Alpha Book

On the other hand, in central Europe
survived in weakness an entirely different kind of state, called an
empire. The theory of an empire was a very ancient one--it meant a
state which should embrace all peoples of whatsoever race or language,
bound together in obedience to a common prince. Such, for example, had
been the ideal of the old Roman Empire, under whose Caesars practically
the whole civilized world had once been joined, so that the inhabitant
of Egypt or Armenia united with the citizen of Britain or Spain in
allegiance to the emperor. That empire retained its hold on portions of
eastern Europe until its final conquest by the Ottoman Turks in 1453,
but a thousand years earlier it had lost control of the West because of
external violence and internal weakness. So great, however, was the
strength of the idea of an "empire," even in the West, that Charlemagne
about the year 800 temporarily united what are now France, Germany,
Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium into what he persisted in styling
the "Roman Empire.


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