Chapter III: The High Noon of the Papacy (1)

[Sidenote: [985-1305 A.D.]]

During the minority of Otto III the Tuscan party exercised undisputed sway in Rome, without any check from without. No sooner was Otto II dead than Boniface VII reappeared from exile, and having seized his rival John XIV, and put him to death by starvation, for two years occupied unresisted the papal chair. Nevertheless Boniface VII was not a friend of the Tuscan party. By the people his dead body was treated with insults. Boniface’s successor, John XV, not proving as pliant as Crescentius the consul desired, was driven from Rome and reduced to the necessity of again appealing to the imperial authority. He was permitted to return.[b]

At his death, Otto III obliged the clergy and the people to elect his nephew Bruno, a German, and only twenty years of age. But the chief control of the city was at present in the hands of the senator Crescentius (Cencius), a man whom the emperor could not fail to view with feelings of fear and jealousy. On visiting Rome, therefore, for the purpose of receiving consecration, he undertook measures for his expulsion; but was prevented from putting them in practice by the persuasions of his nephew, who had assumed the appellation of Gregory V. The clemency of the pontiff was ill rewarded. Crescentius, on the departure of the emperor, drove him from the city and bestowed the pontifical dignity on a Greek, who took the name of John XVI. Gregory in the meantime fled into Lombardy; and, having summoned the several bishops to meet him at Pavia, he there excommunicated both Crescentius and John, his sentence, it is said, being supported by nearly all Italy, Germany, and France. The emperor, on his part, lost no time in proceeding to the capital, where his appearance struck instant terror into the hearts of the guilty Romans. John was apprehended when on the point of leaving the city; and the officers of the emperor, dreading lest their master should show any forbearance towards the culprit, immediately tore out his tongue and his eyes. Crescentius suffered the gentler punishment of decapitation; and Gregory, thus freed from his enemies, retained the papal dignity till the year 999. He was succeeded by Gerbert, archbishop of Ravenna, whom Otto caused to be elected in gratitude for the services he had rendered him as his instructor.[c]

THE DREAM OF OTTO III

[Sidenote: [999-1046 A.D.]]

The emperor was victorious, and exercised undisputed sway in the city of the cæsars. At this moment a grand scheme rose before his mental vision. Rome was to occupy again her ancient place as the seat of empire. An emperor was to sit on the throne of Constantine who would govern like Constantine, and raise the empire once more to the pinnacle of power. A truly apostolic pope was to be appointed, a second Silvester who would reform the clergy and correct the infamous avarice and vice of the Roman church.

On the death of Gregory V that scheme seemed about to be realised. The decree issued by Otto III for the election of his tutor Gerbert, who assumed the name of Silvester II, in allusion to the relations of Constantine and Silvester I, declared Rome to be the capital of the world, the Roman church to be the mother of churches; it described how the dignity of the Roman church had been obscured by her neglectful popes, how the property of the church had been squandered on the dregs of mankind, how the prelates had made everything venal, and so despoiled the very altars of the apostles. It denounced the donations of Constantine and Charles the Bald as void and forgeries; it assumed the power not only of electing, but, by God’s grace, of creating and ordaining the pope, and it granted eight counties for his support. The millennial period of the Christian era was to see all old abuses swept away, and the new régime established. The new age was to begin with a new Constantine and a new Silvester. The year 1000 was to inaugurate the change. But how vain are the schemes of men! The looked-for year came. It found Otto III indeed at Rome, with a palace built on the Aventine, with a regular administrative system for the government of the capital established. It found his tutor, Silvester II, on the chair of St. Peter to second and direct him. Before three years both of them were dead.

The death of Otto put an end to all attempts at reform. For none but Otto in that lawless age rose above his surroundings, to project a new era of improvement. None but his tutor, Silvester II, could sympathise with his projects. When, comet-like, these two luminaries had darted across the heaven and disappeared, the darkness of night grew thicker than before.[b]

With the disappearance of these two eminent men the popedom relapsed into its former degradation. The feudal nobility--that very “refuse” which, to use the expression of a contemporary writer, it had been Otto’s mission “to sweep from the capital”--regained their ascendency, and the popes became as completely the instruments of their will as they had once been of that of the Eastern emperor. A leading faction among this nobility was that of the counts of Tusculum, and for nearly half a century the popedom was a mere appanage in their family. As if to mark their contempt for the office, they carried the election of Theophylact, the son of Count Alberic, a lad scarcely twelve years of age, to the office. Benedict IX (1033-1045), such was the title given him, soon threw off even the external decencies of his office, and his pontificate was disgraced by every conceivable excess. As he grew to manhood his rule, in conjunction with that of his brother, who was appointed the patrician or prefect of the city, resembled that of two captains of banditti. The scandal attaching to his administration culminated when it was known that, in order to win the hand of a lady for whom he had conceived a passion, he had sold the pontifical office itself to another member of the Tusculan house, John, the arch-presbyter, who took the name of Gregory VI (1045-1046). His brief pontificate was chiefly occupied with endeavours to protect the pilgrims to Rome on their way to the capital from the lawless freebooters (who plundered them of their costly votive offerings as well as of their personal property), and with attempts to recover by main force the alienated possessions of the Roman church. Prior, however, to his purchase of the pontifical office, the citizens of Rome, weary of the tyranny and extortions of Benedict, had assembled of their own accord and elected another pope, John, bishop of Sabina, who took the name of Silvester III (rival pope, 1044-1046).

[Sidenote: [1044-1054 A.D.]]

In the meantime Benedict had been brought back to Rome by his powerful kinsmen, and now reclaimed the sacred office. For a brief period, therefore, there were to be seen three rival popes, each denouncing the other’s pretensions and combating them by armed force. But even in Rome the sense of decency and shame had not become altogether extinguished; and at length a party in the Roman church deputed Peter, their archdeacon, to carry a petition to the emperor Henry III, soliciting his intervention. The emperor, a man of deep religious feeling and lofty character, responded to the appeal. He had long noted, in common with other thoughtful observers, the widespread degeneracy which, taking example by the curia, was growing throughout the church at large, and especially visible in concubinage and simony, alike regarded as mortal sins in the clergy. He forthwith crossed the Alps and assembled a council at Sutri. The claims of the three rival popes were each in turn examined and pronounced invalid, and a German, Suidger (Suidgar or Suger), bishop of Bamberg, was elected to the office as Clement II (1046-1047).

THE GERMAN POPES

The degeneracy of the church at this period would seem to have been in some degree compensated by the reform of the monasteries, and from the great abbey of Cluny in Burgundy there now proceeded a line of German popes who in a great measure restored the dignity and reputation of their office. But, whether from the climate, always ill adapted to the German constitution, or from poison, as the contemporary chronicles not unfrequently suggest, it is certain that their tenure of office was singularly brief. Clement II died before the close of the year of his election. Damasus II, his successor, held the office only twenty-three days. Leo IX, who succeeded, held it for the exceptionally lengthened period of more than five years (1049-1054). This pontiff, although a kinsman and nominee of the emperor, refused to ascend the throne until his election had been ratified by the voice of the clergy and the people, and his administration of the office presented the greatest possible contrast to that of Benedict IX or Sergius III.

[Sidenote: [1049-1064 A.D.]]

In more than one respect it constitutes a crisis in the history of the popedom. In conjunction with his faithful friend and adviser, the great Hildebrand, he projected schemes of fundamental church reform, in which the suppression of simony and of married life (or concubinage, as it was styled by its denouncers) on the part of the clergy formed the leading features. In the year 1049, at three great synods successively convened at Rome, Rheims, and Mainz, new canons condemnatory of the prevailing abuses were enacted, and the principles of monasticism more distinctly asserted in contravention of those traditional among the secular clergy. Leo’s pontificate closed, however, ingloriously.

In an evil hour he ventured to oppose the occupation by the Normans, whose encroachments on Italy were just commencing. His ill-disciplined forces were no match for the Norman bands, composed of the best warriors of the age. He was himself made prisoner, detained for nearly a twelvemonth in captivity, and eventually released only to die, a few days after, of grief and humiliation. But, although his own career terminated thus ignominiously, the services rendered by Leo to the cause of Roman Catholicism were great and permanent; and of his different measures none contributed more effectually to the stability of his see than the formation of the college of cardinals.

THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS

The title of “cardinal” was not originally restricted to dignitaries connected with the church of Rome, but it had hitherto been a canonical requirement that all who attained to this dignity should have passed through the successive lower ecclesiastical grades in connection with one and the same foundation; the cardinals attached to the Roman church had consequently been all Italians, educated for the most part in the capital, having but little experience of the world beyond its walls, and incapable of estimating church questions in the light of the necessities and feelings of Christendom at large. By the change which he introduced, Leo summoned the leaders of the party of reform within the newly constituted college of cardinals, and thus attached to his office a body of able advisers with wider views and less narrow sympathies. By their aid the administration of the pontifical duties was rendered at once more easy and more effective.

The pontiff himself was liberated from his bondage to the capital, and, even when driven from Rome, could still watch over the interests of both his see and the entire church in all their extended relations; and the popedom must now be looked upon as entering upon another stage in its history--that of almost uninterrupted progress to the pinnacle of power. According to Anselm[o] of Lucca, it was during the pontificate of Leo, at the synod of Rheims above referred to, that the title of “apostolic bishop” (_apostolicus_) was first declared to belong to the pope of Rome exclusively.

The short pontificate of Nicholas II (1059-1061) is memorable chiefly for the fundamental change then introduced in the method of electing to the papal office. By a decree of the Second Lateran Council (1059), the nomination to the office was vested solely in the cardinal bishops--the lower clergy, the citizens, and the emperor retaining simply the right of intimating or withholding their assent. It was likewise enacted that the nominee should always be one of the Roman clergy, unless indeed no eligible person could be found among their number. At the same time the direst anathemas were decreed against all who should venture to infringe this enactment either in the letter or the spirit.

The preponderance thus secured to the ultramontane party and to Italian interests must be regarded as materially affecting the whole subsequent history of the popedom. The manner in which it struck at the imperial influence was soon made apparent in the choice of Nicholas’ successor, the line of German popes being broken through by the election of Anselm, bishop of Lucca (the uncle of the historian), who ascended the pontifical throne as Alexander II (1061-1073) without having received the sanction of the emperor. His election was forthwith challenged by the latter, and for the space of two years the Roman state was distracted by a civil war, Honorius II being supported as a rival candidate by the imperial arms, while Alexander maintained his position only with the support of the Norman levies. The respective merits of their claims were considered at a council convened at Mantua, and the decision was given in favour of Alexander. Cadalous, such was the name of his rival, did not acknowledge the justice of the sentence, but he retired into obscurity; and the remainder of Alexander’s pontificate, though troubled by the disputes respecting a married clergy, was free from actual warfare. In these much vexed questions of church discipline Alexander, who had been mainly indebted for his election to Hildebrand, the archdeacon of the Roman church, was guided entirely by that able churchman’s advice, and in 1073 Hildebrand himself succeeded to the office as Gregory VII (1073-1085).[d]

MILMAN ON THE MISSION OF THE PAPACY

[Sidenote: [1064-1073 A.D.]]

Hildebrand was now pope; the great contest for the dominion over the human mind, the strife between the temporal and spiritual power, which had been carried on for some centuries as a desultory and intermitting warfare, was now to be waged boldly, openly, implacably, to the subjugation of one or of the other. Sacerdotal, or rather papal Christianity, had not yet fulfilled its mission, for, the papal control withdrawn, the sacerdotal rule would have lost its unity, and with its unity its authority must have dissolved away. Without the clergy, not working here and there with irregular and uncombined excitement on the religious feelings of man, awakening in one quarter a vigorous enthusiasm, while in other parts of Europe men were left to fall back into some new Christian heathenism, or into an inert habitual Christianity of form; without the whole order labouring on a fixed and determined system, through creeds sanctified by ancient reverence and a ceremonial guarded by rigid usage; without this vast uniform, hierarchical influence, where, in those ages of anarchy and ignorance, of brute force and dormant intelligence, had been Christianity itself? And looking only to its temporal condition, what had the world been without Christianity?

The papacy has still the more splendid part of its destiny to accomplish. It has shown vital power enough to recover from its seemingly irrecoverable degradation. It might have been supposed that a moral and religious deprivation so profound, would utterly have destroyed that reverence of opinion which was the one groundwork of the papal power. The veil had been raised; and Italy at least, if not Europe, had seen within it, not a reflex of divine majesty and holiness, but an idol not only hideous to the pure moral sentiment, but contemptible for its weakness. If centuries of sanctity had planted deeply in the heart of man his veneration for the successor of St. Peter, it would have been paralysed (the world might expect) and extinguished by more than a century of odious and unchristian vices. A spiritual succession must be broken and interrupted by such unspiritual inheritors. Could the head of Christendom, living in the most unchristian wickedness, perpetuate his descent, and hand down the patrimony of power and authority, with nothing of that piety and goodness which was at least one of his titles to that transcendent power?

But that idea or that opinion would not have endured for centuries, had it not possessed strength enough to reconcile its believers to contradictions and inconsistencies. With all the Teutonic part of Latin Christendom, the belief in the supremacy of the pope was coeval with their Christianity; it was an article of their original creed as much as the redemption; their apostles were commissioned by the pope; to him they humbly looked for instruction and encouragement, even almost for permission to advance upon their sacred adventure. Augustine, Boniface, Ebbo, Anskar, had been papal missionaries. If the faith of Italy was shaken by too familiar a view of that which the Germans contemplated with more remote and indistinct veneration, the national pride, in Rome especially, accepted the spiritual as a compensation for the loss of the temporal supremacy; it had ceased to be the centre of the imperial, it would not endure not to be that of ecclesiastical dominion. The jealousy of a pope elected, or even born, elsewhere than in Italy, showed the vitality of that belief in the papacy, which was belied by so many acts of violence towards individual popes.

The religious minds would be chiefly offended by the incongruity between the lives and the station of the pope; but to them it would be a part of religion to suppress any rebellious doubts. Their souls were deeply impressed with the paramount necessity of the unity of the church; to them the papacy was of divine appointment, the pope the successor of St. Peter; all secret questioning of this integral part of their implanted faith was sin. However then they might bow down in shame and sorrow at the inscrutable decrees of heaven, in allowing its vicegerent thus to depart from his original brightness, yet they would veil their faces in awe, and await in trembling patience the solution of that mystery. In the Christian mind in general, or rather the mind within the world of Christendom, the separation between Christian faith and Christian morality was almost complete. Christianity was a mere unreasoning assent to certain dogmatic truths, an unreasoning obedience to certain ceremonial observances.

(Based on an effigy)]

Controversy was almost dead. In the former century, the predestinarian doctrines of Gottschalk, in general so acceptable to the popular ear, had been entirely suppressed by the sacerdotal authority. The tenets of Berengar concerning the presence of Christ in the Sacrament, had been restrained, and were to be once more restrained, by the same strong hand; and Berengar’s logic was beyond his age. The Manichæan doctrines of the Paulicians and kindred sects were doubtless spreading to a great extent among the lower orders, but as yet in secrecy, breaking out now in one place, now in another, yet everywhere beheld with abhorrence, creating no wide alarm, threatening no dangerous disunion. In all the vulgar of Christendom (and that vulgar comprehended all orders, all ranks) the moral sentiment, as more obtuse, would be less shocked by that incongruity which grieved and oppressed the more religious. The great body of Christians in the West would no more have thought of discussing the character of the pope than the attributes of God. He was to them the apostle, the vicegerent of God, enveloped in the same kind of awful mystery. They feared the thunders of the Lateran as those of heaven; and were no more capable of sound discrimination as to the limits, grounds, and nature of that authority than as to the causes of the destructive fire from the clouds. Their general belief in the judgment to come was not more deeply rooted than in the right of the clergy, more especially the head of the clergy, to anticipate, to declare, or to ratify their doom.

The German line of pontiffs had done much to reinvest the papacy in its ancient sanctity. The Italian Alexander II had been at least a blameless pontiff, and now every qualification which could array the pope in imposing majesty, in what bordered on divine worship, seemed to meet in Gregory VII. His life verified the splendid panegyric with which he had been presented by Cardinal Hugo to the Roman people. He had the austerest virtue, the most simple piety, the fame of vast theologic knowledge, the tried ability to rule men, intrepidity which seemed to delight in confronting the most powerful; a stern singleness of purpose, which, under its name of churchmanship, gave his partisans unlimited reliance on his firmness and resolution, and yet a subtle policy which bordered upon craft. To them his faults were virtues; his imperiousness the due assertion of his dignity; his unbounded ambition zeal in God’s cause; no haughtiness could be above that which became his station. The terror by which he ruled (he was so powerful that he could dispense with love), as it was the attribute of the divinity now exclusively worshipped by man, so was it that which became the representative of God on earth.

The first, the avowed object of Gregory’s pontificate, was the absolute independence of the clergy, of the pope, of the great prelates throughout Latin Christendom, down to the lowest functionary, whose person was to become sacred; that independence under which lurked the undisguised pretension to superiority. His remote and somewhat more indistinct vision was the foundation of a vast spiritual autocracy in the person of the pope, who was to rule mankind by the consentient but subordinate authority of the clergy throughout the world. For this end the clergy were to become still more completely a separate, inviolable caste; their property equally sacred with their persons. Each in his separate sphere, the pope above all and comprehending all, was to be sovereign arbiter of all disputes; to hold in his hands the supreme mediation in questions of war and peace; to adjudge contested successions to kingdoms; to be a great feudal lord, to whom other kings became beneficiaries. His own arms were to be chiefly spiritual, but the temporal power was to be always ready to execute the ecclesiastical behest against the ungodly rebels who might revolt from its authority; nor did the churchman refuse altogether to sanction the employment of secular weapons, to employ armies in his own name, or even to permit the use of arms to the priesthood.

For this complete isolation of the hierarchy into a peculiar and inviolable caste was first necessary the reformation of the clergy in two most important preliminary matters; the absolute extirpation of the two evils, which the more rigid churchmen had been denouncing for centuries, to the suppression of which Hildebrand had devoted so much of his active energies. The war against simony and the concubinage of the clergy (for under this ill-sounding name was condemned all connection, however legalised, with the female sex), must first be carried to a triumphant issue, before the church could assume its full and uncontested domination.[92]

_Simony_

Like his predecessors, like all the more high-minded churchmen, Hildebrand refused to see that simony was the inevitable consequence of the inordinate wealth of the clergy. It was a wild moral paradox to attempt to reconcile enormous temporal possessions and enormous temporal power with the extinction of all temporal motives for obtaining, all temptations to the misuse of these all-envied treasures. In the feudal system, which had been so long growing up throughout western Europe, bishops had become, in every respect, the equals of the secular nobles. In every city the bishop, if not the very first of men, was on a level with the first; without the city he was lord of the amplest domains. Archbishops almost equalled kings; for who would not have coveted the station and authority of a Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, rather than the sovereignty of the feeble Carlovingian monarch?

Charlemagne himself had set the example of advancing his natural sons to high ecclesiastical dignities. His feebler descendants, even the more pious, submitted to the same course from choice or necessity. The evil worked downwards. The bishop, who had bought his see, indemnified himself by selling the inferior prebends or cures. What was so intrinsically valuable began to have its money-price; it became an object of barter and sale. The layman who purchased holy orders bought usually peace, security of life, comparative ease. Those who aspired to higher dignities soon repaid themselves for the outlay, however large and extortionate. The highest bishops confessed their own guilt; the bishopric of Rome had too often been notoriously bought and sold.

According to the strict law, the clergy could receive everything, alienate nothing. But the frequent and bitter complaints of the violent usurpation, or the fraudulent alienation by the clergy themselves of what had been church property, show that neither party respected this sanctity when it was the interest of both to violate it. While, on the one hand, the clergy extorted from the dying prince or noble some important grant, immunity, or possession, the despoiled heir would scruple at no means of resuming his alienated rights or property. The careless, the profligate, the venal, the warlike bishop or abbot, would find means, if he found advantage, to elude the law; to surrender gradually and imperceptibly; to lease out the land so as to annihilate its value to the church; to grant in perpetuity for trifling compensations or for valueless service the coveted estate; and so to relax the inexorable grasp of the church. His own pomp and expenditure would reduce the ecclesiastic to the wants and subterfuges of debtors and of bankrupts; and so the estates would, directly or circuitously, return either to the original or to some new owner.

_Celibacy of the Clergy_

With this universal simony was connected, more closely than may at first appear, the other great vice of the age, as it was esteemed by Hildebrand and his school, the marriage of the clergy. The celibacy of the clergy was necessary to their existence, at the present period, as a separate caste. Hereditary succession and the degeneracy of the order were inseparable. Great as were the evils inevitable from the dominion of the priesthood, if it had become in any degree the privilege of certain families, that evil would have been enormously aggravated, the compensating advantages annulled. Family affections and interests would have been constantly struggling against those of the church. One universal nepotism, a nepotism not of kindred but of parentage, would have preyed upon the vital energies of the order. Every irreligious occupant would either have endeavoured to alienate to his lay descendants the property of the church, or bred up his still more degenerate descendants in the certainty of succession to their patrimonial benefice.

Celibacy may be maintained for a time by mutual control and awe; by severe discipline; by a strong corporate spirit in a monastic community. But in a low state of morals as to sexual intercourse, in an order recruited from all classes of society, not filled by men of tried and matured religion; in an order crowded by aspirants after its wealth, power, comparative ease, privileges, immunities, public estimation; in an order superior to, or dictating public opinion (if public opinion made itself heard); in a permanent order, in which the degeneracy of one age would go on increasing in the next, till it produced some stern reaction; in an order comparatively idle, without social duties or intellectual pursuits; in an order not secluded in the desert, but officially brought into the closest and most confidential relations as instructors and advisers of the other sex, it was impossible to maintain real celibacy; and the practical alternative lay between secret marriage, concubinage without the form of marriage, or a looser and more corrupting intercourse between the sexes.

Throughout Latin Christendom, throughout the whole spiritual realm of Hildebrand, he could not but know there had been long a deep murmured, if not an avowed doubt, as to the authority of the prohibitions against the marriage of the clergy; where the dogmatic authority of the papal canons was not called in question, there was a bold resistance or a tacit infringement of the law. Italy has been seen in actual, if uncombined, rebellion from Calabria to the Alps. The whole clergy of the kingdom of Naples has appeared, under Nicholas II, from the highest to the lowest, openly living with their lawful wives. The married clergy were still, if for the present cowed, a powerful faction throughout Italy; they were awaiting their time of vengeance. The memory of the married pope, Adrian II, was but recent.

In Germany the power and influence of the married clergy will make itself felt, if less openly proclaimed, as a bond of alliance with the emperor and the Lombard prelates. The French councils denounce the crime as frequent, notorious. Among the Anglo-Saxon clergy before Dunstan, marriage was rather the rule, celibacy the exception.

GREGORY’S SYNOD AT ROME

[Sidenote: [1073-1074 A.D.]]

Almost the first public act of Gregory VII was a declaration of implacable war against these his two mortal enemies, simony and the marriage of the clergy. He was no infant Hercules; but the mature ecclesiastical Hercules would begin his career by strangling these two serpents--the brood, as he esteemed them, and parents of all evil. The decree of the synod held in Rome (March 9th, 10th, 1074) in the eleventh month of his pontificate is not extant, but in its inexorable provisions it went beyond the sternest of his predecessors. It absolutely invalidated all sacraments performed by simoniacal or married priests; baptism was no regenerating rite; it might almost seem that the eucharistic bread and wine in their unhallowed hands refused to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ. The communicants guilty of perseverance at least in the sin shared in the sacerdotal guilt. Even the priesthood was startled at this new and awful doctrine, that the efficacy of the sacraments depended on their own sinlessness. Gregory, in his headstrong zeal, was promulgating a doctrine used afterwards by Wycliffe and his followers with such tremendous energy. And this was a fearless, democratical provocation to the people; for it left to notoriety, to public fame, to fix on anyone the brand of the hidden sin of simony, or (it might be the calumnious) charge of concubinage; and so abandoned the holy priesthood to the judgment of the multitude.[93]

But the extirpation of these two internal enemies to the dignity and the power of the sacerdotal order was far below the holy ambition of Gregory; this was but clearing the ground for the stately fabric of his theocracy. If, for his own purposes, he had at first assumed some moderation in his intercourse with the empire, over the rest of Latin Christendom he took at once the tone and language of a sovereign. We must rapidly survey, before we follow him into his great war with the empire, Gregory VII asserting his autocracy over the rest of Latin Christendom.

[Sidenote: [1074-1076 A.D.]]

His letters to Philip I, king of France, are in the haughtiest, most criminatory terms: “No king has reached such a height of detestable guilt in oppressing the churches of his kingdom as Philip of France.” He puts the king to the test; his immediate admission of a bishop of Mâcon, elected by the clergy and people, without payment to the crown. Either let the king repudiate this base traffic of simony, and allow fit persons to be promoted to bishoprics, or the Franks, unless apostates from Christianity, will be struck with the sword of excommunication, and refuse any longer to obey him.

Hildebrand’s predecessor (and Alexander II did no momentous act without the counsel of Hildebrand) had given a direct sanction to the Norman conquest of England. Hildebrand may have felt some admiration, even awe, of the congenial mind of the conqueror. He advances the claim to Peter’s pence over the kingdom. William admits this claim; it was among the stipulations, it was the price which the pope had imposed for his assent to the conquest. But to the demand of fealty, the conqueror returns an answer of haughty brevity: “I have not sworn, nor will I swear fealty which was never sworn by any of my predecessors to yours.” And William maintained his Teutonic independence--created bishops and abbots at his will, was absolute lord over his ecclesiastical as over his feudal liegemen.

To the kings of Spain, in one of his earliest letters, Pope Gregory boldly asserts that the whole realm of Spain is not only within the spiritual jurisdiction of the holy see, but her property. No part of Latin Christendom was so remote or so barbarous as to escape his vigilant determination to bring it under his vast ecclesiastical unity. While yet a deacon he had corresponded with Sweyn, king of Denmark; on him he bestows much grave and excellent advice. In a letter to Olaf, king of Norway, he dissuades him solemnly from assisting the rebellious brothers of the Danish king. Between the duke of Poland and the king of the Russians he interposes his mediation. The son of the Russian had come to Rome to receive his kingdom from the hands of St. Peter. The kingdom of Hungary, as that of Spain, he treats as a fief of the papacy; he rebukes the king Solomon for daring to hold it as a benefice of the king of the Germans. He watches over Bohemia; his legates take under their care the estates of the church; he summons the archbishop of Prague to Rome. Even Africa is not beyond the care of Hildebrand. The clergy and people of Carthage are urged to adhere to their archbishop--not to dread the arms of the Saracens, though that once flourishing Christian province, the land of Cyprian and Augustine, is so utterly reduced that three bishops cannot be found to proceed to a legitimate consecration.

But the empire was the one worthy, one formidable antagonist to Hildebrand’s universal theocracy, whose prostration would lay the world beneath his feet. The empire must acknowledge itself as a grant from the papacy, as a grant revocable for certain offences against the ecclesiastical rights and immunities; it must humbly acquiesce in the uncontrolled prerogative of the cardinals to elect the pope; abandon all the imperial claims on the investiture of the prelates and other clergy with their benefices; release the whole mass of church property from all feudal demands, whether of service or of fealty; submit patiently to rebuke; admit the pope to dictate on questions of war and peace, and all internal government where he might detect, or suppose that he detected, oppression. This was the condition to which the words and acts of Gregory aspired to reduce the heirs of Charlemagne, the successors of the western cæsars.

As a Christian, as a member of the church, the emperor was confessedly subordinate to the pope, the acknowledged head and ruler of the church. As a subject of the empire, the pope owed temporal allegiance to the emperor. The authority of each depended on loose and flexible tradition, on variable and contradictory precedents, on titles of uncertain signification; each could ascend to a time when they were not dependent upon each other. The emperor boasted himself the successor to the whole autocracy of the cæsars, to Augustus, Constantine, Charlemagne: the pope to that of St. Peter, or of Christ himself.[e] But all-powerful as was the pope abroad, in Italy his authority was restricted. Even in Rome the prefect Cencius dared to lay hands on Gregory VII, to tear him from the sanctuary of a church during a riot, and afterwards held him some time a prisoner. At Milan the citizens expelled Herlembald and his tool Atto, who exercised actual tyranny in the city under pretext of carrying out the pope’s reforms, and demanded an archbishop of Henry IV, who sent them a noble from Castiglione. This was the commencement of the struggle between sacerdotal and imperial power that culminated in one of the greatest and most stirring dramas of all history.

Events began auspiciously for Gregory, many points of support being promised him in Germany. Feudal rebellions had kept that country in a state of agitation during the minority of Henry IV, who was but six years old when his father died in 1056. The regency and even the person of the young king had been wrested from the empress Agnes by the dukes of Saxony and Bavaria. Once arrived at man’s estate, Henry IV set about suppressing the revolt that had, as usual, arisen among the Saxons. An important victory won in Thuringia seemed to promise him a continuance of success, when suddenly the voice of the pope thundered down upon him, ordering him, with unexampled audacity, to suspend all warlike operations, and to leave to the holy see the right of decision in his quarrel with the Saxons; furthermore, to abandon all pretensions to ecclesiastical investiture, under pain of excommunication. To this the legates joined the summons to appear at Rome to answer certain personal charges that had been brought against him. Henry IV replied to this furious attack with equal vigour, and in the synod of Worms, composed of eighteen prelates, his partisans, he caused sentence of deposition solemnly to be pronounced against Gregory VII (1076).

[Sidenote: [1076-1077 A.D.]]

This decree, instead of alarming the pope, but excited him to fresh aggression. No sooner was he delivered by a popular movement from the hands of his enemy, Cencius, the Roman prefect, than he began once more to thunder forth denunciations; he hurled a bull of excommunication at the emperor, in which he proclaimed him a rebel to the holy see, and declared his vassals free from all allegiance to him. This bull was mercilessly put into execution by the Saxons and Swabians, all enemies of the house of Franconia. At their head was Rudolf of Swabia and the Italian, Welf, of the house of Este, whom Henry himself had created duke of Bavaria. They convoked a diet at Tribur, suspended the functions of the emperor and menaced him with deposition if he did not win absolution from the curse of Rome. Henry acceded humbly, and promised to assemble a general diet at Augsburg, which he begged the pope to attend for the purpose of absolving him. Alive, however, to the danger of allowing his enemies to come together in a body, he resolved to anticipate the action of the proposed diet and went himself to Italy to implore pardon of the pope.

The price Gregory set upon this absolution was such as no other monarch ever had to pay. The pope was inhabiting at the time the château of Canossa, in the domains of the celebrated countess Matilda, a devout adherent of the holy see and the most powerful sovereign in Italy, since she included among her possessions the marquisates of Tuscany and Spoleto, Parma, Piacenza, and several points in Lombardy, the Marches, etc. Henry IV came to this castle to solicit an audience, but was compelled to wait barefooted in the snow three days before he was received. At last on the fourth day he was admitted and given absolution. Gregory, however, too adroit to lay down arms at once, refused to decide the question relative to the German crown, and deferred all consideration of it to a special diet, thereby reserving to himself a means of throwing Henry into fresh embarrassment. Could the king do other than tremble before a man who was the acknowledged representative of divinity on earth, and who believed himself so secure in the favour of heaven that, taking half of a “host,” he adjured God upon it to annihilate him instantly if he were guilty of the crimes imputed to him? When he presented the second half of the “host” to the king, asking him to swear a similar oath, Henry shrank back affrighted (1077).

By this timely bowing of the head Henry IV avoided the blow that was about to be aimed at him by a coalition of his enemies; the moment of danger once passed, he straightened up like a bow relieved from tension. Indeed he had no alternative save definitively to relinquish his hopes of the crown or again to risk all upon a single chance, since the German rebels had undertaken to answer the question left open by Gregory, and had appointed to the throne Rudolf of Swabia, who had purchased the protection of the legates by promising to abjure investiture (1077), and had been solemnly acknowledged by the pope.

[Sidenote: [1077-1125 A.D.]]

Having gathered around himself a body of partisans, Henry IV began to wage war with success. The battle of Wolksheim, in which Rudolf was slain by the hand of Godfrey de Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, who carried the imperial standard, made him master of Germany (1080). He determined to repeat this success in Italy, where a victory won by his son had already paved the way; and the countess Matilda was stripped of a part of her possessions, Rome was taken, and the archbishop of Ravenna was appointed pope under the name of Clement III. Gregory himself would have fallen into the hands of the man he had so deeply outraged, had not Robert Guiscard and his Normans, faithful allies of the holy see, come to his rescue. He died among them (1085) with the words: “For no other reason than that I have loved justice and pursued iniquity, I must die in exile.”

Up to the final moment he appeared to believe that universal dominance was an inalienable right of the holy see, and his idea was certainly not devoid of logic.

Gregory’s death came too soon; had he lived a few years longer he would have seen his enemy expire in a condition far more miserable than that in which he had been placed at Canossa. Urban II, made pope in 1088, found his main support in the Normans, and conferred upon Roger, duke of Sicily, the title of king. He revealed the papacy in all its grandeur on the occasion of the First Crusade, and revived most of Gregory’s old judgments against the emperor. After a transitory triumph Henry IV was successively attacked by his two sons, whom the church had armed against him, and after having been stripped of all the imperial insignia, was made prisoner by his younger son. In vain he invoked the succour of the king of France, who had been his “most faithful friend”; all help was refused him, and he was reduced to soliciting the post of under-choir-master in a church, “having a considerable knowledge of music.” He died in 1106 at Liège in the depths of poverty, calling down the “vengeance of God upon the parricide”; and his body remained five years without sepulture.

It was, however, this very parricidal son Henry V who at last put a stop to the quarrels resulting from the vexed question of investitures. The decision was retarded some time by the opening of the succession of Countess Matilda, who had bequeathed all her estates to the holy see. Henry laid claim to the entire inheritance, to the fiefs as sovereign of the empire, to the allodial lands as the countess’ nearest heir, and succeeded in entering upon possession of them all. As can readily be believed, this was a cause for fresh dissension in the future. The opening dispute being provisorily settled, the two sides, recognising that a struggle would but weaken them while it confirmed the independence of the feudal lords and of the Italian middle classes, resolved to close the matter by an equitable and, as nearly as possible, an equal division of the rights under dispute. The Concordat of Worms (1122) was couched in the following terms: “I agree,” said Pope Calixtus II to the emperor, “that the elections of the bishops and abbots of the Teutonic kingdom shall take place without violence or simony in your presence, so that in case any difference shall arise you can give your sanction and protection to the side having greater holiness, according to the judgment of the metropolitan and the co-provincials. The elect shall receive from you the prerogatives of his office, and, except that duty that he owes the Roman church, shall render you obedience in all things.”

“I remit to the pope,” said the king, “all right to confer investiture by ring and cross, and in the churches of my kingdom and my empire, I authorise canonical elections and free consecration.” This wise compromise, which vested the temporal and spiritual power respectively in the temporal and spiritual rulers, was accompanied by words of reconciliation. But the design of Gregory VII was not yet fulfilled; the tie of vassalage that united the clergy to the prince was by no means severed, and church remained a part of the state in its main portion at least, if not in its outlying members.

The house of Franconia became extinct with Henry V (1125) after having, by a provisory issue, dissolved the rivalry that existed between the papacy and the empire. The reign of Lothair II, successor of Henry V, was like an interlude between two acts of a drama; during the pause the stage was cleared and reset for the scene that was to follow.[f]

BRYCE ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONCORDAT

The Concordat of Worms was in form a compromise designed to spare either party the humiliation of defeat. Yet the papacy remained master of the field. The emperor retained but one-half of those rights of investiture which had formerly been his. At any moment his sceptre might be shivered in his hand by the bolt of anathema, and a host of enemies spring up from every convent and cathedral.

Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed. The emperor was alienated from the church at the most unfortunate of all moments, the end of the Crusades. The religious feeling which the Crusades evoked turned wholly against the opponent of ecclesiastical claims and was made to work the will of the holy see. A century and a half later the pope did not scruple to preach a crusade against the emperor himself.

Again, it was now the first seeds were sown of that fear and hatred wherewith the German people never thenceforth ceased to regard the encroaching Romish court. Branded by the church and forsaken by the nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the faithful burghers of Worms and Liège. It soon became a test of Teutonic patriotism to resist Italian priestcraft.[g]

RIVAL CLAIMANTS

[Sidenote: [1119-1155 A.D.]]

On the death of Paschal (1118), the bishops of Porto, Ostia, and others elected John of Gaeta, who was chancellor of Rome, to the vacant chair. But his elevation was strongly opposed by the emperor’s minister, Cenzio Frangipani, who, following him to the church where the investiture was to take place, seized him by the throat, and after exposing him to every species of violence from his attendants, dragged him by the hair of the head to his house, and there left him chained, to await the orders of the emperor. He subsequently made his escape to his native place, of which he was made bishop; and Henry, in the meanwhile, raised Maurice Bourdin, by the name of Gregory VIII, to the throne.

Gelasius, as John of Gaeta was called, attempted to recover his dignity, but finding that he could not remain in Italy with safety, fled to Provence, where he died the following year. The anti-pope Gregory, though the way was now open for his accession to the throne, gained no advantage by the death of his rival. Guido, archbishop of Ravenna, a man of considerable powers of mind and vast influence, ascended the papal chair as Calixtus II.[94] The contest which he was obliged to carry on with Gregory ended completely in his favour; and the defeated pretender died, after suffering innumerable miseries,[95] in a monastery. Calixtus himself died shortly after (1124); and his successor, Honorius II, passed a reign of five years in fruitless contention with Roger of Sicily, by whom his troops were entirely defeated. Innocent II and Anacletus II both pretended to the dignity at his death; and the former, before he could establish his sole claim to the prize, had to spend several years as an exile in France.

We pass over the obscure pontificates of his immediate successors. But in 1145, Bernard, abbot of St. Anastasius at Rome, and a favourite disciple of the celebrated saint of the same name, was elected to the see as Eugenius III. But whatever were the virtues of Eugenius, or the credit due to him from his intimacy with a man so full of wisdom and holiness as St. Bernard, the factious spirit which had long prevailed at Rome broke out into new excesses at the period of his elevation. Urged on by the popular eloquence of Arnold of Brescia, they were suddenly inflamed with the desire of restoring the institutions and government of the ancient capital; but the tumult which was commenced with this pretence soon carried its authors to the commission of every species of violence; and the dazzling vision of Rome, restored to its consular dignity, was lost in the clouds and thick darkness which rose from the destruction of some of its finest buildings. Eugenius, by a timely exertion of energy, quelled these disorders; and his return to Rome was attended with all the marks of a triumph. The signs, however, of sedition were still too manifest on the faces of the Romans to allow of his remaining secure among them, and he retired for some time into France. He came back to Italy about the year 1153, and died almost immediately after, at his residence in the town of Tibur.

ADRIAN IV _versus_ BARBAROSSA

[Sidenote: [1155-1158 A.D.]]

The successor of Eugenius was Adrian IV, by birth an Englishman,[96] and strongly characterised by all the ruling passions of the dignified clergy of this age.[97] Frederick Barbarossa had, in the meanwhile, ascended the imperial throne, and his pride and ambition were fitting though dangerous companions for the haughtiness of Adrian. It was not long before an opportunity was afforded these two distinguished men to try the strength of their resolution and principles. Frederick, having been crowned king of the Lombards, hastened towards Rome; but before he arrived at the gate of the city he was met by three cardinals, who acquainted him that the pontiff could not hold any conference with a prince from whom he had as yet received no assurance of obedience and of fidelity to the church. The monarch readily accorded the required professions of allegiance; and a chevalier appointed for the purpose swore solemnly in his name, and on the holy relics, the cross and the Gospel, that he would preserve in safety the life, the liberty, and honour of both the pope and the cardinals. Adrian then intimated his readiness to crown him emperor, and was conducted with great pomp towards the sovereign’s tent.

But here a new cause of contention arose. Frederick had too high a sense of his imperial dignity to manifest any servile complaisance for papal pride. Instead, therefore, of hastening, as some other princes had done, to perform the part of an esquire to the pontiff, he quietly awaited him in his pavilion; which so offended Adrian, that he positively refused to grant him the kiss of peace, till he should perform the humiliating ceremonies to which the pride of churchmen and the pusillanimity of princes had given a species of legitimacy. A whole day was expended in disputing whether the emperor should continue the practice or not. But Adrian was inflexible; and the following morning the haughty Frederick in the presence of his army, purchased the kiss of peace by standing like a menial at the side of the pope’s horse, till he descended and freed him from his degrading situation.

A powerful faction at Rome hailed with joy the approach of Frederick. The desire of limiting the despotism of the pope, and the expectation of drawing large sums as a largess from the imperial treasury, appear to have exercised an almost equal influence on their minds at this time. In their address to Frederick the deputies of this party assumed the station of men who had an unconquered country to present as a free-will offering to the valour and noble qualities of the prince they sought. They had, however, greatly mistaken the ideas of the emperor on the state of Italy. Frederick told them, and with a sternness which presaged a coming storm, that their country had been long and often conquered; that he was truly and lawfully their master. He took possession forthwith of the church of St. Peter (1155), and Adrian placed the imperial crown on the head of the sovereign with far greater willingness than he would have done, had he not seen that his agreement with the prince was now essential to his safety and to the preservation of the church. The populace, finding themselves set at nought by both the pope and the emperor, rose in a mass, and several of the German soldiers fell slaughtered in the aisles of St. Peter. But their death was amply revenged; the emperor attacked the Romans on all sides, and near one thousand citizens paid with their lives the forfeit of their licentiousness or their indiscretion.