ofFrance, king of kings and spiritual perpetu-ator of the Roman Empire. By the theoryof the Catholic Church Charlemagne becamethe ruler of all the earth. To him every kingbecame a subject and every kingdom a vas-salage. He had, at this time, conquered agoodly part of the earth, but in no spiritualsense was he believed to have the divine rightto rule until it came to him, from God,through coronation by the Pope. Never, at. c. 50 any time, did either he or his successorsbecome the accepted rulers of the kings ofall the earth. After his coronation he be-came, thence forth, so far as the Catholicworld is concerned, the Emperor of all trueCatholics, and of what is known as TheHoly Roman Empire. The various ordersof knights arose, at a later date, as the war-rior priesthood of this theoretical became to it what the Catholic clergyare to the church and its Pope, real soldiersof the cross, chosen defenders of Christ, andpromoters of Christian chivalry. Along theline of approved succession, to the title ofCaesar (Kaiser) in this Holy Roman Empire,came Frederick Barbarossa the king (Koenig)of the Germans. Because of the color of hisbeard his Italian subjects called him Bar-barossa, which literally means red-beard. Hewas crowned emperor, at Rome, by PopeAdrian IV, in 1155. His own ideas of thedignity of this honor are set forth in a letterwhich he wrote to his German prela
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booksubjectphysicians, bookyear1
