Chapter IX: Part 9

Edmund, who received the name of "Ironside" from his hardy valor, possessed courage and abilities sufficient to have prevented his country from sinking into those calamities, but not to raise it from that abyss of misery into which it had already fallen. Among the other misfortunes of the English, treachery and disaffection had crept in among the nobility and prelates; and Edmund found no better expedient for stopping the further progress of these fatal evils than to lead his army instantly into the field, and to employ them against the common enemy. After meeting with some success at Gillingham, he prepared himself to decide, in one general engagement, the fate of his crown; and at Scoerston, in the county of Gloucester, he offered battle to the enemy, who were commanded by Canute and Edric. Fortune, in the beginning of the day, declared for him; but Edric, having cut off the head of one Osmer, whose countenance resembled that of Edmund, fixed it on a spear, carried it through the ranks in triumph, and called aloud to the English that it was time to fly; for, behold! the head of their sovereign. And though Edmund, observing the consternation of the troops, took off his helmet, and showed himself to them, the utmost he could gain by his activity and valor was to leave the victory undecided. Edric now took a surer method to ruin him, by pretending to desert to him; and as Edmund was well acquainted with his power, and probably knew no other of the chief nobility in whom he could repose more confidence, he was obliged, notwithstanding the repeated perfidy of the man, to give him a considerable command in the army. A battle soon after ensued at Assington, in Essex, where Edric, flying in the beginning of the day, occasioned the total defeat of the English, followed by a great slaughter of the nobility. The indefatigable Edmund, however, had still resources. Assembling a new army at Gloucester, he was again in condition to dispute the field, when the Danish and English nobility, equally harassed with those convulsions, obliged their kings to come to a compromise and to divide the kingdom between them by treaty. Canute reserved to himself the northern division, consisting of Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumberland, which he had entirely subdued. The southern parts were left to Edmund. This prince survived the treaty about a month. He was murdered at Oxford by two of his chamberlains, accomplices of Edric, who thereby made way for the succession of Canute the Dane to the crown of England.

The English, who had been unable to defend their country and maintain their independency under so active and brave a prince as Edmund, could after his death expect nothing but total subjection from Canute, who, active and brave himself, and at the head of a great force, was ready to take advantage of the minority of Edwin and Edward, the two sons of Edmund. Yet this conqueror, who was commonly so little scrupulous, showed himself anxious to cover his injustice under plausible pretences. Before he seized the dominions of the English princes, he summoned a general assembly of the states in order to fix the succession of the kingdom. He here suborned some nobles to depose that, in the treaty of Gloucester, it had been verbally agreed, either to name Canute, in case of Edmund's death, successor to his dominions or tutor to his children--for historians vary in this particular; and that evidence, supported by the great power of Canute, determined the states immediately to put the Danish monarch in possession of the government. Canute, jealous of the two princes, but sensible that he should render himself extremely odious if he ordered them to be despatched in England, sent them abroad to his ally, the King of Sweden, whom he desired, as soon as they arrived at his court, to free him, by their death, from all further anxiety. The Swedish monarch was too generous to comply with the request; but being afraid of drawing on himself a quarrel with Canute, by protecting the young princes, he sent them to Solomon, King of Hungary, to be educated in his court. The elder, Edwin, was afterward married to the sister of the King of Hungary; but the English prince dying without issue, Solomon gave his sister-in-law, Agatha, daughter of the emperor Henry II, in marriage to Edward, the younger brother; and she bore him Edgar, Atheling, Margaret, afterward Queen of Scotland, and Christina, who retired into a convent.

Canute, though he had reached the great point of his ambition in obtaining possession of the English crown, was obliged at first to make great sacrifices to it; and to gratify the chief of the nobility, by bestowing on them the most extensive governments and jurisdictions. He created Thurkill Earl or Duke of East Anglia--for these titles were then nearly of the same import--Yric of Northumberland, and Edric of Mercia; reserving only to himself the administration of Wessex. But seizing afterward a favorable opportunity, he expelled Thurkill and Yric from their governments, and banished them the kingdom; he put to death many of the English nobility, on whose fidelity he could not rely, and whom he hated on account of their disloyalty to their native prince. And even the traitor Edric, having had the assurance to reproach him with his services, was condemned to be executed and his body to be thrown into the Thames; a suitable reward for his multiplied acts of perfidy and rebellion.

Canute also found himself obliged, in the beginning of his reign, to load the people with heavy taxes in order to reward his Danish followers: he exacted from them at one time the sum of seventy-two thousand pounds, besides eleven thousand which he levied on London alone. He was probably willing, from political motives, to mulct severely that city, on account of the affection which it had borne to Edmund and the resistance which it had made to the Danish power in two obstinate sieges.[25] But these rigors were imputed to necessity; and Canute, like a wise prince, was determined that the English, now deprived of all their dangerous leaders, should be reconciled to the Danish yoke, by the justice and impartiality of his administration. He sent back to Denmark as many of his followers as he could safely spare; he restored the Saxon customs in a general assembly of the states; he made no distinction between Danes and English in the distribution of justice; and he took care, by a strict execution of law, to protect the lives and properties of all his people. The Danes were gradually incorporated with his new subjects; and both were glad to obtain a little respite from those multiplied calamities from which the one, no less than the other, had, in their fierce contest for power, experienced such fatal consequences.

[Footnote 25: In one of these sieges Canute diverted the course of the Thames, and by that means brought his ships above London bridge.]

The removal of Edmund's children into so distant a country as Hungary was, next to their death, regarded by Canute as the greatest security to his government: he had no further anxiety, except with regard to Alfred and Edward, who were protected and supported by their uncle Richard, Duke of Normandy. Richard even fitted out a great armament, in order to restore the English princes to the throne of their ancestors; and though the navy was dispersed by a storm, Canute saw the danger to which he was exposed from the enmity of so warlike a people as the Normans. In order to acquire the friendship of the duke, he paid his addresses to Queen Emma, sister of that prince, and promised that he would leave the children whom he should have by that marriage in possession of the Crown of England. Richard complied with his demand and sent over Emma to England, where she was soon after married to Canute. The English, though they disapproved of her espousing the mortal enemy of her former husband and his family, were pleased to find at court a sovereign to whom they were accustomed, and who had already formed connections with them; and thus Canute, besides securing, by this marriage, the alliance of Normandy, gradually acquired, by the same means, the confidence of his own subjects. The Norman prince did not long survive the marriage of Emma; and he left the inheritance of the duchy to his eldest son of the same name, who, dying a year after him without children, was succeeded by his brother Robert, a man of valor and abilities.

Canute, having settled his power in England beyond all danger of a revolution, made a voyage to Denmark, in order to resist the attacks of the King of Sweden; and he carried along with him a great body of the English, under the command of Earl Godwin. This nobleman had here an opportunity of performing a service, by which he both reconciled the King's mind to the English nation and, gaining to himself the friendship of his sovereign, laid the foundation of that immense fortune which he acquired to his family. He was stationed next the Swedish camp, and observing a favorable opportunity, which he was obliged suddenly to seize, he attacked the enemy in the night, drove them from their trenches, threw them into disorder, pursued his advantage, and obtained a decisive victory over them. Next morning Canute, seeing the English camp entirely abandoned, imagined that those disaffected troops had deserted to the enemy: he was agreeably surprised to find that they were at that time engaged in pursuit of the discomfited Swedes. He was so pleased with this success, and with the manner of obtaining it, that he bestowed his daughter in marriage upon Godwin, and treated him ever after with entire confidence and regard.

In another voyage, which he made afterward to Denmark, Canute attacked Norway, and, expelling the just but unwarlike Olaus, kept possession of his kingdom till the death of that prince. He had now by his conquests and valor attained the utmost height of grandeur: having leisure from wars and intrigues, he felt the unsatisfactory nature of all human enjoyments; and equally weary of the glories and turmoils of this life, he began to cast his view toward that future existence, which it is so natural for the human mind, whether satiated by prosperity or disgusted with adversity, to make the object of its attention. Unfortunately, the spirit which prevailed in that age gave a wrong direction to his devotion: instead of making compensation to those whom he had injured by his former acts of violence, he employed himself entirely in those exercises of piety which the monks represented as the most meritorious. He built churches, he endowed monasteries, he enriched the ecclesiastics, and he bestowed revenues for the support of chantries at Assington and other places, where he appointed prayers to be said for the souls of those who had there fallen in battle against him. He even undertook a pilgrimage to Rome, where he resided a considerable time: besides obtaining from the pope some privileges for the English school erected there, he engaged all the princes through whose dominions he was obliged to pass to desist from those heavy impositions and tolls which they were accustomed to exact from the English pilgrims. By this spirit of devotion, no less than by his equitable and politic administration, he gained, in a good measure, the affections of his subjects.

Canute, the greatest and most powerful monarch of his time, sovereign of Denmark and Norway, as well as of England, could not fail of meeting with adulation from his courtiers; a tribute which is liberally paid even to the meanest and weakest princes. Some of his flatterers, breaking out one day in admiration of his grandeur, exclaimed that everything was possible for him; upon which the monarch, it is said, ordered his chair to be set on the sea-shore while the tide was rising; and as the waters approached, he commanded them to retire, and to obey the voice of him who was lord of the ocean. He feigned to sit some time in expectation of their submission; but when the sea still advanced toward him, and began to wash him with its billows, he turned to his courtiers, and remarked to them that every creature in the universe was feeble and impotent, and that power resided with one Being alone, in whose hands were all the elements of nature; who could say to the ocean, "Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther," and who could level with his nod the most towering piles of human pride and ambition.

The only memorable action which Canute performed after his return from Rome was an expedition against Malcolm, King of Scotland. During the reign of Ethelred, a tax of a shilling a hide had been imposed on all the lands of England. It was commonly called _danegelt_; because the revenue had been employed either in buying peace with the Danes or in making preparations against the inroads of that hostile nation. That monarch had required that the same tax should be paid by Cumberland, which was held by the Scots; but Malcolm, a warlike prince, told him that as he was always able to repulse the Danes by his own power, he would neither submit to buy peace of his enemies nor pay others for resisting them. Ethelred, offended at this reply, which contained a secret reproach on his own conduct, undertook an expedition against Cumberland; but though he committed ravages upon the country, he could never bring Malcolm to a temper more humble or submissive. Canute, after his accession, summoned the Scottish King to acknowledge himself a vassal for Cumberland to the Crown of England; but Malcolm refused compliance, on pretence that he owed homage to those princes only who inherited that kingdom by right of blood. Canute was not of a temper to bear this insult; and the King of Scotland soon found that the sceptre was in very different hands from those of the feeble and irresolute Ethelred. Upon Canute's appearing on the frontiers with a formidable army, Malcolm agreed that his grandson and heir, Duncan, whom he put in possession of Cumberland, should make the submissions required, and that the heirs of Scotland should always acknowledge themselves vassals to England for that province.

Canute passed four years in peace after this enterprise, and he died at Shaftesbury; leaving three sons, Sweyn, Harold, and Hardicanute. Sweyn, whom he had by his first marriage with Alfwen, daughter of the Earl of Hampshire, was crowned in Norway; Hardicanute, whom Emma had borne him, was in possession of Denmark; Harold, who was of the same marriage with Sweyn, was at that time in England.

HENRY III DEPOSES THE POPE

THE GERMAN EMPIRE CONTROLS THE PAPACY

A.D. 1048

FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS

JOSEPH E. DARRAS

(After the extinction of the Carlovingian line, A.D. 887, and the division of the empire, the Church of Rome and the Christian world fell into a highly demoralized state, attributable to the destitution to which ecclesiastical bodies were reduced by the frequent predations of bands of robbers, the immorality of the priesthood, and the power of electing the popes falling into the hands of intriguing and licentious patrician females, whom aspirants to the holy see were not ashamed to bribe for their favors. So depraved had the general spirit of the age become that Pope Boniface VII, A.D. 974, robbed St. Peter's Church and its treasury and fled to Constantinople; while Pope John XVIII, A.D. 1003, was prevented, by general indignation only, from accepting a sum of money from Emperor Basil to recognize the right of the Greek patriarch to the title of "Universal Bishop."

A child, son of one of the old noble houses, was consecrated pope as Benedict IX, A.D. 1033, according to some authorities, at the age of ten or twelve years. He became noted for his profligacy and was driven from his throne, the Romans electing, as Pope Sylvester III, John, Bishop of Sabina, who is said to have paid a high price for the dignity. Benedict, however, regained the papal seat shortly afterward, and drove Sylvester into a refuge, but later sold the office to John Gratianus, Arch-priest of Rome, who as Gregory VI made laudable attempts to effect a general reformation. He failed in his efforts, and a chaotic state ensued; three popes claiming the triple tiara and reigning in Rome: Gregory at the Vatican, Benedict in the Lateran, and Sylvester in the Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

On the invitation of the Roman people, Henry the Black, the young and zealous Emperor of Germany, repaired to Italy in 1045 and summoned a great ecclesiastical council at Sutri, which passed a decree deposing the three papal claimants. The same council elected to the tiara the German bishop of Bamberg, who reigned in the holy see as Clement II. One of his first ceremonies, carried out with all the gorgeous pomp of the Roman Church, was the imperial coronation of Henry and his wife Agnes.

But Henry's action, while "it dragged the Church out of the slough it had fallen into," startled the ecclesiastical world, and was a prelude to the struggle between pope and emperor which, under St. Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII, culminated in the independent establishment of the pontificate and papal power.)

FERDINAND GREGOROVIUS

Henry III, the son and successor of Conrad, was young, vigorous, and God-fearing; a noble prince called, like Charles and Otto the Great, to restore Rome, to deliver it from tyrants, and to reform the almost annihilated Church. For the papacy had been still further dishonored by Benedict IX. It seemed as if a demon from hell, in the disguise of a priest, occupied the chair of Peter and profaned the sacred mysteries of religion by his insolent courses.

Benedict IX, restored in 1038, protected by his brother Gregory, who ruled the city as senator of the Romans, led unchecked the life of a Turkish sultan in the palace of the Lateran. He and his family filled Rome with robbery and murder; all lawful conditions had ceased. Toward the end of 1044, or in the beginning of the following year, the populace at length rose in furious revolt; the Pope fled, but his vassals defended the Leonina against the attacks of the Romans. The Trasteverines remained faithful to Benedict, and he summoned friends and adherents; Count Gerard of Galeria advanced with a numerous body of horse to the Saxon gate and repulsed the Romans. An earthquake added to the horrors in the revolted city. The ancient chronicle which relates these events does not tell us whether Trastevere was taken by assault after a three-days' struggle, but merely relates that the Romans unanimously renounced Benedict, and elected Bishop John of the Sabina to the papacy as Sylvester III. John also owed his elevation to the gold with which he bribed the rebels and their leader, Girardo de Saxo. This powerful Roman had first promised his daughter in marriage to the Pope, and afterward refused her; for the Pope had not hesitated, in all seriousness, to sue for the hand of a Roman lady, a relative of his own. Her father lured him on with the hope of winning her, but required that Benedict should in the first place resign the tiara.

The Pope, burning with passion, consented and fulfilled his promise during the revolt of the Romans. He was mastered by the demon of sensuality; it was reported by the superstitious that he associated with devils in the woods and attracted women by means of spells. It was asserted that books of magic, with which he had conjured demons, had been found in the Lateran. His banishment meanwhile aroused the haughty spirit of his house, and anger at Gerard's treacherous conduct proved a further incentive to revenge. His numerous adherents still held St. Angelo, and his gold acquired him new friends. After a forty-nine days' reign, Sylvester III was driven from the apostolic chair, which the Tusculan reascended in March, 1045.

Benedict now ruled for some time in Rome, while Sylvester III found safety either within some fortified monument in the city or in some Sabine fortress, and continued to call himself pope. A beneficent darkness veils the horrors of this year. Hated by the Romans, insecure on his throne, in constant terror of the renewal of the revolution, Benedict eventually found himself obliged to abdicate. The abbot Bartholomew of Grotta Ferrata urged him to the step, but he unblushingly sold the papacy for money like a piece of merchandise. In exchange for a considerable income, that is to say, for the revenue of "Peter's pence" from England, he made over his papal dignities by a formal contract to John Gratianus, a rich archpriest of the Church of St. John at the Latin gate, on May 1, 1045.

Could the holiest office in Christendom be more deeply outraged than by a sale such as this? And yet so general was the traffic in ecclesiastical dignities throughout the world that when a pope finally sold the chair of Peter the scandal did not strike society as specially heinous.

John Gratian, or Gregory VI, set aside the canon law with a defiant courage which perhaps was only understood by the minority of his compatriots; he bought the papacy in order to wrest it from the hands of a criminal, and this remarkable Pope, although regarded as an idiot in that terrible period, was possibly an earnest and high-minded man. Scarcely had Peter Damian knowledge of this traffic when he wrote to Gregory VI on his elevation, rejoicing that the dove with the olive branch had returned to the ark. The Saint may have known the Pope personally and have been persuaded of his spiritual virtues. Even the chroniclers of the time, who represent him--assuredly with injustice--as so rude and simple that he was obliged to appoint a representative, are unable to fasten any crime upon him. The Cluniacs in France and the congregations of Italy all hailed his elevation as the beginning of a better time, and side by side with this simonist Pope a young and brave monk suddenly appears, who, after the heroic exertions of a lifetime, was to raise the degenerate papacy to a height hitherto undreamed of. Hildebrand first issues from obscurity by the side of Gregory VI; he became the Pope's chaplain, and this fact alone proves that Gregory was no idiot. How far Hildebrand's activity already extended, whether he had any share in Gregory's illegal elevation, we do not know; but in the "representative" spoken of by the chronicles, we may easily recognize the gifted young monk who was Gregory's counsellor, and who later took the name of Gregory VII in grateful recollection of his predecessor.

While Benedict IX pursued his wild career in Tusculum or Rome, Gregory VI remained Pope for nearly two years. His desire was to save the Church, which stood in need of a drastic reform--and which soon afterward obtained it. The papacy, lately a hereditary fief of the counts of Tusculum, was utterly ruined; the _dominium temporale_, the ominous gift of the Carlovingians, the box of Pandora in the hands of the Pope from which a thousand evils had arisen, had disappeared, since the Church could scarcely command the fortresses in the immediate neighborhood of the city. A hundred lords, the captains or vassals of the Pope, stood ready to fall upon Rome; every road was infested with robbers, every pilgrim was robbed; within the city the churches lay in ruins, while the priests caroused. Daily assassinations made the streets insecure. Roman nobles, sword in hand, forced their way into St. Peter's itself to snatch the gifts which pious hands still placed upon the altar.

The chronicler who describes this state of things extols Gregory for having repressed it. The captains, it is true, besieged the city, but the Pope boldly assembled the militia, restored a degree of order, and even conquered several fortresses in the district. Sylvester had apparently made an attempt on Rome; he was, however, defeated by Gregory's energy. The short and dark period of Gregory's pontificate was terrible, and his severity toward the robbers soon made him hated by the nobles and even by the equally rapacious cardinals.

Whatever he may have done under the influence of French and Italian monks to rescue the Church from its state of barbarous confusion, it was--as in the time of Otto the Great--by the German dictatorship alone that it could be saved. The exertions of Gregory VI soon ceased to bear any result; his means were exhausted, and his opponents gradually overpowered him. So utter was the state of anarchy that it is said that all three popes lived in the city at the same time: one in the Lateran, a second in St. Peter's, and a third in Santa Maria Maggiore.

The eyes of the better citizens at length turned to the King of Germany. The archdeacon Peter convoked a synod without consulting Gregory, and it was here resolved urgently to invite Henry to come and take the imperial crown and raise the Church from the ruin into which it had fallen.

Henry, coming from Augsburg, crossed the Brenner, and arrived at Verona in September, 1046, accompanied by a great army and filled with the ardent desire of becoming the reformer of the Church. No enemy opposed him, the bishops and dukes, among them the powerful margrave Boniface of Tuscany, did homage without delay. The Roman situation was provisionally discussed at a great synod in Pavia. Gregory VI now hastened to meet the King at Piacenza, where he hoped to gain the monarch to his side. Henry, however, dismissed him with the explanation that his fate and that of the antipopes would be canonically decided by a council.

Shortly before Christmas he assembled one thousand and forty-six bishops and Roman clergy at Sutri. The three popes were summoned, and Gregory and Sylvester III actually appeared. Sylvester was deposed from his pontificate and condemned to penance in a monastery. Gregory VI, however, gave the council cause to doubt its competence to judge him. Gregory, who was an upright man, or one at least conscious of good intentions, consented publicly to describe the circumstances of his elevation, and was thereby forced to condemn himself as guilty of simony and unworthy of the papal office. He quietly laid down the insignia of the papacy, and his renunciation did him honor. Henry, with the bishops and the margrave Boniface, immediately started for the city, which did not shut its gates against him; for Benedict II had hid himself in Tusculum, and his brothers did not venture on any resistance. Rome, weary of the Tusculum horrors, joyfully accepted the German King as her deliverer. Never afterward was a king of Germany received with such glad acclamations by the Roman people; never again did any other effect such great results or achieve the like changes. With the Roman expedition of Henry III begins a new epoch in the history of the city, and more especially of the Church. It seemed as if the waters of the deluge had subsided, and as if men from the ark had landed on the rock of Peter to give new races and new laws to a new world. What law, that stern and terrible power which kills, binds, and holds together, signifies in human affairs, has indeed been experienced by few periods so fully as by that with which we have now to deal.

A synod, assembled in St. Peter's on December 23d, again pronounced all three popes deposed, and a canonical pope had consequently to be elected. Like Otto III before his coronation, Henry had also at his side a man who was to wear the tiara and to confer the crown upon himself.

Adalbert of Hamburg and Bremen having refused the papacy, the King chose Suidger of Bamberg. The royal command was all that was required to place the candidate on the sacred chair. Henry, however, would not violate any of the canonical forms. As King of Germany he possessed no right either over that city or yet over the papal election. The right must first be conferred upon him, and this was done by a treaty which he had already concluded with the Romans at Sutri. "Roman Signors," said Henry at the second sitting of the synod on December 24th, "however thoughtless your conduct may hitherto have been, I still accord you liberty to elect a pope according to ancient custom; choose from among this assembly whom you will."

The Romans replied: "When the royal majesty is present, the assent to the election does not belong to us, and, when it is lacking, you are represented by your _patricius_. For in the affairs of the republic the patricius is not patricius of the pope, but of the emperor. We admit that we have been so thoughtless as to appoint idiots as popes. It now behooves your imperial power to give the Roman republic the benefit of law, the ornament of manners, and to lend the arm of protection to the Church."

The senators of the year 1046, who so meekly surrendered the valuable right to the German King, heeded not the shades of Alberic and the three Crescentii; since these--their patricians--would have accused them of treason.

The Romans of these days were, however, ready for any sacrifice so that they obtained freedom from the Tusculum tyranny. Nothing more clearly shows the utter depth of their exhaustion and the extent of their sufferings than the light surrender of a right which it had formerly cost Otto the Great such repeated efforts to extort from the city. Rome made the humiliating confession that she possessed no priest worthy of the papacy, that the clergy in the city were rude and utter simonists. All other circumstances, moreover, forbade the election of a Roman or even of an Italian to the papacy.

The Romans besought Henry to give them a good pope; he presented the Bishop of Bamberg to the assenting clergy, and led the reluctant candidate to the apostolic chair. Clement II, consecrated on Christmas Day, 1046, immediately placed the imperial crown on Henry's head and on that of his wife Agnes. There were still many Romans who had been eye-witnesses of like transactions--that is to say, of papal election and imperial coronation following one the other in immediate succession--in the case of Otto III and Henry V; who, as they now saw the second German pope mount the chair of Peter, may have recalled the fact that the first had only lived a few sad years in Rome and had died in misery.

The coronation of Henry III was performed under such significant conditions and in such perfect tranquillity that it offers the most fitting opportunity for describing in a few sentences the ceremonial of the imperial coronation.

Since Charles the Great, these repeated ceremonies, with the more frequent coronations or Lateran processions of the popes, formed the most brilliant spectacle in Rome.

When the Emperor-elect approached with his wife and retinue, he first took an oath to the Romans, at the little bridge on the Neronian Field, faithfully to observe the rights and usages of the city. On the day of the coronation he made his entrance through the Porta Castella close to St. Angelo and here repeated the oath. The clergy and the corporations of Rome greeted him at the Church of Santa Maria Traspontina, on a legendary site called the Terebinthus of Nero. The solemn procession then advanced to the steps of the cathedral. Senators walked by the side of the King, the prefect of the city carried the naked sword before him, and his chamberlains scattered money.

Arrived at the steps he dismounted from his horse and, accompanied by his retinue, ascended to the platform where the Pope, surrounded by the higher clergy, awaited him sitting. The King stooped to kiss the Pope's foot, tendered the oath to be an upright protector of the Church, received from the Pope the kiss of peace, and was adopted by him as the son of the Church. With solemn song both King and Pope entered the Church of Santa Maria in Turri, beside the steps of St. Peter's, and here the King was formally made canon of the cathedral. He then advanced, conducted by the Lateran count of the palace and by the _primicerius_ of the judges, to the silver door of the cathedral, where he prayed, and the Bishop of Albano delivered the first oration.

Innumerable mystic ceremonies awaited the King in St. Peter's itself. Here, a short way from the entrance, was the _rota porphyretica_, a round porphyry stone inserted in the pavement, on which the King and Pope knelt. The imperial candidate here made his profession of faith, the Cardinal-bishop of Portus placed himself in the middle of the rota and pronounced the second oration. The King was then draped in new vestments, was made a cleric in the sacristy by the Pope, was clad with tunic, dalmatica, pluviale, mitre and sandals, and was then led to the altar of St. Maurice, whither his wife, after similar but less fatiguing ceremonies, accompanied him. The Bishop of Ostia here anointed the King on the right arm and neck and delivered the third oration.

If the Emperor-elect were fitted by the dignity of his calling, then the solemnity of the function, the mystic and tedious pomp, the magnificent monotone of prayer and song in the ancient cathedral, hallowed by so many exalted memories, must have stirred his inmost soul. The pinnacle of all human ambition, the crown of Charles the Great, lay glittering before his longing eyes on the altar of the Prince of the Apostles. The Pope, however, first placed a ring on the finger of the Anointed, as symbol of the faith, the permanence and strength of his Catholic rule; with similar formulæ girt him with the sword, and finally placed the crown upon his head. "Take," he said, "the symbol of fame, the diadem of royalty, the crown, the empire, in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; renounce the archfiend and all sins, be upright and merciful, and live in such pious love that thou mayest hereafter receive the everlasting crown in company with the saints, from our Lord Jesus Christ."

The church resounded with the Gloria and the Laudes: "Life and victory to the Emperor, to the Roman and the German army," and with the endless acclamations of the rude soldiers who hailed their King in German, Slav, and Romance tongues.

The Emperor divested himself of the symbols of the empire, and now ministered to the Pope as subdeacon at mass. The Count Palatine afterward removed the sandals, and put the red imperial boots with the spurs of St. Maurice upon him. Whereupon the entire procession, accompanied by the Pope, left the church and advanced along the so-called "Triumphal Way," through the flower-bedecked city, amid the ringing of all the bells, to the Lateran. At special stations were posted clergy singing praises, and the _scholæ_ or guilds placed to salute the Emperor as he passed. Chamberlains scattered money before and behind the procession, and all the scholæ and the officials of the palace received the _presbyterium_ or customary present of money. A banquet closed the solemnities in the papal palace.

Such are merely the barest outlines of an imperial coronation of this period. The ceremonies, borrowed from Byzantine pomp, had been established since Charles the Great, and had remained essentially the same, although, in the course of time, many details had been altered and others had been introduced. The magnificence of these spectacles is no longer rivalled by the pageantry of our days. The multitudes of dukes and counts, of bishops and abbots, knights and nobles with their retinues, the splendor of their attire, the strangeness of their faces and their tongues, the martial array of warriors, the mystic magnificence of the papacy with all its orders in such picturesque costume, the aspect of secular Rome, of judges and senators, of consuls and _duces_, of the militia with their banners, in curious, motley, fantastic attire; lastly, as the sublime scene of the drama, the stern, gloomy, ruinous city, through which the procession solemnly advanced--all combined to produce a picture of such mighty and universal historic interest that even a Roman accustomed to the pomp of Trajan's period could not have beheld it without feelings of astonishment.

These coronation processions restored to the city its character of metropolis. The Romans of the time might flatter themselves that the emperors whom they elected still ruled the universe. The strangers who flocked to the city freely distributed their gold, and the hungry populace could live for weeks on the proceeds of the coronation.

J.E. DARRAS

The accession of Gregory VI was the harbinger of an epoch of moral renaissance. The wise Pontiff, whose glory it had been to free the Church from a disgraceful yoke, proved himself worthy of the sovereign power, as much by the zeal with which he wielded as by the noble disinterestedness with which he resigned it. He found the temporal domains of the Church so far diminished that they hardly furnished the Pope with the means of an honorable maintenance. As guardian of the rights of the Church, he hurled an excommunication against the usurpers. The infuriated plunderers marched upon Rome with an armed force. The Pope also raised troops, took possession of St. Peter's church, drove out the wretches who stole the offerings laid upon the tombs of the Apostles, took back several estates belonging to the domain of the Church, and secured the safety of the roads, upon which pilgrims no longer ventured to travel except in caravans. This policy displeased the Romans, who had now become habituated to plunder. Their complaints induced Henry III, King of Germany, to hurry to Italy, and to summon a council at Sutri, during the Christmas festival, to inquire whether the election of Gregory should be regarded as simoniacal. The Pope and the clergy entertained the sincere conviction that they were justified in bringing about, even by means of money, the abdication of the unworthy Benedict, thus to end the scandal which so foully disgraced the Holy See. As opinions were divided on this point, Gregory VI, to set all doubts at rest, stripped himself, with his own hands, of the Pontifical vestments, and gave up to the bishops his pastoral staff. Having given to the world this noble example of self-denial, Gregory withdrew to the monastery of Cluny, bearing with him the consciousness of a great duty done. He died in that holy solitude in the odor of sanctity.

The see left vacant by the magnanimous humility of Gregory VI was bestowed, by general consent, upon Suidger, bishop of Bamberg, whom King Henry had brought with him to Rome. The new Pope, whose elevation was due only to universally known and acknowledged virtues, took the name of Clement II, and was crowned on Christmas-Day (A.D. 1046); in the same solemnity he bestowed the imperial title and crown upon Henry III, and his queen, Agnes, daughter of William, duke of Aquitaine.

The Emperor Henry, during his sojourn in Rome, sent for St. Peter Damian to assist the Pope by his counsels. The illustrious religious thus wrote to the Pontiff, in excuse for not complying: "Notwithstanding the Emperor's request, so expressive of his benevolence in my regard, I cannot devote to journeys the time which I have promised to consecrate to God in solitude. I send the imperial letter in order that your Holiness may decide, if it become necessary. My soul is weighed down with grief when I see the churches of our provinces plunged into shameful confusion through the fault of bad bishops and abbots. What does it profit us to learn that the Holy See has been brought out from darkness into the light, if we still remain buried in the same gloom of ignominy? But we hope that you are destined to be the savior of Israel. Labor then, Most Holy Father, once more to raise up the kingdom of justice, and use the vigor of discipline to humble the wicked and to raise the courage of the good."

On his return to Germany, Henry took the Pope with him. The city of Beneventum refused to open its gates to the Sovereign Pontiff, who, at the Emperor's request, pronounced against it a sentence of excommunication. Clement made but a short visit to his native land, and hastened back to Rome. His apostolic zeal led him to visit, in person, the churches of Umbria, the deplorable condition of which he had learned from the letter of St. Peter Damian. On reaching the monastery of St. Thomas of Aposello, he was seized with a mortal disease, before having accomplished the object of his journey. His last thought was for his beloved church of Bamberg, to which he sent, from his dying couch, a confirmation of all its former privileges, assuring it, in the most touching terms, of his unchanging affection.

DISSENSION AND SEPARATION OF THE GREEK AND ROMAN CHURCHES

A.D. 1054

HENRY FANSHAWE TOZER

JOSEPH DEHARBE

(In the division of the Greek Catholic Church from that at Rome, Protestant writers see a very natural and legitimate separation of two equal powers. Roman Catholics, regarding the Papal supremacy as established from the beginning, treat the division as a plot by evil and malignant men. Both viewpoints are here given.

The Eastern--or Greek Christian--Church, now known as the Holy Orthodox, Catholic, Apostolic, Oriental Church, first assumed individuality at Ephesus, and in the catechetical school of Alexandria, which flourished after A.D. 180. It early came into conflict with the Western or Roman Church: "the Eastern Church enacting creeds, and the Western Church discipline."

In the third century, Dionysius, Bishop of Rome, accused the Patriarch of Alexandria of error in points of faith, but the Patriarch vindicated his orthodoxy. Eastern monachism arose about 300; the Church of Armenia was founded about the same year; and the Church of Georgia or Iberia in 340.

Constantine the Great caused Christianity to be recognized throughout the Roman Empire, and in 325 convened the first ecumenical or general Council at Nicaea [Nice], when Arius, excommunicated for heresy by a provincial synod at Alexandria in 321, defended his views, but was condemned. Arianism long maintained a theological and political importance in the East and among the Goths and other nations converted by Arian missionaries. In A.D. 330, Constantine removed the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, and thence dates the definite establishment of the Greek Church and the serious rivalry with the Roman Church over claims of preeminence, differences of doctrine and ritual, charges of heresy and inter-excommunications, which ended in the final separation of the churches in 1054.

In A.D. 461, the churches of Egypt, Syria, and Armenia separated from the Church of Constantinople, over the Monophysite controversy on the single divine or single compound nature of the Son; in 634 the struggle with Mahometanism began; in 676 the Maronites of Lebanon formed a strong sect, which, in 1182, joined the Roman Church. In 988, Vladimir the Great of Russia founded the Græco-Russian Church, in which the Greek Church found a refuge, when Mahometanism was established at Constantinople, after its capture by the Turks in 1453.)

HENRY FANSHAWE TOZER

The separation of the Eastern and Western churches, which finally took place in the year 1054, was due to the operation of influences which had been at work for several centuries before. From very early times a tendency to divergence existed, arising from the tone of thought of the dominant races in the two, the more speculative Greeks being chiefly occupied with purely theological questions, while the more practical Roman mind devoted itself rather to subjects connected with the nature and destiny of man. In differences such as these there was nothing irreconcilable: the members of both communions professed the same forms of belief, rested their faith on the same divine persons, were guided by the same standard of morals, and were animated by the same hopes and fears; and they were bound by the first principles of their religion to maintain unity with one another. But in societies, as in individuals, inherent diversity of character is liable to be intensified by time, and thus counteracts the natural bonds of sympathy, and prevents the two sides from seeing one another's point of view. In this way it coöperates with and aggravates the force of other causes of disunion, which adverse circumstances may generate. Such causes there were in the present instance, political, ecclesiastical, and theological; and the nature of these it may be well for us to consider, before proceeding to narrate the history of the disruption.

The office of bishop of Rome assumed to some extent a political character as early as the time of the first Christian emperors. By them this prelate was constituted a sort of secretary of state for Christian affairs, and was employed as a central authority for communicating with the bishops in the provinces; so that after a while he acted as minister of religion and public instruction. As the civil and military power of the Western Empire declined, the extent of this authority increased; and by the time when Italy was annexed to the Empire of the East, in the reign of Justinian, the popes had become the political chiefs of Roman society. Nominally, indeed, they were subject to the exarch of Ravenna, as vicegerent of the Emperor at Constantinople, but in reality the inhabitants of Western Europe were more disposed to look to the spiritual potentate in the Imperial city as representing the traditions of ancient Rome.

The political rivalry that was thus engendered was sharpened by the traditional jealousy of Rome and Constantinople, which had existed ever since the new capital had been erected on the shores of the Bosporus. Then followed struggles for administrative superiority between the popes and the exarchs, culminating in the shameful maltreatment and banishment of Martin I by the emperor Constans--an event which the See of Rome could never forget.

The attempt to enforce iconoclasm in Central Italy was influential in causing the loss of that province to the Empire; and even after the Byzantine rule had ceased there, the controversy about images tended to keep alive the antagonism, because, although that question was once and again settled in favor of the maintenance of images, yet many of the emperors, in whose persons the power of the East was embodied, were foremost in advocating their destruction. Indeed, from first to last, owing to the close connection of church and state in the Byzantine empire, the unpopularity of the latter in Western Europe was shared by the former. To this must be added the contempt for one another's character which had arisen among the adherents of the two churches, for the Easterns had learned to regard the people of the West as ignorant and barbarous, and were esteemed by them in turn as mendacious and unmanly.

In ecclesiastical matters also the differences were of long standing. These related to questions of jurisdiction between the two patriarchates. Up to the eighth century, the patriarchate of the West included a number of provinces on the eastern side of the Adriatic--Illyricum, Dacia, Macedonia, and Greece. But Leo the Isaurian, who probably foresaw that Italy would ere long cease to form part of his dominions, and was unwilling that these important territories should own spiritual allegiance to one who was not his subject, altered this arrangement, and transferred the jurisdiction over them to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Against this measure the bishops of Rome did not fail to protest, and demands for their restoration were made up to the time of the final schism. A further ecclesiastical question, which in part depended on this, was that of the Church of the Bulgarians. The prince Bogoris had swayed to and fro in his inclinations between the two churches, and had ultimately given his allegiance to that of the East; but the controversy did not end there. According to the ancient territorial arrangement the Danubian provinces were made subject to the archbishopric of Thessalonica, and that city was included within the Western patriarchate; and on this ground Bulgaria was claimed by the Roman see as falling within that area. The matter was several times pressed on the attention of the Greek Church, especially on the occasion of the council held at Constantinople in 879, but in vain. The Eastern prelates replied evasively, saying that to determine the boundaries of dioceses was a matter which belonged to the sovereign. The Emperor, for his part, had good reason for not yielding, for by so doing he would not only have admitted into a neighboring country an agency which would soon have been employed for political purposes to his disadvantage, but would have justified the assumption on which the demand rested, viz., that the pope had a right to claim the provinces which his predecessors had lost. Thus this point of difference also remained open, as a source of irritation between the two churches.

But behind these questions another of far greater magnitude was coming into view, that of the papal supremacy. From being in the first instance the head of the Christian church in the old Imperial city, and afterward Patriarch of the West, and _primus inter pares_ in relation to the other spiritual heads of Christendom, the bishop of Rome had gradually claimed, on the strength of his occupying the _cathedra Petri_, a position which approximated more and more to that of supremacy over the whole Church. This claim had never been admitted in the East, but the appeals which were made from Constantinople to his judgment and authority, both at the time of the iconoclastic controversy and subsequently, lent some countenance to its validity.

But the great advance was made in the pontificate of Nicholas I (858-867), who promulgated, or at least recognized, the _False Decretals_. This famous compilation, which is now universally acknowledged to be spurious, and can be shown to be the work of that period, contains, among other documents, letters and decrees of the early bishops of Rome, in which the organization and discipline of the Church from the earliest time are set forth, and the whole system is shown to have depended on the supremacy of the popes. The newly discovered collection was recognized as genuine by Nicholas, and was accepted by the Western Church. The effect of this was at once to formulate all the claims which had before been vaguely asserted, and to give them the authority of unbroken tradition. The result to Christendom at large was in the highest degree momentous. It was impossible for future popes to recede from them, and equally impossible for other churches which valued their independence to acknowledge them. The last attempt on the part of the Eastern Church to arrange a compromise in this matter was made by the emperor Basil II, a potentate who both by his conquests and the vigor of his administration might rightly claim to negotiate with others on equal terms. By him it was proposed (A.D. 1024) that the Eastern Church should recognize the honorary primacy of the Western patriarch, and that he in turn should acknowledge the internal independence of the Eastern Church. These terms were rejected, and from that moment it was clear that the separation of the two branches of Christendom was only a question of time.