32 BIRDS IN LEGEND 



The destruction of the Italian and western half of the 

 old Roman empire was by the hands of northern bar- 

 barians who at first were mere conquerors and despoilers, 

 but finally, affected by their contact with civilization and 

 law, became residents in and rulers of Italy, and were 

 proud to assume the titles and what they could of the 

 dignity of Roman emperors. In the eighth century 

 Charlemagne became substantially master of the western 

 world, at least, and assumed the legionary eagle as he 

 did the purple robes of an Augustus; and his successors 

 held both with varying success until the tenth century, 

 when German kings became supreme and in 962 founded 

 that very unholy combination styled the Holy Roman 

 Empire. For hundreds of years this fiction was main- 

 tained. At times its eagle indicated a real lordship over 

 all Europe ; between times the states broke apart, and, as 

 each kept the royal standard, separate eagles contended 

 for mastery. Thus Prussia and other German kingdoms 

 retained on their shields the semblance of a "Roman" 

 eagle ; and the Teutonic Knights carried it on their savage 

 expeditions of "evangelization" to the eastern Baltic lands. 



All these were more or less conventional figures of 

 the Bird of Jove in its natural form, but a heraldic figure 

 with two heads turned, Janus like, in opposite directions, 

 was soon to be revived in the region where, as we have 

 seen, it had been familiar 2000 years before as the 

 national emblem of the Eastern, or Byzantine, Empire, 

 which for hundreds of years contested with Rome, both 

 the political and the ecclesiastical hegemony of the world. 

 Just when this symbol came into favor at Constantinople 

 is unknown, but one authority says it did not appear be- 

 fore the tenth century. At that time the Eastern em- 

 perors were recovering lost provinces and extending their 



