[Sidenote: Decline of the regal power in Germany as compared with France and England.]
That head, however, was no longer what he had been. The relative position of Germany and France was now exactly the reverse of that which they had occupied two centuries earlier. Rudolf was as conspicuously a weaker sovereign than Philip III of France, as the Franconian Emperor Henry III had been stronger than the Capetian Philip I. In every other state of Europe the tendency of events had been to centralize the administration and increase the power of the monarch, even in England not to diminish it: in Germany alone had political union become weaker, and the independence of the princes more confirmed. The causes of this change are not far to seek. They all resolve themselves into this one, that the German king attempted too much at once. The rulers of France, where manners were less rude than in the other Transalpine lands, and where the Third Estate rose into power more quickly, had reduced one by one the great feudataries by whom the first Capetians had been scarcely recognized. The English kings had annexed Wales, Cumbria, and part of Ireland, had obtained a prerogative great if not uncontrolled, and exercised no doubtful sway through every corner of their country. Both had won their successes by the concentration on that single object of their whole personal activity, and by the skilful use of every device whereby their feudal rights, personal, judicial, and legislative, could be applied to fetter the vassal. Meantime the German monarch, whose utmost efforts it would have needed to tame his fierce barons and maintain order through wide territories occupied by races unlike in dialect and customs, had been struggling with the Lombard cities and the Normans of South Italy, and had been for full two centuries the object of the unrelenting enmity of the Roman pontiff. And in this latter contest, by which more than by any other the fate of the Empire was decided, he fought under disadvantages far greater than his brethren in England and France. William the Conqueror had defied Hildebrand, William Rufus had resisted Anselm; but the Emperors Henry the Fourth and Barbarossa had to cope with prelates who were Hildebrand and Anselm in one; the spiritual heads of Christendom as well as the primates of their special realm, the Empire. And thus, while the ecclesiastics of Germany were a body more formidable from their possessions than those of any other European country, and enjoying far larger privileges, the Emperor could not, or could with far less effect, win them over by invoking against the Pope that national feeling which made the cry of Gallican liberties so welcome even to the clergy of France.