PART II.
CHAPTER I.
MAHOMETANISM—IMAGE-WORSHIP.
A.D. 612-794.
Within a few years after the death of Gregory the Great, a new religion was set up by an Arabian named Mahomet, who seems to have been honest, although mistaken, at first, but grew less honest as he went on, and as he became more successful and powerful. His religion was made up partly from the Jewish, partly from the Christian, and partly from other religions which he found around him; but he gave out that it had been taught him by visions and revelations from heaven, and these pretended revelations were gathered into a book called the Koran, which serves Mahomet's followers for their Bible. This new religion was called Islam, which means submission to the will of God; and the sum of it was declared to be that "there is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet."
One point in the new religion was, that every faithful Mahometan (or Mussulman, as they were called) was required once in his life to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, a city which was Mahomet's birthplace, and was considered to be especially holy; and to this day it is visited every year by great companies of pilgrims. Another remarkable thing was, that he commanded his followers to spread their religion by force; and this was done with such success, that within about sixty years after Mahomet's death they had conquered Syria and the Holy Land, Egypt, Persia, parts of Asia Minor, and all the north of Africa. A little later, they crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and got possession of Spain, where their kingdom of Granada lasted until 1492, nearly eight hundred years. In the countries which the Mussulmans subdued, Christians were allowed to live and to keep up their religion; but they had to pay a heavy tribute, and to bear great hardships and disgraces at the hands of the conquerors.
I have mentioned that before Gregory the Great's time almost all Europe had been overrun by the rude nations of the north.[62] Learning nearly died out, and what remained of it was kept up by the monks and clergy only. There is but little to tell of the history of those times; for, although in the Greek empire there were great disputes about some doctrines and practices, these matters were such as you would not care to know about, nor would you be much the wiser if you did know.
I may, however, mention that one of these disputes was about images, to which the Christians of those ages, and especially the Greeks, had come by degrees to pay a sort of reverence which St. Augustine and other fathers of older days would have looked on with horror. It had become usual to fall down before images, to pray to them, to kiss them, to burn lights and incense in their honour, to adorn them with gold, silver, and precious stones, to lay the hand on them in taking oaths, and even to use them as godfathers or godmothers for children in baptism. Those who defend the use of images would tell us that the honour is not given to them, but to Almighty God, to the Saviour, and to the saints, through the images. But when we find, for instance, that people paid more honour to one image of the blessed Virgin than to another, and that they supposed their prayers to have a greater hope of being heard when they were said before one image than when they were said before another, we cannot help thinking that they believed the images themselves to have some particular virtue in them.
There were, then, some of the Greek emperors who tried to put down the superstitious regard for images; and they were the more set on this because the Mahometans, who abhorred images, reproached the Christians for using them. These emperors, wishing to do away with the grounds for such reproaches, caused the figures of stone or metal to be broken, and the sacred pictures to be smeared over; and they persecuted very cruelly those who were foremost in defending them. Then came other emperors who were in favour of images; or widowed empresses, who governed during the boyhood of their sons, and took up the cause of images with great zeal; and thus the friends and the enemies of images succeeded each other by turns on the throne, so that the battle was fought, backwards and forwards, for a long time, until at length an agreement was come to which has ever since continued in the Greek Church. By this agreement, it was settled that the figures made by carving in stone or wood, or by casting metal into a mould, should be forbidden, but that the use of religious pictures (which were also called by the name of images) should be allowed. Hence it is said that the Greeks may not worship anything of which one can take the tip of the nose between his finger and his thumb. But in the Latin Church the carved or molten images are still allowed; and among the poorer and less educated people there is a great deal of superstition connected with them.
NOTES
[ [62]See Part I., [chap XXIII.]
CHAPTER II.
THE CHURCH IN ENGLAND.
A.D. 604-734.
While the light of the Gospel was darkened by the Mahometan conquests in some parts of the world where it had once shone brightly, it was spreading widely among the nations which had got possession of western Europe. In England, the successors of St. Augustine converted a large part of the Anglo-Saxons by their preaching, and much was also done by missionaries from the island of Iona, on the west of Scotland. There, as we have seen,[63] an Irish abbot, named Columba, had settled with some companions about the year 565, and from Iona their teaching had been carried all over the northern part of Britain. These missionaries from Iona to England found a home in the island of Lindisfarne, on the Northumbrian coast, which was given up to them by Oswald, king of Northumbria, and from them got the name of Holy Island. Oswald himself had been converted while an exile in Scotland; and, as he had learnt the language of the country there, he often helped the missionaries in their labours by interpreting what they said into the language of his own subjects who listened to them. The Scottish missionaries carried their labours even as far south as the river Thames; and their modest and humble ways gained the respect and love of the people so much that, as we are told by the Venerable Bede, wherever one of them appeared, he was joyfully received as the servant of God. Even those who met them on the road used eagerly to ask their blessing, and, whenever one of them came to any village, the inhabitants flocked to hear from him the message of the Gospel.
But these Scottish missionaries differed in some respects from the clergy who were connected with St. Augustine; and after a time a great meeting was held at Whitby, in Yorkshire, to settle the questions between them and the Roman Church. We must not suppose that these differences were of any real importance; for they were only about such small matters as the reckoning of the day on which Easter should be kept, and the way in which the hair of the clergy should be clipped or shaven. But, although these were mere trifles, the two parties were each so set on their own ways that no agreement could be come to; and the end was, that the Scottish missionaries went back to their own country, and did no more work for spreading the Gospel in England, although after a while the Scottish clergy, and those of Ireland too, were persuaded to shave their hair and to reckon their Easter in the same way as the other clergy of the West.
In those dark times some of the most learned and famous men were English monks. Among them I shall mention only Bede, who is commonly called the Venerable, and to whose care we owe almost all our knowledge of the early history of the Church in this land. Bede was born about the year 673, near Jarrow, in Northumberland, and at the age of seven he entered the monastery of Jarrow, where the rest of his life was spent. He tells us of himself that he made it his pleasure every day "either to learn or to teach or to write something;" and, after having written many precious books during his quiet life in his cell at Jarrow, he died on the eve of Ascension-day in the year 734, just as he had finished a translation of St. John's Gospel.
NOTES
CHAPTER III.
ST. BONIFACE.
A.D. 680-755.
Although the Church of Ireland was in a somewhat rough state at home, many of its clergy undertook missionary work on the Continent; and by them and others much was done for the conversion of various tribes in Germany and in the Netherlands. But the most famous missionary of those times was an Englishman named Winfrid, who is styled the Apostle of Germany.
Winfrid was born near Crediton, in Devonshire, about the year 680. He became a monk at an early age, and perhaps it was then that he took the name of Boniface, by which he is best known. He might probably have risen to a high place in the church of his own country if he had wished to do so; but he was filled with a glowing desire to preach the Gospel to the heathen. He therefore refused all the tempting offers which were made to him at home, crossed the sea, and began to labour in Friesland and about the lower part of the Rhine. For three years he assisted another famous English missionary, Willibrord, bishop of Utrecht, who wished to make Boniface his successor; but Boniface thought that he was bound rather to labour in some country where his work was more needed; so, leaving Willibrord, he went into Hessia, where he made and baptized many thousands of converts. The pope, Gregory the Second, on hearing of this success, invited him to Rome, consecrated him as a bishop, and sent him back with letters recommending him to the princes and people of the countries in which his work was to lie. (A.D. 723.)
The government of the Franks was then in a very odd state. There were kings over them; but these kings, instead of carrying on the government for themselves, and leading their nation in war, were shut up in their palaces, except that once in the year they were brought out in a cart drawn by bullocks to appear at the national assemblies. These poor "do-nothings" (as the kings of the old French race are called) were without any strength or spirit. From their way of life, they allowed their hair to grow without being shorn; and the Greeks, who lived far away from them, and knew of them only by hearsay, believed, not only that their hair was long, but that it grew down their backs like the bristles of a hog. And, while the kings had sunk into this pitiable state, the real work of the kingly office was done, and the kingly power was really enjoyed, by great officers who were called mayors of the palace.
At the time which I am speaking of, the mayor of the palace was Charles, who was afterwards known by the name of Martel, or The Hammer. Charles had done a great service to Christendom by defeating a vast army of Mahometans, who had forced their way from Spain into the heart of France, and driving the remains of them back across the Pyrenees. It is said that they lost 375,000 men in the battle which they fought with Charles near Poitiers (A.D. 732); and, although this number is no doubt beyond the truth, it is certain that the infidels were so much weakened that they never ventured to attempt any more conquests in western Europe. But, although Charles had thus done very great things for the Christian world, it would seem that he himself did not care much for religion; and, although he gave Boniface a letter of protection, he did not help or encourage him greatly in his missionary labours. But Boniface was resolved to carry on bravely what he believed to be God's work. He preached in Hessia and Thuringia, and made many thousands of converts. He built churches and monasteries, and brought over from England large numbers of clergy to help him in preaching and in the Christian training of his converts, for which purpose he also obtained supplies of books from his own country. He founded bishoprics, and held councils of clergy and laymen for the settlement of the Church's affairs. Finding that the Hessians paid reverence to an old oak-tree, which was sacred to one of their gods, he resolved to cut it down. The heathens stood around, looking fiercely at him, cursing and threatening him, and expecting to see him and his companions struck dead by the vengeance of their gods. But when he had only just begun to attack the oak we are told that a great wind suddenly arose, and struck it so that it fell to the ground in four pieces. The people, seeing this, took it for a sign from heaven, and consented to give up their old idolatry; and Boniface turned the wood of the huge old oak to use by building a chapel with it.
In some places Boniface found a strange mixture of heathen superstitions with Christianity, and he did all that he could to root them out. He had also much trouble with missionaries from Ireland, whose notions of Christian doctrine and practice differed in some things from his; and perhaps he did not always treat them with so much of wisdom and gentleness as might have been wished. But after all he was right in thinking that the sight of more than one kind of Christian religion, different from each other and opposed to each other, must puzzle the heathen and hinder their conversion; so that we can understand his jealousy of those Irish missionaries, even if we cannot wholly approve of it.
In reward of his labours and success, Boniface was made an archbishop by Pope Gregory III. in 732; and, although at first he was not fixed in any one place, he soon brought the German Church into such a state of order that it seemed to be time for choosing some city as the seat of its chief bishop, just as the chief bishop of England was settled at Canterbury. Boniface himself wished to fix himself at Cologne; but at that very time the bishop of Mentz got into trouble by killing a Saxon, who, in a former war, had killed the bishop's father. Although it had been quite a common thing in those rough days for bishops to take a part in fighting, Boniface and his councils had made rules forbidding such things, as unbecoming the ministers of peace; and the case of the bishop of Mentz, coming just after those rules had been made, could not well be passed over. The bishop, therefore, was obliged to give up his see; and Mentz was chosen to be the place where Boniface should be fixed as archbishop and primate of Germany, having under him five bishops, and all the nations which had received the Gospel through his preaching.
When Boniface had grown old, he felt himself again drawn to Frisia, where, as we have seen,[64] he had laboured in his early life; and at the age of seventy-five he left his archbishopric, with all that invited him to spend his last days there in quiet and honour, that he might once more go forth as a missionary to the barbarous Frieslanders. Among them he preached with much success; but on Whitsun eve, 755, while he was expecting a great number of his converts to meet, that they might receive confirmation from him, he and his companions were attacked by an armed party of heathens, and the whole of the missionaries, fifty-two in number, were martyred. But although Boniface thus ended his active and useful life by martyrdom at the hands of those whom he wished to bring into the way of salvation, his work was carried on by other missionaries, and the conversion of the Frisians was completed within no long time. Boniface's body was carried up the Rhine, and was buried at Fulda, a monastery which he had founded amidst the loneliness of a vast forest; and there the tomb of the "Apostle of the Germans" was visited with reverence for centuries.
NOTES
CHAPTER IV.
PIPIN AND CHARLES THE GREAT.
A.D. 741-814.
PART I.
Towards the end of St. Boniface's life, a great change took place in the government of the Franks. Pipin, who had succeeded his father, Charles Martel, as mayor of the palace, grew tired of being called a servant while he was really the master; and the French sent to ask the pope, whose name was Zacharias, whether the man who really had the kingly power ought not also to have the title of king. Zacharias, who had been greatly obliged to the Franks for helping him against his enemies the Lombards, answered them in the way that they seemed to wish and to expect; and accordingly they chose Pipin as their king. And while, according to the custom in such cases, Pipin was lifted up on a shield and displayed to the people, while he was anointed and crowned, the last of the poor old race of "do-nothing" kings was forced to let his long hair be shorn until he looked like a monk, and was then shut up in a monastery for the rest of his days.
Pipin afterwards went into Italy for the help of the pope, and bestowed on the Roman Church a large tract of country which he had taken from the Lombards. And this donation (as it was called) or gift, was the first land which the popes possessed in such a way that they were counted as the sovereigns of it.
Pipin died in 768, and was succeeded by his son Charles, who is commonly called Charlemagne (or Charles the Great). Under Charles the connexion between the Franks and the Popes became still closer than before; and when Charles put down the Lombard kingdom in Italy (A.D. 774), the popes came in for part of the spoil.
But the most remarkable effect of this connexion was at a later time, when Pope Leo III. had been attacked in a Roman street by some conspirators, who tried to blind him and to cut out his tongue. But they were not able to do their work thoroughly, and Leo recovered the use both of his tongue and of his eyes. He then went into Germany to ask Charles to help him against his enemies; and on his return to Rome he was followed by Charles. There, on Christmas Day, A.D. 800, when a vast congregation was assembled in the great church of St. Peter, the pope suddenly placed a golden crown on the king's head, while the people shouted, "Long life and victory to our emperor, Charles!" So now, after a long time, an emperor was set up again in the West; and, although these new emperors were German, they all styled themselves emperors of the Romans. The popes afterwards pretended that they had a right to bestow the empire as they liked, and that Leo had taken it from the Greeks, and given it to the Germans. But this was quite untrue. Charles seems to have made up his mind to be emperor, but he was very angry with the pope for giving him the crown by surprise, instead of letting him take his own way about it; and, if he had been left to himself, he would have taken care to manage the matter so that the pope should not appear to do anything more than to crown him in form after he had been chosen by the Roman people.
Charles was really a great man, although he had very serious faults, and did many blameable things. He carried his conquests so far that the Greeks had a proverb, "Have the Frank for thy friend, but not for thy neighbour,"—meaning that the Franks were likely to try to make their neighbours' lands their own. He thought it his duty to spread the Christian faith by force, if it could not be done in a gentler way; and thus, when he had conquered the Saxons in Germany, he made them be baptized and pay tithes to the Church. But I need hardly say that people's belief is not to be forced in this way; and many of those who submitted to be baptized at the conqueror's command had no belief in the Gospel, and no understanding of it. There is a story told of some who came to be baptized over and over again for the sake of the white dresses which were given to them at their baptism; and when one of these had once got a dress which was coarser than usual, he declared that such a sack was fitter for a swineherd than for a warrior, and that he would have nothing to do with it or with the Christian religion. The Saxons gave Charles a great deal of trouble, for his war with them lasted no less than thirty-three years; and at one time he was so much provoked by their frequent revolts that he had the cruelty to put 4,500 Saxon prisoners to death.
But there are better things to be told of Charles. He took very great pains to restore learning, which had long been in a state of decay. He invited learned men from Italy and from England to settle in his kingdom; and of all these, the most famous was a Northumbrian named Alcuin. Alcuin gave him wise and good advice as to the best way of treating the Saxons in order to bring them to the faith; and when Charles was on his way to Rome, just before he was crowned as emperor, Alcuin presented him with a large Latin Bible, written expressly for his use; for we must remember that printing was not invented until more than six hundred years later, so that all books in Charles's days were manuscript (or written by hand). Some people have believed that an ancient manuscript Bible which is now to be seen in the great library at Paris is the very one which Alcuin gave to Charles.
We are told that when Charles found himself at a loss for help in educating his people, he said to Alcuin that he wished he might have twelve such learned clerks as Jerome and Augustine; and that Alcuin answered, "The Maker of heaven and earth has had only two such; and are you so unreasonable as to wish for twelve?"
Alcuin was made master of the palace school, which moved about wherever the court was, and in which the pupils were Charles's own children and the sons of his chief nobles; and besides this, care was taken for the education of the clergy and of the people in general. Charles himself tried very hard to learn reading and writing when he was already in middle age; but although he became able to read, and used to keep little tablets under his pillow, in order that he might practise writing while lying awake in bed, he never was able to write easily. Many curious stories are told of the way in which he overlooked the service in his chapel, where he desired that everything should be done as well as possible. He would point with his finger or with his staff at any person whom he wished to read in chapel, and when he wished any one to stop he coughed; and it was expected that at these signals each person would begin or stop at once, although it might be in the middle of a sentence.
During this time the question of images, which I have already mentioned,[65] came up again in the Greek Church. A council was held in 787 at Nicæa, where the first general council had met in the time of Constantine, more than four centuries and a half before;[66] and in this second Nicene council images were approved of. In the West, the popes were also for them; but they were condemned in a council at Frankfort, and a book was written against them in the name of Charles. It is supposed that this book was mostly the work of Alcuin, but that Charles, besides allowing it to go forth with his name and authority, had really himself had a share in making it.
Charles the Great died in the year 814. A short time before his death, he sent for his son Lewis, and in the great church at Aix-la-Chapelle, which was Charles's favourite place of abode, he took from the altar a golden crown, and with his own hands placed it on the head of Lewis. By this he meant to show that he did not believe the empire to depend on the pope's will, but considered it to be given to himself and his successors by God alone.
NOTES
[ [66]See Part I., [chap. XI.]
CHAPTER V.
DECAY OF CHARLES THE GREAT'S EMPIRE.
A.D. 814-887.
Lewis, the son of Charles the Great, was a prince who had very much of good in him, so that he is commonly called the Pious. But he was of weak character, and his reign was full of troubles, mostly caused by the ambition of his own sons, who were helped by a strong party among the clergy, and even by Pope Gregory the Fourth. At one time he was obliged to undergo public penance, and some years later he was deprived of his kingdom and empire, although these acts caused such a shock to the feelings of men that he found friends who helped him to recover his power. And after his death (A.D. 840) his children and grandchildren continued to quarrel among themselves as long as any of them lived.
Besides these quarrels among their princes, the Franks were troubled at this time by enemies of many kinds.
First of all I may mention the Northmen, who poured down by sea on the coasts of the more civilized nations. These were the same who in our English history are called Danes, with whom the great Alfred had a long struggle, and who afterwards, under Canute, got possession of our country for a time. They had light vessels,—serpents, as they were called,—which could sail up rivers; and so they carried fire and sword up every river whose opening invited them, making their way to places so far off the sea as Mentz, on the Rhine; Treves, on the Moselle; Paris, on the Seine; and even Auxerre, on the Yonne. They often sacked the wealthy trading cities which lay open to their attacks; they sailed on to Spain, plundered Lisbon, passed the Straits of Gibraltar, and laid waste the coasts of Italy.
After a time they grew bolder, and would leave their vessels on the rivers, while they struck across the country to plunder places which were known to be wealthy. They made fortified camps, often on the islands of the great rivers, and did all the mischief they could within a large circle around them. These Northmen were bitter enemies of Christianity, and many of them had lost their homes because they or their fathers would not be converted at Charlemagne's bidding; so that they had a special pleasure in turning their fury against churches and monasteries. Wherever they came, the monks ran off and tried to save themselves, leaving their wealth as a prey to the strangers. People were afraid to till the land, lest these enemies should destroy the fruits of their labours. Famines became common; wolves were allowed to multiply and to prey without check; and such were the distress and fear caused by the invaders, that a prayer for the deliverance "from the fury of the Northmen" was added to the service-books of the Frankish church.
Another set of enemies were the Mahometan Saracens, who got possession of the great islands of the Mediterranean and laid waste its coasts. It is said that some of them sailed up the Tiber and carried off the altar which covered the body of St. Peter. One party of Saracens settled on the banks of a river about halfway between Rome and Naples; others in the neighbourhood of Nice, and on that part of the Alps which is now called the Great St. Bernard; and they robbed pilgrims and merchants, whom they made to pay dearly for being let off with their lives.
Europe also suffered much from the Hungarians, a very rude, heathen people, who about the year 900 poured into it from Asia. We are told that they hardly looked human, that they lived like beasts, that they ate men's flesh and drank their blood. They rode on small active horses, so that the heavy-armed cavalry of the Franks could not overtake them; and if they ran away before their enemies, they used to stop from time to time, and let fly their arrows backwards. From the Elbe to the very south of Italy these barbarians filled Europe with bloodshed and with terror.
The Northmen at length made themselves so much feared in France, that King Charles III., who was called the Simple, gave up to them, in 911, a part of his kingdom, which from them got the name of Normandy. There they settled down to a very different sort of life from their old habits of piracy and plunder, so that before long the Normans were ahead of all the other inhabitants of France; and from Normandy, as I need hardly say, it was that William the Conqueror and his warriors came to gain possession of England.
The princes of Charles the Great's family, by their quarrels, broke up his empire altogether; and nobody had anything like the power of an emperor until Otho I., who became king of Germany in 936, and was crowned emperor at Rome in 962.
CHAPTER VI.
STATE OF THE PAPACY.
A.D. 891-1046.
All this time the papacy was in a very sad condition. Popes were set up and put down continually, and some of them were put to death by their enemies. The body of one pope named Formosus, after it had been some years in the grave, was taken up by order of one of his successors (Stephen VI.), was dressed out in the full robes of office, and placed in the papal chair; and then the dead pope was tried and condemned for some offence against the laws of the Church. It was declared that the clergy whom he had ordained were not to be reckoned as clergy; his corpse was stripped of the papal robes; the fingers which he had been accustomed to raise in blessing were cut off; and the body, after having been dragged about the city, was thrown into the Tiber (A.D. 896).
Otho the Great, who has been mentioned as emperor, turned out a young pope, John XII., who was charged with all sorts of bad conduct (A.D. 963); and that emperor's grandson, Otho III., put in two popes, one after another (A.D. 996, 999). The second of these popes was a very learned and clever Frenchman, named Gerbert, who as pope took the name of Sylvester II. He had studied under the Arabs in Spain (for in some kinds of learning the Arabs were then far beyond the Christians); and it was he who first taught Christians to use the Arabic figures (such as 1, 2, and 3) instead of the Roman letters or figures (such as I., II., and III.). He also made a famous clock; and on account of his skill in such things people supposed him to be a sorcerer, and told strange stories about him. Thus it is said that he made a brazen head, which answered "Yes" and "No" to questions. Gerbert asked his head where he should die, and supposed from the answer that it was to be in the city of Jerusalem. But one day as he was at service in one of the Roman churches which is called "Holy Cross in Jerusalem," he was taken very ill; and then he understood that that church was the Jerusalem in which he was to die. We need not believe such stories; but yet it is well to know about them, because they show what people were disposed to believe in the time when the stories were made.
The troubles of the papacy continued, and at one time there were no fewer than three popes, each of whom had one of the three chief churches of Rome, and gave himself out for the only true pope. But this state of things was such a scandal that the emperor, Henry III., was invited from Germany to put an end to it, and for this purpose he held a council at Sutri, not far from Rome, in 1046. Two of the popes were set aside, and the third, Gregory VI., who was the best of the three, was drawn to confess that he had given money to get his office, because he wished to use the power of the papacy to bring about some kind of reform. But on this he was told that he had been guilty of simony—a sin which takes its name from Simon the sorcerer, in the Acts of the Apostles (ch. viii.), and which means the buying of spiritual things with money. This had never struck Gregory before; but when told of it by the council he had no choice but to lay aside his papal robes, and the emperor put one of his own German bishops into the papacy.
CHAPTER VII.
MISSIONS OF THE NINTH AND TENTH CENTURIES.
It will be pleasanter to tell you something about the missions of those times; for a great deal of missionary work was then carried on.
(1.) The Bulgarians, who had come from Asia in the end of the seventh century, and had settled in the country which still takes its name from them, were converted by missionaries of the Greek Church. It is said that, when some beginning of the work had been made, and the king himself had been baptized by the patriarch of Constantinople (A.D. 861), the king asked the Greek emperor to send him a painter to adorn the walls of his palace; and that a monk named Methodius was sent accordingly, for in those times monks were the only persons who practised such arts as painting. The king desired him to paint a hall in the palace with subjects of a terrible kind, by which he meant that the pictures should be taken from the perils of hunting. But, instead of such subjects, Methodius painted the last judgment, as being the most terrible of all things; and the king, on seeing the picture of hell with its torments, and being told that such would be the future place of the heathen, was so terrified that he gave up the idols which he had kept until then, and that many of his subjects were also moved to seek admission into the Church.
Although the conversion of Bulgaria had been the work of Greek missionaries, the popes afterwards sent some of their clergy into the country, and claimed it as belonging to them; and this was one of the chief causes why the Greek and the Latin churches separated from each other, so that they have never since been really reconciled.
(2.) It is not certain whether the painter Methodius was the same with a monk of that name, who, with his brother, named Cyril, brought about the conversion of Moravia (A.D. 863). These missionaries went about their work in a different way from what was common; for it had been usual for the Greek clergy to use the Greek language, and for the Western clergy to use the Latin, in their church-service and in other things relating to religion; but instead of this, Cyril and Methodius learnt the language of the country, and translated the church-services, with parts of the holy Scriptures, into it, so that all might be understood by the natives. In Moravia, too, there was a quarrel between the Greek and the Latin clergy; but, although the popes usually insisted that the services of the Church should be either in Latin or in Greek (because these were two of the languages which were written over the Saviour's cross), they were so much pleased with the success of Cyril and Methodius, that they allowed the service of the Moravian Church to be still in the language of the country.
(3.) Soon after the conversion of the Moravians, the duke of Bohemia paid a visit to their king, Swatopluk, who received him with great honour, but at dinner set him and his followers to sit on the floor, as being heathens. Methodius, who was at the king's table, spoke to the duke, and said that he was sorry to see so great a prince obliged to feed as if he were a swineherd. "What should I gain by becoming a Christian?" he replied; and when Methodius told him that the change would raise him above all kings and princes, he and his thirty followers were baptized.
A story of the same kind is told as to the conversion of the Carinthians, which was brought about in the end of the eighth century by a missionary named Ingo, who asked Christian slaves to eat at his own table, while he caused food to be set outside the door for their heathen masters, as if they had been dogs. This led the Carinthian nobles to ask questions; and in consequence of what they heard they were baptized, and their example was followed by their people generally.
The second bishop of Prague, the chief city of Bohemia, Adalbert, is famous as having gone on a mission to the heathens of Prussia, by whom he was martyred on the shore of the Frische Haff in 997.
(4.) In the north of Germany, in Denmark, and in Sweden, Anskar, who had been a monk at Corbey, on the Weser, laboured for thirty-nine years with earnest devotion and with great success (A.D. 826-865). In addition to preaching the Gospel of salvation, he did much in such charitable works as the building of hospitals and the redemption of captives; and he persuaded the chief men of the country north of the Elbe to give up their trade in slaves, which had been a source of great profit to them, but which Anskar taught them to regard as contrary to the Christian religion. Anskar was made archbishop of Hamburg and Bremen, and is styled "The Apostle of the North." But he had to suffer many dangers and reverses in his endeavours to do good. At one time, when Hamburg was burnt by the Northmen, he lost his church, his monastery, his library, and other property; but he only said, with the patriarch Job, "The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!" Then he set to work again, without being discouraged by what had befallen him, and he even made a friend of the heathen king who had led the attack on Hamburg. Anskar died in the year 865. It is told that when some of his friends were talking of miracles which he was supposed to have done, he said, "If I were worthy in my Lord's sight, I would ask of Him to grant me one miracle—that He would make me a good man!"
(5.) The Russians were visited by missionaries from Greece, from Rome, and from Germany, so that for a time they wavered between the different forms of the Christian religion which were offered to them; but at length they decided for the Greek Church. When their great prince (who, at his baptism, took the name of Basil) had been converted (A.D. 988) he ordered that the idol of the chief god who had been worshipped by the Russians should be dragged at a horse's tail through the streets of the capital, Kieff, and should be thrown into the river Dnieper. Many of the people burst into tears at the sight; but when they were told that the prince wished them to be baptized, they said that a change of religion must be good if their prince recommended it; and they were baptized in great numbers. "Some," we are told, "stood in the water up to their necks, others up to their breasts, holding their young children in their arms; and the priests read the prayers from the bank of the river, naming at once whole companies by the same name."
(6.) I might give an account of the spreading of the Gospel in Poland, Hungary, and other countries; but let us keep ourselves to the north of Europe. Although Anskar had given up his whole life to missionary work among the nations near the Baltic Sea, there was still much to be done, and sometimes conversion was carried on in ways which to us seem very strange. As an instance of this, I may give some account of a Norwegian king named Olave, the son of Tryggve.
Olave was at first a heathen, and had long been a famous sea-rover, when he was converted and baptized in one of the Scilly islands (A.D. 994). He took up his new religion with a great desire to spread it among his people, and he went about from one part of Norway to another, everywhere destroying temples and idols, and requiring the people to be baptized whether they were willing or not. At one place he found eighty heathens, who were supposed to be wizards. He first tried to convert them in the morning when they were sober, and again in the evening when they were enjoying themselves over their horns of ale; and as he could not persuade them, whether they were sober or drunk, he burnt their temple over their heads. All the eighty perished except one, who made his escape; and this man afterwards fell into the king's hands, and was thrown into the sea.
At another time, Olave fell in with a young man named Endrid, who agreed to become a Christian if any one whom the king might appoint should beat him in diving, in archery, and in sword-play. Olave himself undertook the match, and got the better of Endrid in all the trials; and then Endrid gave in, and allowed himself to be converted and baptized. These were strange ways of spreading the Gospel; but they seem to have had their effect on the rough men of the North.
At last, Olave was attacked by some of his heathen neighbours, and was beaten in a great sea-fight (A.D. 1000). It was generally believed that he had perished in the sea; but there is a story of a Norwegian pilgrim who, nearly fifty years later, lost his way among the sands of Egypt, and lighted on a lonely monastery, with an old man of his own country as its abbot. The abbot put many questions to him, and asked him to carry home a girdle and a sword, and to give them with a message to a warrior who had fought bravely beside King Olave in his last battle; and on receiving them the old warrior was assured that the Egyptian abbot could be no other than his royal master, who had been so long supposed to be dead.
Somewhat later than Olave the son of Tryggve (A.D. 1015) Norway had another king Olave, who was very zealous for the spreading of the Gospel among his people, and, like the elder Olave, was willing to do so by force if he could not manage the matter otherwise. On his visiting a place called Dalen, a bishop named Grimkil, who accompanied him, set forth the Christian doctrine; but the heathens answered that their own god was better than the God of the Christians, because he could be seen. The king spent the greater part of the night in prayer, and next morning at daybreak the idol of the northern god Thor was brought forward by his worshippers. Olave pointed to the rising sun, as being a witness to the glory of its Maker; and, while the heathens were gazing on its brightness, a tall soldier, to whom the king had given his orders beforehand, lifted up his club and dashed the idol to pieces. A swarm of loathsome creatures, which had lived within the idol's huge body, and had fattened on the food and drink which were offered to it, rushed forth, as in the case of the image of Serapis, hundreds of years before;[67] whereupon the men of Dalen were convinced of the falsehood of their old religion, and consented to be baptized. King Olave was at length killed in battle against his heathen subjects (A.D. 1030), and his memory is regarded as that of a saint.
(7.) From Norway the Gospel made its way to the Norwegian settlements in Iceland, and even in Greenland, where it long flourished, until, in the middle of the fifteenth century, ice gathered on the shores so as to make it impossible to land on them. About the same time a great plague, which was called the Black Death, carried off a large part of the settlers, and the rest were so few and so weak that they were easily killed by the natives.
It seems to be certain that some of the Norwegians from Greenland discovered a part of the American continent, although no traces of them remained there when the country was again discovered by Europeans, hundreds of years later.
NOTES
[ [67]See Part I., [chap. XVI.]
CHAPTER VIII.
POPE GREGORY THE SEVENTH.
PART I.
In the times of which I have been lately speaking, the power of the popes had grown far beyond what it was in the days of Gregory the Great.
I have told you Gregory was very much displeased because a patriarch of Constantinople had styled himself Universal Bishop.[68] But since that time the popes had taken to calling themselves by this very title, and they meant a great deal more by it than the patriarchs of Constantinople had meant; for people in the East are fond of big words, so that, when a patriarch called himself Universal Bishop, he did not mean anything in particular, but merely to give himself a title which would sound grandly. And thus, although he claimed to be universal, he would have allowed the bishops of Rome to be universal too. But when the popes called themselves Universal Bishops, they meant that they were bishops of the whole church, and that all other bishops were under them.
They had friends, too, who were ready to say anything to raise their power and greatness. Thus, about the year 800, when the popes had begun to get some land of their own, through the gifts of Pipin and Charlemagne,[69] a story was got up that the first Christian emperor, Constantine, when he built his city of Constantinople, and went to live in the East, made over Rome to the pope, and gave him also all Italy, with other countries of the West, and the right of wearing a golden crown. And this story of Constantine's gift (or donation, as it was called), although it was quite false, was commonly believed in those days of ignorance.
About fifty years later another monstrous falsehood was put forth, which helped the popes greatly. Somebody, who took the name of Isidore, a famous Spanish bishop who had been dead more than two hundred years, made a collection of Church law and of popes' letters; and he mixed up with the true letters a quantity which he had himself forged, but which pretended to have been written by bishops of Rome from the very time of the Apostles. And in these letters it was made to appear that the pope had been appointed by our Lord Himself to be head of the whole Church, and to govern it as he liked; and that the popes had always used this power from the beginning. This collection of laws is known by the name of the False Decretals; but nobody in those times had any notion that they were false, and so they were believed by every one, and the pope got all that they claimed for him.
But in course of time the popes would not be contented even with this. In former ages nobody could be made pope without the emperor's consent, and we have seen how Otho the Great, his grandson, Otho III., and afterwards Henry III., had thought that they might call popes to account for their conduct; how these emperors brought some popes before councils for trial, and turned them out of their office when they misbehaved.[70] But just after Henry III., as we have read, had got rid of three popes at once, a great change began, which was meant to set the popes above the emperors. The chief mover in this change was Hildebrand, who is said to have been the son of a carpenter in a little Tuscan town, and was born between the years 1010 and 1020.
Hildebrand became a monk of the strictest kind, and soon showed a wonderful power of swaying the minds of other men. Thus, when a German named Bruno, bishop of Toul, had been chosen as pope by Henry III., to whom he was related, and as he was on his way to Rome that he might take possession of his office, his thoughts were entirely changed by some talk with Hildebrand, whom he happened to meet. Hildebrand told him that popes, instead of being appointed by emperors, ought to be freely chosen by the Roman clergy and people; and thereupon Bruno, putting off his fine robes, went on to Rome in company with Hildebrand, whose lessons he listened to all the way, so that he took up the monk's notions as to all matters which concerned the Church. On arriving at Rome, he told the Romans that he did not consider himself to be pope on account of the emperor's favour, but that if they should think fit to choose him he was willing to be pope. On this he was elected by them with great joy, and took the name of Leo IX. (A.D. 1048). But, although Leo was called pope, it was Hildebrand who really took the management of everything.
When Leo died (A.D. 1054), the Romans wished to put Hildebrand into his place; but he did not yet feel himself ready to take the papacy, and instead of this he contrived to get one after another of his party elected, until at length, after having really directed everything for no less than five-and-twenty years, and under the names of five popes in succession, he allowed himself to be chosen in 1073, and styled himself Gregory VII.
The empire was then in a very sad state. Henry III. had died in 1056, leaving a boy less than six years old to succeed him; and this poor boy, who became Henry IV., was very badly used by those who were about him. One day, as he was on an island in the river Rhine, Hanno, archbishop of Cologne, gave him such an account of a beautiful new boat which had been built for the archbishop, that the young prince naturally wished to see it; and as soon as he was safe on board, Hanno carried him off to Cologne, away from his mother, the empress Agnes. Thus the poor young Henry was in the hands of people who meant no good by him; and, although he was naturally a bright, clever, amiable lad, they did what they could to spoil him, and to make him unfit for his office, by educating him badly, and by throwing in his way temptations to which he was only too ready to yield. And when they had done this, and he had made himself hated by many of his people on account of his misbehaviour, the very persons who had done the most to cause his faults took advantage of them, and tried to get rid of him as king of Germany and emperor. In the meantime Hildebrand (or Gregory, as we must now call him) and his friends had been well pleased to look on the troubles of Germany; for they hoped to turn the discontent of the Germans to their own purpose.
Gregory had higher notions as to the papacy than any one who had gone before him. He thought that all power of every kind belonged to the pope; that kings had their authority from him; that all kingdoms were held under him as the chief lord; that popes were as much greater than kings or emperors as the sun is greater than the moon; that popes could make or unmake kings just as they pleased; and although he had asked the emperor to confirm his election, as had been usual, he was resolved that such a thing should never again be asked of an emperor by any pope in the time to come.
One way in which Gregory tried to increase his power was by forcing the clergy to live unmarried, or, if they were married already, to put away their wives. This was a thing which had not been required either in the New Testament or by the Church in early times. But by degrees a notion had grown up that single life was holier than married life; and many canons (or laws of the Church) had been made against the marriage of the clergy. But Gregory carried this further than any one before him, because he saw that to make the clergy different from other men, and to cut them off from wife and children and the usual connexions of family, was a way to unite them more closely into a body by themselves. He saw that it would bind them more firmly to Rome; that it would teach them to look to the pope, rather than to their national sovereign, as their chief; and that he might count on such clergy as sure tools, ready to be at the pope's service in any quarrel with princes. He therefore sent out his orders, forbidding the marriage of the clergy, and he set the people against their spiritual pastors by telling them to have nothing to do with the married clergy, and not to receive the sacraments of the Church from them. The effects of these commands were terrible: the married clergy were insulted in all possible ways, many of them were driven by violence from their parishes, and their unfortunate wives were made objects of scorn for all mankind. So great and scandalous were the disorders which arose, that many persons, in disgust at the evils which distracted the Church, and at the fury with which parties fought within it, forsook it and joined some of the sects which were always on the outlook for converts from it.
Another thing on which Gregory set his heart, as a means of increasing the power of the popes, was to do away with what was called Investiture. This was the name of the form by which princes gave bishops possession of the estates and other property belonging to their sees. The custom had been that princes should put the pastoral staff into the hands of a new bishop, and should place a ring on one of his fingers; but now fault was found with these acts, because the staff meant that the bishop had the charge of his people as a shepherd has of his flock, and the ring meant that he was joined to his Church as a husband is joined to his wife in marriage. For now it was said to be wrong to use things which are signs of spiritual power, when that which the prince gives is not spiritual power, but only a right to the earthly possessions of the see. Gregory, therefore, ordered that no bishop should take investiture from any sovereign, and that no sovereign should give investiture; and out of this grew a quarrel which lasted fifty years, and was the cause of grievous troubles in the Church.
Gregory had also quarrels with enemies at home. One of these, a rough and lawless man named Cencius, went so far as to seize him when he was at a service about midnight on Christmas Eve, and carried him off to a tower, where the pope was exposed all night to the insults of a gang of ruffians, and of Cencius himself, who even held a sword to his naked throat, in the hope of frightening him into the payment of a large sum as ransom. But Gregory was not a man to be terrified by any violence, and held out firmly. A woman who took pity on him bathed his wounds, and a man gave him some furs to protect him against the cold; and in the morning he was delivered by a party of his friends, by whom Cencius and his ruffians were overpowered, and frightened into giving up their prisoner.
In Germany many of the princes and people threw off their obedience to Henry. They destroyed his castles and reduced him to great distress; they held meetings against him, and were strong enough to make him give up his power of government for a time, and leave all questions between him and his subjects to be settled by the pope. Henry was so much afraid of losing his kingdom altogether, that, in order to beg the pope's mercy, he crossed the Alps, with his queen and a few others, in the midst of a very hard winter, running great risks among the snow and ice which covered the lofty mountains over which his road lay. In the hope of getting the pope's forgiveness, he hastened to Canossa, a castle among the Apennines, at which Gregory then was; but Gregory kept the emperor standing three days outside the gate, dressed as a penitent, and pierced through and through by the bitter cold of that terrible winter, before he would allow himself to be seen. When at last Henry was admitted, the pope treated him very hardly; some say that he even tried to make him take the holy sacrament of our Lord's body, by way of proving whether he were innocent or guilty of the charges which his enemies brought against him. And, after all that Henry had gone through, no peace was made between him and his enemies. The troubles of Germany continued: the other party set up against Henry a king of their own choosing, named Rudolf; and Henry, in return for this, set up another pope in opposition to Gregory.
After a time, Henry was able to put down his enemies in Germany, and he led a large army into Italy, where he got almost all Rome into his hands; and on Easter Day, 1084, he was crowned as emperor, in St. Peter's Church, by Clement III., the pope of his party. Gregory entreated the help of Robert Guiscard, the chief of some Normans who had got possession of the south of Italy; and Guiscard, who was glad to have such an opportunity for interfering, speedily came to his relief and delivered him. But in fighting with the Romans in the streets, these Normans set the city on fire, and a great part of it was destroyed, so that within the walls of Rome there are even in our own day large spaces which were once covered with buildings, but are now given up to cornfields or vineyards. Gregory felt himself unable to bear the sight of his ruined city, and, when the Normans withdrew, he went with them to Salerno, where he died on the 25th of May, 1085. It is said that his last words were, "I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile;" and the meaning seems to be, that by these words he wished to claim the benefit of our Lord's saying, "Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
Of all the popes, Gregory VII. was the one who did most to increase the power of the papacy. No doubt he was honest in his intentions, and thought that to carry them out would be the best thing for the whole Church, as well as for the bishops of Rome. But he did not care whether the means which he used were fair or foul; and if his plans had succeeded, they would have brought all mankind into slavery to Rome.
NOTES
CHAPTER IX.
THE FIRST CRUSADE.
A.D. 1095-1099.
PART I.
The popes who came next after Gregory VII. carried things with a high hand, following the example which he had set them. They got the better of Henry IV., but in a way which did them no credit. For when Henry had returned from Italy to his own country, and had done his best, by many years of good government, to heal the effects of the long troubles of Germany, the popes encouraged his son Conrad, and after Conrad's death, his younger son Henry, to rebel against him. The younger Henry behaved very treacherously to his father, whom he forced to give up his crown; and, at last, Henry IV. died broken-hearted in 1106. When Henry was thus out of the way, his son, Henry V., who, until then, had seemed to be a tool of the pope and the clergy, showed what sort of man he really was by imprisoning Pope Paschal II. and his cardinals for nine weeks, until he made the pope grant all that he wanted. But at length this emperor was able to settle for a time the great quarrel of investitures, by an agreement made at the city of Worms, on the Rhine, in 1123.
But before this time, and while Henry IV. was still emperor, the popes had got a great addition to their power and importance by the Crusades,—a word which means wars undertaken for the sake of the Cross. I have told you already, how, from the fourth century, it became the fashion for Christians to flock from all countries into the Holy Land, that they might warm their faith (as they thought) by the sight of the places where our Blessed Lord had been born, and lived, and died, and where most of the other things written in the Scripture history had taken place.[71] Very often, indeed, this pilgrimage was found to do more harm than good to those who went on it; for many of them had their minds taken up with anything rather than the pious thoughts which they professed: but the fashion of pilgrimage grew more and more, whether the pilgrims were the better or the worse for it.
When the Holy Land had fallen into the hands of the Mahometans, as I have mentioned,[72] these often treated the Christian pilgrims very badly, behaving cruelly to them, insulting them, and making them pay enormously for leave to visit the holy places. And when Palestine was conquered by the Turks, who had taken up the Mahometan religion lately, and were full of their new zeal for it (A.D. 1076), the condition of the Christians there became worse than ever. There had often been thoughts among the Christians of the West as to making an attempt to get back the Holy Land from the unbelievers; but now the matter was to be taken up with a zeal which had never before been felt.
A pilgrim from the north of France, called Peter the Hermit, on returning from Jerusalem, carried to Pope Urban II. a fearful tale of the tyranny with which the Mahometans there treated both the Christian inhabitants and the pilgrims; and the pope gave him leave to try what he could do to stir up the Christians of the West for the deliverance of their brethren. Peter was a small, lean, dark man, but with an eye of fire, and with a power of fiery speech; and wherever he went, he found that people of all classes eagerly thronged to hear him; they even gathered up the hairs which fell from the mule on which he rode, and treasured them up as precious relics. On his bringing back to the pope a report of the success which he had thus far met, Urban himself resolved to proclaim the crusade, and went into France, as being the country where it was most likely to be welcomed. There, in a great meeting at Clermont, A.D. 1095, where such vast numbers attended that most of them were forced to lodge in tents, because the town itself could not hold them, the pope, in stirring words, set forth the reasons of the holy war, and invited his hearers to take part in it. While he was speaking, the people broke in on him with shouts of "God wills it!"—words which from that time became the cry of the Crusaders; and when he had done, thousands enlisted for the crusade by fixing little crosses on their dress.
All over Europe everything was set into motion; almost every one, whether old or young, strong or feeble, was eager to join; women urged their husbands or their sons to take the cross, and any one who refused was despised by all. Many of those who enlisted would not wait for the time which had been fixed for starting. A large body set out under Peter the Hermit and two knights, of whom one was called Walter the Pennyless. Other crowds followed, which were made up, not of fighting men only, but of poor, broken-down old men, of women and children who had no notion how very far off Jerusalem was, or what dangers lay in the way to it. There were many simple country folks, who set out with their families in carts drawn by oxen; and whenever they came to any town, their children asked, "Is this Jerusalem?" And besides these poor creatures, there were many bad people, who plundered as they went on, so as to make the crusade hated even by the Christian inhabitants of the countries through which they passed.
These first swarms took the way through Hungary to Constantinople, and then across the Bosphorus into Asia Minor. Walter the Pennyless, who, although his pockets were empty, seems to have been a brave and good soldier, was killed in battle near Nicæa, the place where the first general council had been held,[73] but which had now become the capital of the Turks; and the bones of his followers who fell with him were gathered into a great heap, which stood as a monument of their rashness. It is said that more than a hundred thousand human beings had already perished in these ill-managed attempts before the main forces of the Crusaders began to move.
When the regular armies started at length, A.D. 1096, part of them marched through Hungary, while others went through Italy, and there took ship for Constantinople. The chief of their leaders was Godfrey of Bouillon, a brave and pious knight; and among the other commanders was Robert, duke of Normandy, whom we read of in English history as the eldest son of William the Conqueror, and brother of William Rufus. When they reached Constantinople, they found that the Greek emperor, Alexius, looked on them with distrust and dislike rather than with kindness; and he was glad to get rid of them by helping them across the strait to Asia.
In passing through Asia Minor, the Crusaders had to fight often, and to struggle with many other difficulties. The sight of the hill of bones near Nicæa roused them to fury; and, in order to avenge Walter the Pennyless and his companions, they laid siege to the city, which they took at the end of six weeks. After resting there for a time, they went on again and reached Antioch, which they besieged for eight months (Oct., 1097-June, 1098). During this siege they suffered terribly. Their tents were blown to shreds by the winds, or were rotted by the heavy rains which turned the ground into a swamp; and, as they had wasted their provisions in the beginning of the siege (not expecting that it would last so long), they found themselves in great distress for food, so that they were obliged to eat the flesh of horses and camels, of dogs and mice, with grass and thistles, leather, and the bark of trees. Their horses had almost all sunk under the hardships of the siege, and the men were thinned by disease and by the assaults of their enemies.
At length Antioch was betrayed to them; but they made a bad use of their success. They slew all of the inhabitants who refused to become Christians. They wasted the provisions which they found in the city, or which were brought to them from other quarters; and when a fresh Mahometan force appeared, which was vastly greater than their own, they found themselves shut in between it and the garrison of the castle, which they had not been able to take when they took the city.
Their distress was now greater than before, and their case seemed to be almost hopeless, when their spirits were revived by the discovery of something which was supposed to be the lance by which our blessed Lord's side was pierced on the cross. They rushed, with full confidence, to attack the enemy on the outside; and the victory which they gained over these was soon followed by the surrender of the castle. But a plague which broke out among them obliged them to remain nearly nine months longer at Antioch.
Having recruited their health, they moved on towards Jerusalem, although their numbers were now much less than when they had reached Antioch. When at length they came in sight of the holy city, a cry of "Jerusalem! Jerusalem! God wills it!" ran through the army, although many were so moved that they were unable to speak, and could only find vent for their feelings in tears and sighs. All threw themselves on their knees and kissed the sacred ground (June, 1099). The siege of Jerusalem lasted forty days, during which the Crusaders suffered much from hunger, and still more from thirst: for it was the height of summer, when all the brooks of that hot country are dried up; the wells, about which we read so much in holy Scripture, were purposely choked with rubbish, and the cisterns were destroyed or poisoned. Water had to be fetched from a distance of six miles, and was sold very dear; but it was so filthy that many died after drinking it. The besiegers found much difficulty in getting wood to make the engines which were then used in attacking the walls of cities; and when they had at length been able to build such machines as they wanted, the defenders tried to upset them, and threw at them showers of burning pitch or oil, and what was called the Greek fire, in the hope that they might set the engines themselves in flames, or at least might scald or wound the people in them. We are even told that two old women, who were supposed to be witches, were set to utter spells and curses from the walls; but a stone from an engine crushed the poor old wretches, and their bodies tumbled down into the ditch which surrounded the city. The Crusaders were driven back in one assault, and were all but giving way in the second; but Godfrey of Bouillon thought that he saw in the sky a bright figure of a warrior beckoning him onwards; and the Crusaders pressed forward with renewed courage until they found themselves masters of the holy city (July 15, 1099). It was noted that this was at three o'clock on a Friday afternoon,—the same day of the week, and the same hour of the day, when our Blessed Lord was crucified.
I shall not tell you of the butchery and of the other shocking things which the Crusaders were guilty of when they got possession of Jerusalem. They were, indeed, wrought up to such a state that they were not masters of themselves. At one moment they were throwing themselves on their knees with tears of repentance and joy; and then again they would start up and break lose into some frightful acts of cruelty and plunder against the conquered enemy, sparing neither old man, nor woman, nor child.
Eight days after the taking of Jerusalem, the Crusaders met to choose a king. Robert of Normandy was one of those who were proposed; but the choice fell on Godfrey of Bouillon. But the pious Godfrey said that he would not wear a crown of gold when the King of kings had been crowned with thorns; and he refused to take any higher title than that of Defender and Baron of the Holy Sepulchre.
Godfrey did not live long to enjoy his honours, and his brother, Baldwin, was chosen in his room. The kingdom of Jerusalem was established, and pilgrims soon began to stream afresh towards the sacred places. But, although we might have expected to find that this recovery of the Holy Land from the Mahometans by the Christians of the West would have led to union of the Greek and Latin Churches, it unhappily turned out quite otherwise. The popes set up a Latin patriarch, with Latin bishops and clergy, against the Greeks, and the two Churches were on worse terms than ever.
This crusade was followed by others, as we shall see by and by; but meanwhile, I may say that, although the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem was never strong, and soon showed signs of decay, these crusades brought the nations of the West, which fought side by side in them, to know more of each other; that they served to increase trade with the East, and so to bring the produce of the Eastern countries within the reach of Europeans; and, as I have said already,[74] they greatly helped to increase the power of the popes, who had seen their way to take the direction of them, and thus get a stronger hold than before on the princes and people of Western Christendom.
NOTES
CHAPTER X.
NEW ORDERS OF MONKS.—MILITARY ORDERS.
In the times of which I have lately been speaking, the monks did much valuable service to the Church and to the world in general. It was mostly through their labours that heathen nations were converted to the Gospel, that their barbarous roughness was tamed, and that learning, although it had greatly decayed, was not altogether lost. Often, where monks had built their houses in lonely places, little clusters of huts grew up round them, and in time these clusters of huts became large and important towns. Monks were very highly thought of, and sometimes it was seen that kings and queens would leave all their worldly grandeur, and would withdraw to spend their last years under the quiet roof of a monastery. But it was found, at the same time, that monks were apt to fall away from the strict rules by which they were bound, so that reforms were continually needed among them.
As the popes became more powerful, they found the monks valuable friends and allies, and they gave exemptions to many monasteries; that is to say, they took it on themselves to set those monasteries free from the control which the bishops had held over them, so that the monks of these exempt places did not own any bishop at all, and would not allow that any one but the pope was over them.
I have already told you of the rule which was drawn up for monks by St. Benedict of Nursia.[75] Some other rules were afterwards made, such as that of Columban, an Irish abbot, who for many years (A.D. 589-615) laboured in France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy. Columban went more into little matters than Benedict had done, and laid down exact directions in cases where Benedict had left the abbots of monasteries to settle things as they should think fit. Thus Columban's rule laid down that any monk who should call anything his own should receive six strokes, and appointed the same punishment for every one who should omit to say Amen after the abbot's blessing, or to make the sign of the cross over his spoon or his candle; for every one who should talk at meals, or should cough at the beginning of a psalm. There were ten strokes for striking the table with a knife, or for spilling beer on it; and for heavier offences the punishment sometimes rose as high as two hundred: besides that, other punishments were used, such as fasting on bread and water, psalm-singing, humble postures, and long times of silence.
Still, however, Benedict's rule was that by which the greater part of the Western monks were governed. But, although they were under the same rule, they had no other connexion with each other; each company of monks stood by itself, having no tie outside its own walls. There was not as yet, in the West, anything like the society which St. Pachomius had long before established in Egypt,[76] where all the monasteries were supposed to be as so many sisters, and all owned the mother-monastery as their head. It was not until the tenth century that anything of this kind was set on foot in the Western Church.
(1.) In the year 912, an abbot named Berno founded a new society at Cluny, in Burgundy. He began with only twelve monks; but by degrees the fame of Cluny spread, and the pattern which had been set there was copied far and wide, until at length more than two thousand monasteries were reckoned as belonging to the "Congregation" (as it was called), or Order of Cluny; and all these looked up to the great abbot of the mother-monastery as their chief. The early abbots of Cluny were very remarkable men, and took a great part in the affairs both of the Church and of kingdoms: some of them even refused the popedom; and bishops placed themselves under them, as simple monks of Cluny, for the sake of their advice and teaching.
The founders of the Cluniac order added many precepts to the rule of St. Benedict. Thus the monks were required to swallow all the crumbs of their bread at the end of every meal; and when some of them showed a wish to escape this duty, they were frightened into obedience by an awful tale that a monk, when dying, saw at the end of his bed a great sack of the crumbs which he had left on the table rising up as a witness against him. The monks were bound to keep silence at times; and we are told that, rather than break this rule, one of them allowed his horse to be stolen, and another let himself be carried off as a prisoner by the Northmen. During these times of silence they made use of a set of signs, by which they were able to let each other know what they wanted.
This congregation of Cluny, then, was the first great monkish order in the West, and others soon followed it. They were mostly very strict at first—some of them so strict that they not only forbade all luxury in the monks, but would not allow any fine buildings, or any handsome furniture in their churches. But in general the monks soon got over this by saying that, as their buildings and their services were not for themselves, but for God, their duty was to honour Him by giving Him of the best that they could.
These orders were known from each other by the difference of their dress: thus the Benedictines were called Black Monks, the Cistercians were called White Monks, and at a later time we find mention of Black Friars, White Friars, Grey Friars, and so forth.
(2.) About the time of Gregory VII., several new orders were founded; and of these the most famous were the Carthusians and the Cistercians.
As to the beginning of the Carthusian order, a strange story is told. The founder, Bruno, is said to have been studying at Paris, when a famous teacher, who had been greatly respected for his piety, died. As his funeral was on its way to the grave, the corpse suddenly raised itself from the bier, and uttered the words, "By God's righteous judgment I am accused!" All who were around were struck with horror, and the burial was put off until the next day. But then, as the mourners were again moving towards the grave, the dead man rose up a second time, and groaned out, "By God's righteous judgment I am judged!" Again the service was put off; but on the third day, the general awe was raised to a height by his lifting up his head and saying, "By God's righteous judgment I am condemned!" And it is said that on this discovery as to the real state of a man who had been so highly honoured for his supposed goodness, Bruno was so struck by a feeling of the hollowness of all earthly judgment that he resolved to hide himself in a desert.
I have given this story as a sample of the strange tales which have been told and believed; but not a word of it is really true, and Bruno's reasons for withdrawing from the world were of quite a different kind. It is, however, true that he did withdraw into a wild and lonely place, which is now known as the Great Chartreuse, among rough and awful rocks, near Grenoble; and there an extremely severe rule was laid down for the monks of his order (A.D. 1084). They were to wear goatskins next to the flesh, and their dress was altogether to be of the coarsest and roughest sort. On three days of each week their food was bread and water; on the other days they were allowed some vegetables; but even their highest fare on holidays was cheese and fish, and they never tasted meat at all. Once a week they submitted to be flogged, after confessing their sins. They spoke on Sundays and festivals only, and were not allowed to use signs like the Cluniacs. It is to be said, to the credit of the Carthusians, that, although their order grew rich and built splendid monasteries and churches, they always kept to their hard way of living, more faithfully, perhaps, than any other order.
(3.) The Cistercian order, which I have mentioned, was founded by Robert of Molême (A.D. 1098), and took its name from its chief monastery, Citeaux, or, in Latin, Cistercium. The rule was very strict. From the middle of September to Easter they were to eat but one meal daily. Their monasteries were not to be built in towns, but in lonely places. They were to shun pomp and pride in all things. Their services were to be plain and simple, without any fine music. Their vestments and all the furniture of their churches were to be coarse and without ornament. No paintings, nor sculptures, nor stained glass were allowed. The ordinary dress of the monks was to be white.
At first it seemed as if the hardness of the Cistercian rule prevented people from joining. But the third abbot of Citeaux, an Englishman, named Stephen Harding, when he was distressed at the slow progress of the order, was comforted by a vision in which he saw a multitude washing their white robes in a fountain; and very soon the vision seemed to be fulfilled. In 1113 Bernard (of whom we shall hear more presently) entered the monastery of Citeaux, and by and by the order spread so wonderfully that it equalled the Cluniac congregation in the number of houses belonging to it. These were not only connected together like the Cluniac monasteries, but had a new kind of tie in the general chapters, which were held every year. For these general chapters every abbot of the order was required to appear at Citeaux, to which they all looked up as their mother. Those who were in the nearer countries were bound to attend every year; those who were further off, once in three, or five, or seven years, according to distance. Thus the smaller houses were allowed to have a share in the management of the whole; and the plan was afterwards imitated by Carthusians and other orders.
(4.) I need not mention any more of the societies of monks which began about the same time; but I must not omit to say that the Crusades gave rise to what are called military orders, of which the first and most famous were the Templars and the Hospitallers, or Knights of St. John. These orders were governed by rules which were much like those of the monks; but the members of them were knights, who undertook to defend the Holy Land against the unbelievers. The Hospitallers were at first connected with a hospital which had been founded at Jerusalem for the benefit of pilgrims by some Italian merchants, and took its name from St. John, an archbishop of Alexandria, who was called the Almsgiver. They had a black dress, with a white cross on the breast, and, from having been at first employed in nursing the sick and relieving the poor, they became warriors who fought against the Mussulmans.
The Templars, who wore a white dress, with a red cross on the breast, were even more famous as soldiers than the Hospitallers. The knights of both these orders were bound by their rules to remain unmarried, to be regular and frequent in their religious exercises, to live plainly, to devote themselves to the defence of the Christian faith and of the Holy Land; and for the sake of this work emperors, kings, and other wealthy persons bestowed lands and other gifts on them, so that they had large estates in all the countries of Europe. But as they grew rich, they forgot their vows of poverty and humility, and, although they kept up their character for bravery, they were generally disliked for their pride and insolence.
We shall see by and by how it was that the order of the Temple came to ruin. But the Hospitallers lasted longer. When the Christians were driven out of the Holy Land, the knights of this order removed first to Cyprus, then to Rhodes, and, last of all, to Malta, where they continued even until quite late times.
Other military orders were founded after the pattern of the Templars and the Hospitallers. The most famous of them were the Teutonic (or German) knights, who fought the heathens on the shores of the Baltic Sea, and got possession of a large country, which afterwards became the kingdom of Prussia; and the order of St. James, which belonged to Spain, and there carried on a continual war with the Mahometan Moors, whose settlement in that country has already been mentioned.[77]
NOTES
CHAPTER XI.
ST. BERNARD.
A.D. 1091-1153.
PART I.
St. Bernard was mentioned a little way back,[78] when we were speaking of the Cistercian order. But I must now tell you something more specially about him; for Bernard was not only famous for his piety and for his eloquent speech, but by means of these he gained such power and influence that he was able to direct the course of things in the Church in such a way as no other man ever did.
Bernard, then, was born near Dijon, in Burgundy, in the year 1091. His father was a knight; his mother, Aletha, was a very religious woman, who watched carefully over his childhood, and prayed earnestly and often that he might be kept from the dangers of an evil world. As Bernard was passing from boyhood to youth, the good Aletha died. We are told that even to her last breath she joined in the prayers and psalm-singing of the clergy who stood round her bed; and he afterwards fancied that she appeared to him in visions, warning him lest he should run off in pursuit of worldly learning so as to forget the importance of religion above all things.
After a time, Bernard was led to resolve on becoming a monk. But before doing so he contrived to bring his father, his uncle, his five brothers, and his sister to the same mind; and when he asked leave to enter the Cistercian order, it was at the head of a party of more than thirty. It is said that, as they were setting out, the eldest brother saw the youngest at play, and told him that all the family property would now fall to him. "Is it heaven for you, and earth for me?" said the boy; "that is not a fair division;" and he followed Bernard with the rest.
We have seen that, although the Cistercian order had been founded some years, people were afraid to join it because the rule was so strict.[79] But the example of Bernard and his companions had a great effect, and so many others were thus led to enter the order, that the mother-monastery was far too small to hold them. Bernard was chosen to be head of one of the swarms which went forth from Citeaux. The name of his new monastery was Clairvaux, which means The Bright Valley. When he and his party first settled there, they had to bear terrible hardships. They suffered from cold and from want of clothing. For a time they had to feed on porridge made of beech-leaves; and even when the worst distress was over, the plainness and poverty of their way of living astonished all who saw it.
Bernard himself went so far in mortification that he made himself very ill, and would most likely have died, if a bishop, who was his friend, had not stepped in and taken care of him for a time. Bernard afterwards understood that he had been wrong in carrying things so far; but the people who saw how he had worn himself down by fasting and frequent prayer, were willing to let themselves be led to anything that so saintly a man might recommend to them. It was even believed that he had the gift of doing miracles; and this added much to the admiration which he raised wherever he went.
Perhaps there never was a man who had greater influence than Bernard; for, although he did not rise to be anything more than Abbot of Clairvaux, and refused all higher offices, he was able, by the power of his speech, and by the fame of his saintliness, to turn kings and princes, popes and emperors, and even whole assemblies of men, in any way that he pleased. When two popes had been chosen in opposition to each other, Bernard was able to draw all the chief princes of Christendom into siding with that pope whose cause he had taken up; and when the other pope's successor had been brought so low that he could carry on his claims no longer, he went to Bernard, entreating him to plead for him with the successful pope, Innocent II., and was led by the abbot to throw himself humbly as a penitent at Innocent's feet.
Some years after this, one of Bernard's old pupils was chosen as pope, and took the name of Eugenius III. Eugenius was much under the direction of his old master, and Bernard, like a true friend, wrote a book "On Consideration," which he sent to Eugenius, showing him the chief faults which were in the Roman Church, and earnestly exhorting the pope to reform them.
Bernard was even the chief means of getting up a new crusade. When tidings came from the East that the Christians in those parts had suffered heavy losses (A.D. 1145), he travelled over great part of France and along the river Rhine in order to enlist people for the holy war. He gathered meetings, at which he spoke in such a way as to move all hearts, and stirred up his hearers to such an eagerness for crusading that they even tore the clothes off his back in order to divide them into little bits, which might serve as crusaders' badges. And he drew in the emperor Conrad and king Lewis VII. of France, besides a number of smaller princes, to join the expedition, although it was so hard to persuade Conrad, that, when at last he was brought over, it was regarded as a miracle.
It had been found, at the time of the first crusade, that many people were disposed to fall on the Jews of their own neighbourhood, as being enemies of Christ no less than the Mahometans of the Holy Land, and the same was repeated now. But Bernard strongly set his face against this kind of cruelty, and was not only the means of saving the lives of many Jews, but brought the chief preacher of the persecution to own with sorrow and shame that he had been utterly wrong.
Although, however, a vast army was raised for the recovery of the Holy Land, and although both the emperor and the French king went at the head of it, nothing came of the crusade except that vast numbers of lives were sacrificed without any gain; and even Bernard's great fame as a saint was not enough to protect him from blame on account of the part which he had taken in getting up this unfortunate attempt.
These were some of the most remarkable things in which Bernard's command over men's minds was shown; and he was able also to get the better of some persons who taught wrong or doubtful opinions, even although they may have been men of sharper wits and of greater learning than himself.
In short, Bernard was the leading man of his age. No doubt he believed many things which we should think superstitious or altogether wrong; and in his conduct we cannot help noticing some tokens of human frailty—especially a jealous love of the power and influence which he had gained. But, although he was not without his defects, we cannot fail to see in him an honest, hearty, and laborious servant of God, and we shall not wish to grudge him the title of saint, which was granted to him by a pope in 1173, and has ever since been commonly attached to his name. Bernard died in 1153.
NOTES
CHAPTER XII.
ADRIAN IV.—ALEXANDER III.—BECKET.—THE THIRD CRUSADE.
A.D. 1153-1192.
In the year of Bernard's death Adrian IV. was chosen pope; and he is especially to be noted by us because he was the only Englishman who ever held the papacy. His name at first was Nicolas Breakspeare; and he was born near St. Albans, where, in his youth, he asked to be received into the famous abbey as a monk. But the monks of St. Albans refused him; and he then went to seek his fortune abroad, where he rose step by step, until at length the poor Hertfordshire lad, who would have had no chance of any great place in his own country (for he was of Saxon family, and the Normans, after the Conquest, kept all the good places for themselves), was chosen to be the head of Christendom (A.D. 1154).
Adrian had a high notion of the greatness and dignity of his office. When the emperor Frederick I. (who is called Barbarossa, or Redbeard) went from Germany into Italy, and was visited in his camp by the pope, Adrian required that the emperor should hold his stirrup as he mounted his horse, and said that such had been the custom from the time of the great Constantine. Frederick had never heard of such a thing before, and was not willing to submit; but on inquiry he found that a late emperor, Lothair III., had held a pope's stirrup, and then he agreed to do the like. But he took care to do it so awkwardly that every one who saw it began to laugh; and thus he made his submission appear like a joke.
Frederick Redbeard carried on a long struggle with the popes. When, at Adrian's death, two rival popes had been chosen (A.D. 1159), the emperor required them to let him judge between their claims; and, as one of them, Alexander III., refused to admit any earthly judge, Frederick took part with the other, who called himself Victor IV. And when Victor was dead, Frederick set up three more anti-popes, one after another, to oppose Alexander.
But Alexander had the kings of France and England on his side, and at last he not only got himself firmly settled, but brought Frederick to entreat for peace with him, and with some cities of North Italy, which had formed themselves into what was called the Lombard League (A.D. 1177). But we must not believe a story that, when this treaty was concluded in the great church of St. Mark at Venice, the pope put his foot on the emperor's neck, and the choir chanted the words of the 91st Psalm, "Thou shalt go upon the lion and the adder:" for this story was not made up until long after, and has no truth at all in it.
It was in Alexander III.'s time that the great quarrel between Henry II. of England and Archbishop Thomas Becket took place. Becket had been raised by the king's favour to be his chancellor, and afterwards to be archbishop of Canterbury and head of all the English clergy (A.D. 1162). But, although until then he had done everything just as the king wished, no sooner had he become archbishop than he turned round on Henry. He claimed that any clergyman who might be guilty of crimes should not be tried by the king's judges, but only in the Church's courts. He was willing to allow that, if a clergyman were found guilty of a great crime in these courts, he might be degraded,—that is to say, that he should be turned out of the ranks of the clergy,—and that, when he had thus become like other men, he might be tried like any other man for any fresh offences which he might commit. But for the first crime Becket would allow no other punishment than degradation at the utmost. The king said that in such matters clergy and laity ought to be alike; and about this chiefly the two quarrelled, although there were also other matters which helped to stir up the strife.
In order to get out of the king's way, the archbishop secretly left England (A.D. 1164), and for six years he lived in France, where king Lewis treated him with much kindness, partly because this seemed a good way to annoy the king of England. But at length peace was made, and Becket had returned to England, when some new acts of his provoked the king to utter some hasty words against him; whereupon four knights, who thought to do Henry a service, took occasion to try to seize the archbishop, and, as he refused to go with them, murdered him in his own cathedral (A.D. 1170). But as you must have read the story of Becket in the history of England, I need not spend much time in repeating it.
In 1185, when Urban III. was pope, tidings reached Europe that Jerusalem had been taken by the great Mussulman hero and conqueror, Saladin; and at once all Western Christendom was stirred up to make a grand attempt for the recovery of the Holy City. The lion-hearted Richard of England, Philip Augustus of France, and the emperor Frederick Redbeard, who had lately made his peace with the pope, were all to take part; but very little came of it. Frederick, after having successfully made his way by Constantinople into Asia Minor, was drowned in the river Cydnus, in Cilicia. Richard, Philip, and other leaders, after reaching the Holy Land, quarrelled among themselves; and the Crusaders, after a vast sacrifice of life, returned home without having effected the deliverance of Jerusalem. You will remember how Richard, in taking his way through Austria, fell into the hands of the emperor Henry VI., the son of Frederick Redbeard, and was imprisoned in Germany until his subjects were able to raise the large sum which was demanded for his ransom.
CHAPTER XIII.
INNOCENT THE THIRD.
A.D. 1198-1216.
PART I.
The popes were continually increasing their power in many ways, although they were often unable to hold their ground in their own city, but were driven out by the Romans, so that they were obliged to seek a refuge in France, or to fix their court for a time in some little Italian town. They claimed the right of setting up and plucking down emperors and kings. Instead of asking the emperor to confirm their own election to the papacy, as in former times, they declared that no one could be emperor without their consent. They said that they were the chief lords over kingdoms; they required the emperors to hold their stirrup as they mounted on horseback, and the rein of their bridle as they rode. And while such was their treatment of earthly princes, they also steadily tried to get into their own hands the powers which properly belonged to bishops, so that the bishops should seem to have no rights of their own, but to hold their office and to do whatever they did only through the pope's leave and as his servants. They contrived that, whenever any difference arose in the Church of any country, instead of being settled on the spot, it should be carried by an appeal to Rome, that the pope might judge it. They declared themselves to be above any councils of bishops, and claimed the power of assembling general councils, although in earlier times this power had belonged to the emperors, as was seen in the case of the first great council of Nicæa. They interfered with the election of bishops, and with the appointment of clergy to offices, in every country; and they sent into every country their ambassadors, or legates (as they were called), whom they charged people to respect and obey as they would respect and obey the pope himself. These legates usually made themselves hated by their pride and greediness; for they set themselves up far above the archbishops and bishops of any country that they might be sent into, and they squeezed out from the clergy of each country which they visited the means of keeping up their pomp and splendour.
The popes who followed Gregory VII. all endeavoured to act in his spirit, and to push the claims of their see further and further. And of these popes, by far the strongest and most successful was Innocent III., who was only thirty-seven years old when he was elected in 1198. I have told you how Gregory said that the papacy was as much greater than any earthly power as the sun is than the moon. And now Innocent carried out this further by saying that, as the lesser light (the moon) borrows of the greater light (the sun), so the royal power is borrowed from the priestly power.
Innocent pretended to a right of judging between the princes who claimed the empire and the kingdom of Germany, and of making an emperor by his own choice. He forced the king of France, Philip Augustus, to do justice to a virtuous Danish princess, whom he had married and had afterwards put away. And he forced John of England to accept Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury, although Langton was appointed by the pope without any regard to the rights of the clergy or of the sovereign of England. Both in France and in England Innocent made use of what was called an interdict to make people submit to his will. By this sentence (which had first come into use about three hundred years before), a whole country was punished at once, the bad and the good alike; all the churches were closed, all the bells were silenced, all the outward signs of religion were taken away. There was no blessing for marriage, there were no prayers at the burial of the dead; the baptism of children and the office for the dying were the only services of the Church which were allowed while the interdict lasted. And it was commonly found, that, although a king might not himself care for any spiritual threats or sentences which the pope might utter, he was unable to hold out against the general feeling of his people, who could not bear to be without the rites of religion, and cried out that the innocent thousands were punished for the sake of one guilty person.
John was completely subdued to the papacy, and agreed to give up his crown to the pope's commissioner, Pandulf; after which he received it again from Pandulf's hands, and promised to hold the kingdoms of England and Ireland under the condition of paying a yearly tribute as an acknowledgment that the pope was his lord.
Archbishop Langton, although he had been forced on the English Church by the pope, yet afterwards took a different line from what might have been expected. For when John, by his tyranny, provoked his barons to rise against him, the archbishop was at the head of those who wrung from the king the Great Charter as a security for English liberty; and, although the pope was violently angry, and threatened to punish the archbishop and the barons severely, Langton stood firmly by the cause which he had taken up.
While Innocent was thus carrying things with a high hand among the Christians of the West, he could not but feel distress about the state of affairs in the East. There, countries which had once been Christian, and among them the Holy Land, where the Saviour had lived and died, had fallen into the hands of unbelievers, and all the efforts which had been made to recover them had hitherto been vain. The pope's mind was set on a new crusade, and in order to raise money for it he gave much out of his own purse, stinted himself as to his manner of living, obliged the cardinals and others around him to do the like, and caused collections to be gathered throughout Western Christendom. Eloquent preachers were sent about to stir people up to the great work, and the chief beginning was made at a place called Ecry, in the north of France. It so happened that the most famous of the preachers, whose name was Fulk, arrived there just as a number of nobles and knights were met for a tournament (which was the name given to the fights of knights on horseback, which were regarded as sport, but very often ended in sad earnest). Fulk, by the power of his speech, persuaded most of these gallant knights at Ecry to take the cross; and, as the number of Crusaders grew, some of them were sent to Venice, to provide means for their being carried by sea to Egypt, which was the country in which it was thought that the Mahometans might be attacked with the best hope of success.
When these envoys reached Venice, which was then the chief trading city of Europe, they found the Venetians very willing to supply what they wanted. It was agreed that for a certain sum of money the Venetians should prepare ships and provisions for the number of Crusaders which was expected; and they did so accordingly. But when the Crusaders came, it was found that their numbers fell short of what had been reckoned on; for many had chosen other ways of going to the East; and, as the Venetians would take nothing less than the sum which they had bargained for, the Crusaders, with their lessened numbers, found themselves unable to pay. In this difficulty, the Venetians proposed that, instead of the money which could not be raised, the Crusaders should give them their help against the city of Zara, in Dalmatia, with which Venice had a quarrel. The Crusaders were very unwilling to do this; because the pope, in giving his consent to their enterprise, had forbidden them to turn their arms against any Christians. But they contrived to persuade themselves that the pope's words were not to be understood too exactly; and at a meeting in the great church of St. Mark, Henry Dandolo, the doge or duke of Venice, took the cross, and declared to the vast multitude of citizens and Crusaders who crowded the church that, although he was ninety-four years of age, and almost or altogether blind, he himself would be the leader.
A fleet of nearly five hundred vessels sailed from Venice accordingly (Oct., 1202), and Zara was taken after a siege of six days, although the inhabitants tried to soften the feelings of the besiegers by displaying crosses and sacred pictures from the walls, as tokens of their brotherhood in Christ. After this success, the Crusaders were bound by their engagement to go on to Egypt or the Holy Land; but a young Greek prince, named Alexius, entreated them to restore his father, who had been dethroned by a usurper, to the empire of the East; and, although the French were unwilling to undertake any work that might interfere with the recovery of the Holy Land, the Venetians, who cared little for anything but their own gain, persuaded them to turn aside to Constantinople.
When the Crusaders came in sight of the city, they were so astonished at the beauty of its lofty walls and towers, of its palaces and its many churches, that (as we are told) the hearts of the boldest among them beat with a feeling which could not be kept down, and many of them even burst into tears. They found the harbour protected by a great chain which was drawn across the mouth of it; but this chain was broken by the force of a ship which was driven against it with the sails swollen by a strong wind. The blind old doge, Henry Dandolo, stood in the prow of the foremost ship, and was the first to land in the face of the Greeks who stood ready to defend the ground. Constantinople was soon won, and the emperor, who had been deposed and blinded by the usurper, was brought from his dungeon, and was enthroned in the great church of St. Sophia, while his son Alexius was anointed and crowned as a partner in the empire.
But quarrels soon arose between the Greeks and the Latins. Alexius was murdered by a new usurper; his father died of grief: and the Crusaders found themselves drawn on to conquer the city afresh for themselves. This conquest was disgraced by much cruelty and unchecked plunder; and the religion of the Greeks was outraged by the Latin victors as much as it could have been by heathen barbarians.
The Crusaders set up an emperor and a patriarch of their own, and the Greek clergy were forced to give way to Latins. The pope, although he was much disappointed at finding that his plan for the recovery of the Holy Land had come to nothing, was yet persuaded by the greatness of the conquest to give a kind of approval to it. But the Latin empire of the East was never strong; and after about seventy years it was overthrown by the Greeks, who drove out the Latins and restored their own form of Christian religion.
Innocent did not give up the notion of a crusade, and at a later time he sent about preachers to stir up the people of the West afresh; but nothing had come of this when the pope died. I must, however, mention a strange thing which arose out of this attempt at a crusade.
A shepherd boy, named Stephen, who lived near Vendome, in the province of Orleans, gave out that he had seen a vision of the Saviour, and had been charged by Him to preach the cross. By this tale Stephen gathered some children about him, and they set off for the crusade, displaying crosses and banners, and chanting in every town or village through which they passed, "O Lord, help us to recover Thy true and holy cross!" When they reached Paris, there were no less than 15,000 of them, and as they went along their numbers became greater and greater. If any parents tried to keep back their children from joining them, it was of no use; even if they shut them up, it was believed that the children were able to break through bars and locks in order to follow Stephen and his companions. Ignorant people fancied that Stephen could work miracles, and treasured up threads of his dress as precious relics. At length the company, whose numbers had reached 30,000, arrived at Marseilles, where Stephen entered the city in a triumphal car, surrounded on all sides by guards. Some shipowners undertook to convey the child-crusaders to Egypt and Africa for nothing; but these were wretches who meant to sell them as slaves to the Mahometans; and this was the fate of such of the children as reached the African coast, after many of them had been lost by shipwreck on the way.
Innocent, although he had nothing to do with this crusade, or with one of the same kind which was got up in Germany, declared that the zeal of the children put to shame the coldness of their elders, whom he was still labouring, with little success, to enlist in the cause of the Holy Land.
A war of a different kind, but which was also styled a crusade, was carried on in the south of France while Innocent was pope. In that country there were great numbers of persons who did not agree with the Roman Church, and who are known by the names of Waldenses and Albigenses. The opinions of these two parties differed greatly from each other. The Waldenses, whose name was given to them from Peter Waldo, of Lyons, who founded the party about the year 1170, were a quiet set of people, something like the Quakers of our own time. They dressed and lived plainly, they were mild in their manners, and used some rather affected ways of speech; they thought all war and all oaths wrong, they did not acknowledge the claims of the clergy, and, although they attended the services of the Church, it is said that they secretly mocked at them. They were fond of reading the Holy Scripture in their own language, while the Roman Church would only allow it to be read in Latin, which was understood by few except the clergy, and not by all of them. And so eager were the Waldenses to bring people to their own way of thinking, that we are told of one of them, a poor man, who, after his day's work, used to swim across a river in wintry nights, that he might reach a person whom he wished to convert.
The Albigenses, on whom the persecution chiefly fell, held something like the doctrines of Manes, whom I mentioned a long way back,[80] so that they could not properly be considered as Christians at all. But, although we cannot think well of their doctrines, the treatment of these people was so cruel and so treacherous as to raise the strongest feelings of anger and horror in all who read the accounts of it. Tens of thousands were slain, and their rich and beautiful country was turned into a desert.
The chief leader of the crusade in the south of France was Simon de Montfort, father of that Earl Simon who is famous in the history of England. Innocent, although he seems to have been much deceived by those who reported matters to him, was grievously to blame for having given too much countenance to the cruelties and injustice which were practised against the unhappy Albigenses.
Among the clergy who accompanied the Crusaders into southern France and tried to bring over the Albigenses and Waldenses to the Roman Church was a Spaniard named Dominic, who afterwards became famous as the founder of an order of mendicant friars (that is to say, begging brothers). He also founded the Inquisition, which was a body intended to search out and to put down all opinions differing from the doctrines of the Roman Church. But the cruelty, darkness, and treachery of its proceedings were so shocking, that, although Dominic was certainly its founder, we need not suppose that he would have approved of all its doings.
The Waldenses and Albigenses had been used to reproach the clergy of the Church for their habits of pomp and luxury; and Dominic had done what he could to meet these charges by the plainness and hardness of the life which he and his companions led while labouring in the south of France. And when he resolved to found a new order of monks, he carried the notion of poverty to an extreme. His followers were to be not only poor, but beggars. They were to live on alms, and from day to day, refusing any gifts of money so large as to give the notion of a settled provision for their needs.
About the same time another great begging order was founded by Francis, who was born in 1182 at Assisi, a town in the Italian duchy of Spoleto. The stories as to his early days are very strange; indeed, it would seem that, when he was struck with a religious idea, he could not carry it out without such oddities of behaviour as in most people would look like signs of a mind not altogether right. When Francis heard in church our Lord's charge to His apostles, that they should go forth without money in their purses, or a staff, or scrip, or shoes, or changes of raiment (St. Matt. x. 9, 10), he went before the bishop of Assisi, and, stripping off all his other clothes, he set forth to preach repentance without having anything on him but a rough gray woollen frock, with a rope tied round his waist. He fancied that he was called by a vision to repair a certain church; and he set about gathering the money for this purpose by singing and begging in the streets. He felt an especial charity for lepers, who, on account of their loathsome disease, were shut out from the company of men, and were subject to miseries of many kinds; and, although many hospitals had already been founded in various countries for these unfortunate people, the kindness which Francis showed to them had a great effect in lightening their lot, so far as human fellow-feeling could do so.
Francis wished his followers to study humility in all ways. They were to seek to be despised, and were told to be uneasy if they met with usage of any other kind. They were not to let themselves be called brethren but little brethren; they must try to be reckoned as less than any other persons. They were especially to be on their guard against the pride of learning; and, in order to preserve them from the danger of this, Francis would hardly allow them even a book of the Psalms. But, in truth, all these things might really be turned the opposite way, and in making such studied shows of humility it was quite possible that the Franciscans might fall under the temptations of pride.
Francis was very fond of animals, which he treated as reasonable creatures, speaking to them by the names of brothers and sisters. He used to call his own body brother ass, on account of the heavy burdens and the hard usage which it had to bear. He kept a sheep in church, and it is said that the creature, without any training, used to take part in the services by kneeling and bleating at proper times. He preached to flocks of birds on the duty of thanking their Maker for His goodness to them; nay, he preached to fishes, to worms, and even to flowers.
Perhaps the oddest story of this kind is one about his dealing with a wolf which infested the neighbourhood of Gubbio. Finding that every one in the place was overcome by fear of this fierce beast, Francis went out boldly to the forest where the wolf lived, and, meeting him, began to talk to him about the wickedness of killing, not only brute animals, but men; and he promised that, if the wolf would give up such evil ways, the citizens of Gubbio would maintain him. He then held out his right hand; whereupon the wolf put his paw into it as a sign of agreement, and allowed the saint to lead him into the town. The people of Gubbio were only too glad to fulfil the promise which Francis had made for them; and they kept the wolf handsomely, giving him his meals by turns, until he died of old age, and in such general respect that he was lamented by all Gubbio.
There is a strange story that Francis, towards the end of his life, received in his body what are called the stigmata (that is to say, the marks of the wounds which were made in our Lord's body at the crucifixion). And a great number of other superstitious tales became connected with his name; but with such things we need not here trouble ourselves.
When Dominic and Francis each applied to Pope Innocent for his approval of their designs to found new orders, he was not forward to give it; but, on thinking the matter over, he granted them what they asked. Each of them soon gathered followers, who spread into all lands. The Franciscans, especially, made converts from heathenism by missions; and these orders, by their rough and plain habits of life, made their way to the hearts of the poorest classes in a degree which had never been known before. And the influence which they thus gained was all used for the papacy, which found them the most active and useful of all its servants.
In the year 1215, Innocent held a great council at Rome, what is known as the fourth Lateran Council, and is to be remembered for two of its canons; by one of which the false doctrine of the Roman Church as to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper was, for the first time, established; and by the other, it was made the duty of every one in the Roman Church to confess to the priest of his parish at least once a year.
NOTES
CHAPTER XIV.
FREDERICK II.—ST. LEWIS OF FRANCE.
A.D. 1220-1270.
PART I.
The popes still tried to stir up the Christians of the West for the recovery of the Holy Land; and there were crusading attempts from time to time, although without much effect. One of these crusades was undertaken in 1228 by Frederick II., an emperor who was all his life engaged in struggles against one pope after another. Frederick had taken the cross when he was very young; but when once any one had done so, the popes thought that they were entitled to call on him to fulfil his promise at any time they pleased, no matter what other business he might have on his hands. He was expected to set off on a crusade whenever the pope might bid him, although it might be ruinous to him to be called away from his own affairs at that time.
In this way, then, the popes had got a hold on Frederick, and when he answered their summons by saying that his affairs at home would not just then allow him to go on a crusade, they treated this excuse as if he had refused altogether to go; they held him up to the world as a faithless man, and threatened to put his lands under an interdict,[81] and to take away his crown. And when at last Frederick found himself able to go to the Holy Land, the pope and his friends set themselves against him with all their might, saying that he was not hearty in the cause, and even that he was not a Christian at all. So that, although Frederick made a treaty with the Mahometans by which a great deal was gained for the Christians, it came to little or nothing, because the popes would not confirm it.
I need not say much more about Frederick II. There was very much in him that we cannot approve of or excuse; but he met with hard usage from the popes, and after his death (A.D. 1250) they pursued his family with constant hatred, until the last heir, a spirited young prince named Conradin, who boldly attempted to recover the dominions of his family in Southern Italy, was made prisoner and executed at Naples in 1268.
At the same time with Frederick lived a sovereign of a very different kind, Lewis IX. of France, who is commonly called St. Lewis, and deserves the name of saint better than very many persons to whom it is given. There was a great deal in the religion of Lewis that we should call superstition; but he laboured very earnestly to live up to the notions of Christian religion which were commonly held in his time. He attended several services in church every day, and when he was told that his nobles found fault with this, he answered, that no one would have blamed him if he had spent twice as much time in hunting or in playing at dice. He was diligent in all other religious exercises, he refrained from all worldly sports and pastimes, and, as far as could be, he shunned the pomp of royalty. He was very careful never to use any words but such as were fit for a Christian. He paid great respect to clergy and monks, and said that if he could divide himself into two, he would give one half to the Dominicans and the other half to the Franciscans. It is even said that at one time he would himself have turned friar, if his queen had not persuaded him that he would do better by remaining a king and studying to govern well and to benefit the Church.
But with all this, Lewis took care that the popes should not get more power over the French Church than he thought due to them. And if any bishop had tried to play the same part in France which Becket played in English history, we may be sure that St. Lewis would have set himself steadily against him.
In 1244 Jerusalem was taken by the Mongols, a barbarous heathen people, who had none of that respect which the Mahometans had shown for the holy places of the Jewish and Christian religions; thus these holy places were now profaned in a way which had not been known before, and stories of outrages done by the new conquerors, with cries for help from the Christians of the Holy Land, reached the West.
Soon after this King Lewis had a dangerous illness, in which his life was given over. He had been for some time speechless, and was even supposed to be dead, when he asked that the cross might be given to him; and as soon as he had thus engaged himself to the crusade he began to recover. His wife, his mother, and others tried to persuade him that he was not bound by his promise, because it had been made at a time when he was not master of himself; but Lewis would not listen to such excuses, and resolved to carry it out faithfully. The way which he took to enlist companions was very curious. On the morning of Christmas day, when a very solemn service was to be held in the chapel of his palace (a chapel which is still to be seen, and is among the most beautiful buildings in Paris), he caused dresses to be given to the nobles as they were going in; for this was then a common practice with kings at the great festivals of the Church. But when the French lords, after having received their new robes in a place which was nearly dark, went on into the chapel, which was bright with hundreds of lights, each of them found that his dress was marked with a cross, so that, according to the notions of the time, he was bound to go to the holy war.
The king did what he could to raise troops, and appointed his mother, Queen Blanche, to govern the kingdom during his absence; and, after having passed a winter in the island of Cyprus, he reached Damietta, in Egypt, on the 5th of June, 1249. For a time all went well with the Crusaders; but soon a change took place, and everything seemed to turn against them. They lost some of their best leaders; a plague broke out and carried off many of them; they suffered from famine, so that they were even obliged to eat their horses; and the enemy, by opening the sluices of the Nile, let loose on them the waters of the river, which carried away a multitude. Lewis himself was very ill, and at length he was obliged to surrender to the enemy, and to make peace on terms far worse than those which he had before refused.
But even although he was a prisoner, his saintly life made the Mahometans look on him with reverence; so that when the Sultan to whom he had become prisoner was murdered by his own people, they thought of choosing the captive Christian king for their chief. Lewis refused to make any treaty for his deliverance unless all his companions might have a share in it; and, although he might have been earlier set free, he refused to leave his captivity until all the money was made up for the ransom of himself and his followers. On being at length free to leave Egypt, he went into the Holy Land, where he visited Nazareth with deep devotion. But, although he eagerly desired to see Jerusalem, he denied himself this pleasure, from a fear that the crusading spirit might die out if the first of Christian kings should consent to visit the holy city without delivering it from the unbelievers.
After an absence of six years, Lewis was called back to France by tidings that his mother, whom he had left as regent of the kingdom, was dead (A.D. 1254). But he did not think that his crusading vow was yet fulfilled; and sixteen years later he set out on a second attempt, which was still more unfortunate than the former. On landing at Tunis, he found that the Arabs, instead of joining him, as he had expected, attacked his force; but these were not his worst enemies. At setting out, the king had been too weak to bear armour or to sit on horseback; and after landing he found that the bad climate, with the want of water and of wholesome food, spread death among his troops. One of his own sons, Tristan, who had been born during the king's captivity in Egypt, fell sick and died. Lewis himself, whose weak state made him an easy victim to disease, died on the 25th of August, 1270, after having shown in his last hours the piety which had throughout marked his life. And, although his eldest son, Philip, recovered from an attack which had seemed likely to be fatal, the Crusaders were obliged to leave that deadly coast with their number fearfully lessened, and without having gained any success. Philip, on his return to France, had to carry with him the remains of his father, of his brother, of one of his own children, and of his brother-in-law, the king of Navarre. Such was the sad end of an expedition undertaken by a saintly king for a noble purpose, but without heeding those rules of prudence which, if they could not have secured success, might at least have taught him to provide against some of the dangers which were fatal to him.
NOTES
CHAPTER XV.
PETER OF MURRONE.
A.D. 1294.
In that age the papacy was sometimes long vacant, because the cardinals, who were the highest in rank of the Roman clergy, and to whom the choice of a pope belonged, could not agree. In order to get over this difficulty, rules were made for the purpose of forcing the cardinals to make a speedy choice. Thus, at a council which was held by Pope Gregory X. at Lyons, in 1274 (chiefly for the sake of restoring peace and fellowship between the Greek and Latin Churches), a canon was made for the election of popes. This canon directed that the cardinals should meet for the choice of a new pope within ten days after the last pope's death; that they should all be shut up in a large room, which, from their being locked in together, was called the conclave;[82] that they should have no means of speaking or writing to any person outside, or of receiving any letters; that their food should be supplied through a window; that, if they did not make their choice within three days, their provisions should be stinted, and if they delayed five days more, nothing should be given them but bread and water. By such means it was thought that the cardinals might be brought to settle the election of a pope as quickly as possible.
We can well believe that the cardinals did not like to be put under such rules. They contrived that later popes should make some changes in them, and tried to go on as before, putting off the election so long as seemed desirable for the sake of their own selfish objects. At one time, when there had been no pope for six months, the people of Viterbo confined the cardinals in the public hall of their city until an election should be made. At another time, the cardinals were shut up in a Roman monastery, where six of them died of the bad air. But one cardinal, who was more knowing than the rest, drove off the effect of the air by keeping up fires in all his rooms, even through the hottest weather; and at length he was chosen pope.
On the death of this pope, Nicolas IV. (A.D. 1292), his office was vacant for two years and a quarter; and when the cardinals then met, it seemed as if they could not fix on any successor. But one day one of them told the rest that a holy man had had a vision, threatening heavy judgments unless a pope were chosen within a certain time; and he gave such an account of this holy man that all the cardinals were struck at once with the idea of choosing him for pope. His name was Peter of Murrone. He lived as a hermit in a narrow cell on a mountain; and there he was found by certain bishops who were sent by the cardinals to tell him of his election. He was seventy-two years of age; roughly dressed, with a long white beard, and thin from fasting and hard living. He could speak no other tongue than the common language of the country-folks around, and he was quite unused to business of any kind, so that he allowed himself to be led by any one who would take the trouble. The fame of Peter's holiness had been widely spread, and he was even supposed to do miracles; so that his election was welcomed by multitudes. Two hundred thousand persons flocked to see his coronation, where the old man appeared in the procession riding on an ass, with his reins held by the king of Naples on one side and by the king's son on the other (A.D. 1294).
This king of Naples, Charles II., got the poor old pope completely into his power. He made him take up his abode at Naples, where Celestine V. (as he was now called) tried to carry on his old way of life by getting a cell built in his palace, just like his old dwelling on the rock of Fumone; and into this little place he would withdraw for days, leaving all the work of his office to be done by some cardinals whom he trusted.
Other stories are told which show that Celestine was quite unfit for his office. The cardinals soon came to think that they had made a great mistake in choosing him; and at length the poor old man came to think so too. One of the cardinals, Benedict Gaetani, who had gained a great influence over his mind, persuaded him that the best thing he could do was to resign; and, after having been pope about five months, Celestine called the cardinals together, and read to them a paper, in which he said that he was too old and too weak to bear the burden of his office; that he wished to return to his former life of quiet and contemplation. He then put off his robes, took once more the rough dress which he had worn as a hermit, and withdrew to his old abode. But the jealousy of his successor did not allow him to remain there in peace. It was feared that the reverence in which the old hermit was held by the common people might lead to some disturbance; and to prevent this he was shut up in close confinement, where he lived only about ten months. The poorer people had all manner of strange notions about his holiness and his supposed miracles; and about twenty years after his death, he was admitted into the Roman list of saints.
NOTES
[ [82] Con meaning together, and clavis meaning a key.
CHAPTER XVI.
BONIFACE VIII.
A.D. 1294-1303.
PART I.
In Celestine's place was chosen Benedict Gaetani, who, although even older than the worn-out and doting late pope, was still full of strength, both in body and in mind. Benedict (who took the name of Boniface VIII.) is said to have been very learned, especially in matters of law; but his pride and ambition led him into attempts which ended in his own ruin, and did serious harm to the papacy.
In the year 1300 Boniface set on foot what was called the Jubilee. You will remember the Jubilee which God in the Law of Moses commanded the Israelites to keep (Leviticus xxv.). But this new Jubilee had nothing to do with the law of Moses, and was more like some games which were celebrated every hundredth year by the ancient Romans. Nothing of the sort had ever before been known among Christians; but when the end of the thirteenth century was at hand, it was found that people's minds were full of a fancy that the year 1300 ought to be a time of some great celebration. Nay, they were even made to believe that such a way of keeping every hundredth year had been usual from the beginning of the Church, although (as I have said) there was no ground whatever for this notion; and one or two lying old men were brought forward to pretend that when children they had attended a former jubilee a hundred years before!
How the expectation of the jubilee was got up we do not know. Most likely Boniface had something to do with it; at all events, he took it up and reaped the profits of it. He sent forth letters offering extraordinary spiritual benefits to all who should visit Rome and the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul during the coming year; and immense numbers of people flocked together from all parts of Europe. It is said that all through the year there were two hundred thousand strangers in Rome; for as some went away, others came to fill up their places. The crowd is described to us as if, in the streets and on the bridge leading to the great church of St. Peter's, an army were marching each way.
It is said that Boniface appeared one day in the robes of a pope, and next day in those of an emperor, with a sword in his hand, and that he declared to some ambassadors that he was both pope and emperor. And after all this display of his pride and grandeur, he found himself much enriched by the offerings which the pilgrims had made; for these were so large, that in one church alone (as we are told) two of the clergy were employed day and night in gathering them in with long rakes. If this be anything like the truth, the whole amount collected from the pilgrims at the jubilee must have been very large indeed.
Boniface got into serious quarrels with princes and others; but the most serious of them all was a quarrel with Philip IV. of France, who is called The Fair on account of his good looks—not that there was any fairness in his character, for it would not be easy to name any one more utterly unfair. If Boniface wished to exalt himself above princes, Philip, who was a thoroughly hard, cold, selfish man, was no less desirous to get the mastery over the clergy; and it was natural that between two such persons unpleasant differences should arise. I need not mention the particulars, except that Boniface wrote letters which seemed to forbid the clergy of any kingdom to pay taxes and such-like dues to their sovereign, and to claim for the pope a right to dispose of the kingdoms of the earth. Philip, provoked by this, held meetings of what were called the estates of France,—clergy, nobles, and commons,—and charged the pope with all sorts of vices and crimes, even with disbelief of the Christian faith. The estates declared against the pope's claims; and when Boniface summoned a council of bishops from all countries to meet at Rome, Philip forbade the French bishops to obey, and all but a few stayed away. One of the pope's letters to the king was cut in pieces and thrown into the fire, and the burning was proclaimed through the streets of Paris with the sound of the trumpet.
The pope was greatly enraged by Philip's conduct. He prepared a bull by which the king was declared to be excommunicated and to be deprived of his crown; and it was intended to publish this bull on the 8th of September, 1303, at Anagni, Boniface's native place, where he was spending the summer months. But on the day before something took place which hindered the carrying out of the pope's design.
Early in his reign Boniface had been engaged in a quarrel with the Colonnas, one of the most powerful among the great princely families of Rome. He had persecuted them bitterly, had deprived them of their estates and honours, and, after having got possession of a fortress belonging to them by treachery, he had caused it to be utterly destroyed, and the ground on which it stood to be ploughed up and sown with salt. The Colonnas were scattered in all quarters, and it is said that one of them, named James, who was a very rough and violent man, had been for a time in captivity among pirates, and was delivered from this condition by the money of the French king, who wished to make use of him.
On the 7th of September, 1303, this James Colonna, with other persons in King Philip's service, appeared at Anagni with an armed force, and made their way to the pope's palace. Boniface sent to ask what they wanted; and in answer they required that he should give up his office, should restore the Colonnas to all that they had lost, and should put himself into the hands of James Colonna. On his refusal, they set fire to the doors of a church which adjoined the palace, and rushed in through the flames. Boniface heard the forcing of the doors which were between them and the room in which he was; and as one door after another gave way with a crash, he declared himself resolved to die as became a pope. He put on the mantle of his office, with the imperial crown which bore the name of Constantine; he grasped his pastoral staff in one hand and the keys of St. Peter in the other, and, taking his seat on his throne, he awaited the approach of his enemies. On entering the room, even these rude and furious men were awed for a moment by his venerable and dauntless look; but James Colonna, quickly overcoming this feeling, required him to resign the papacy. "Behold my neck and my head," answered Boniface: "if I have been betrayed like Christ, I am ready to die like Christ's vicar." Colonna savagely dragged him from the throne, and is said to have struck him on the face with his mailed hand, so as to draw blood. Others of the party poured forth torrents of reproaches. The pope was hurried into the streets, was paraded about the town on a vicious horse, with his face toward the tail, and was then thrown into prison, while the ruffians plundered the palaces and churches of Anagni.
The citizens, in their surprise and alarm, had allowed these things to pass without any check. But two days later they took heart, and with the help of some neighbours got the better of the pope's enemies and delivered him from prison. He was brought out on a balcony in the market-place, where his appearance raised the pity of all, for he had tasted nothing since his arrest. The old man begged that some good woman would save him from dying by hunger. On this the crowd burst out into cries of, "Life to you, holy father!" and immediately people hurried away in all directions, and came back with abundance of food and drink for his relief. The pope spoke kindly to all who were near him, and pronounced forgiveness of all but those who had plundered the Church.
Boniface was soon afterwards removed to Rome. But the sufferings which he had gone through had been too much for a man almost ninety years old to bear. His mind seems to have given way; and there are terrible stories (although we cannot be sure that they are true) about the manner of his death, which took place within a few days after he reached the city (Nov. 22, 1303). It was said of him, "He entered like a fox, he reigned like a lion, he went out like a dog;" and although this saying was, no doubt, made up after his end, it was commonly believed to have been a prophecy uttered by old Pope Celestine, to whom he had behaved so treacherously and so harshly.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE POPES AT AVIGNON.—THE RUIN OF THE TEMPLARS.
A.D. 1303-1312.
PART I.
The next pope, Benedict XI., wished to do away with the effects of Boniface's pride and ambition, and especially to soothe the king of France, whom Boniface had so greatly provoked. But Benedict died within about seven months (June 27, 1304) after his election, and it was not easy to fill up his place. At last, about a year after Benedict's death (June 5, 1305), Bertrand du Got, archbishop of Bordeaux, was chosen. It was said that he had held a secret meeting with King Philip in the depths of a forest, and that, in order to get the king's help towards his election, he bound himself to do five things which Philip named, and also a sixth thing, which was not to be spoken of until the time should come for performing it. But this story seems to have been made up because the pope was seen to follow Philip's wishes in a way that people could not understand, except by supposing that he had bound himself by some special bargain.
For some years Clement V. (as he was called) lived at the cost of French cathedrals and monasteries, which he visited one after another; and then (A.D. 1310) he settled at Avignon, a city on the Rhone, where he and his successors lived for seventy years—about the same length of time that the Jews spent as captives in Babylon. Hence this stay of the popes at Avignon has sometimes been spoken of as the "Babylonian Captivity" of the Church. Although there were some good popes in the course of those seventy years, the court of Avignon was usually full of luxury and vice, and the government of the Church grew more and more corrupt.
Philip the Fair was not content with having brought Boniface to his end, but wished to persecute and disgrace his memory. He caused all sorts of shocking charges to be brought against the dead pope, and demanded that he should be condemned as a heretic, and that his body should be taken up and burnt. By these demands Pope Clement was thrown into great distress. He was afraid to offend Philip, and at the same time he wished to save the memory of Boniface; for if a pope were to be condemned in the way in which Philip wished, it must tell against the papacy altogether. And besides this, if Boniface had not been a lawful pope (as Philip and his party said), the cardinals whom he had appointed were not lawful cardinals, and Clement, who had been partly chosen by their votes, could have no right to the popedom. He was therefore willing to do much in order to clear Boniface's memory; and Philip craftily managed to get the pope's help in another matter on condition that the charges against Boniface should not be pressed. This is supposed to have been the secret article which we have heard of in the story of the meeting in the forest.
I have already mentioned the order of Knights Templars, which was formed in the Holy Land soon after the first crusade.[83] These soldiers of the cross showed at all times a courage worthy of their profession; but they also showed faults which were beyond all question. As they grew rich, they grew proud, and, from having at first been very strict in their way of living, it was believed that they had fallen into habits of luxury. They despised all men outside of their own order; they showed no respect for the kings of Jerusalem, or for the patriarchs, and were, indeed, continually quarrelling with them.
At this time the number of the Templar Knights was about fifteen thousand—the finest soldiers in the world; and the whole number of persons attached to the order was not less than a hundred thousand. About half of these were Frenchmen, and all the masters or heads of the order had been French.
But, although the charges which I have mentioned were enough to make the Templars generally disliked, they were not the worst charges against them. It was said that during the latter part of their time in the Holy Land they had grown friendly with the unbelievers, whom they were bound to oppose in arms to the uttermost; that from such company they had taken up opinions contrary to the Christian faith, and vices which were altogether against their duty as soldiers of the Cross, or as Christians at all; that they practised magic and unholy rites; that when any one was admitted into the order, he was required to deny Christ, to spit on the cross and trample on it, and to worship an idol called Baphomet (a name which seems to have meant the false prophet Mahomet).
Philip the Fair was always in need of money for carrying on his schemes, and at one time, when some tricks which, he had played on the coin of his kingdom had provoked the people of Paris to rise against him, he took refuge in the house of the Templars there. This house covered a vast space of ground with its buildings, and was finer and stronger than the royal palace; and it was perhaps the sight which Philip then got of the wealth and power of the Templars that led him to attack them, in the hope of getting their property into his own hands.
Philip set about this design very craftily. He invited the masters of the Templars and of the Hospitallers (whom you will remember as the other great military order)[84] into France, as if he wished to consult them about a crusade. The master of the Hospital was unable to obey the summons; but the master of the Temple, James de Molay, who had been in the order more than forty years, appeared with a train so splendid that Philip's greed was still more whetted by the sight of it. The master was received with great honour; but, in the meantime, orders were secretly sent to the king's officers all over the kingdom, who were forbidden to open them before a certain day; and when these orders were opened, they were found to require that the Templars should everywhere be seized and imprisoned without delay. Accordingly, at the dawn of the following day, the Templars all over France, who had had no warning and felt no suspicion, were suddenly made prisoners, without being able to resist.
Next day, which was Sunday, Philip set friars and others to preach against the Templars in all the churches of Paris; and inquiries were afterwards carried on by bishops and other judges as to the truth of the charges against them. While the trials were going on, the Templars were very hardly used. All that they had was taken away from them, so that they were in grievous distress. They were kept in dungeons, were loaded with chains, ill fed and ill cared for in all ways. They were examined by tortures, which were so severe that many of them were brought, by the very pain, to confess everything that they were charged with, although they afterwards said that they had been driven by their sufferings to own things of which they were not at all guilty. Many were burnt in companies from time to time; at one time no fewer than fifty-four were burnt together at Paris; and such cruelties struck terror into the rest.
Some of the Templars on their trials told strange stories. They said, for instance, that some men on being admitted to the order were suddenly changed, as if they had been made to share in some fearful secrets; that, from having been jovial and full of life, delighting in horses and hounds and hawks, they seemed to be weighed down by a deep sadness, under which they pined away. It is not easy to say what is to be made of all these stories. As to the ceremonies used at admitting members, it seems likely enough that the Templars may have used some things which looked strange and shocking, but which really meant no harm, and were properly to be understood as figures or acted parables.
The pope seems, too, not to have known what to make of the case; but, as we have seen, he had bound himself to serve King Philip in the matter of the Templars, in order that Pope Boniface's memory might be spared. At a great council held under Clement, at Vienne, in 1312, it was decreed that the order of the Temple should be dissolved; yet it was not said that the Templars had been found guilty of the charges against them, and the question of their guilt or innocence remains to puzzle us as it puzzled the Council of Vienne.
The master of the Temple, James de Molay, was kept in prison six years and a half, and was often examined. At last, he and three other great officers of the order were condemned to imprisonment for life, and were brought forward on a platform set up in front of the cathedral of Paris that their sentence might be published. A cardinal began to read out their confessions; but Molay broke in, denying and disavowing what he had formerly said, and declaring himself worthy to die for having made false confessions through fear of death and in order to please the king. One of his companions took part with him in this; but the other two, broken down in body and in spirit by their long confinement, had not the courage to join them. Philip, on hearing what had taken place, gave orders that James de Molay and the other who took part with him should be burnt without delay; and on the same day they were led forth to death on a little island in the river Seine (which runs through Paris), while Philip from the bank watched their sufferings. Molay begged that his hands might be unbound; and, as the flames rose around him and his companion, they firmly declared the soundness of their faith, and the innocence of the order.
Within nine months after this, Philip died at the age of forty-six (A.D. 1314); and within a few years his three sons, of whom each had in turn been king of France, were all dead. Philip's family was at an end, and the crown passed to one of his nephews. And while the clergy supposed those misfortunes to be the punishment of Philip's doings against Pope Boniface, the people in general regarded them as brought on by his persecution of the Templars. It is not for us to pass such judgments at all; but I mention these things in order to show the feelings with which Philip's actions and his calamities were viewed by the people of his own time.
In other countries, such as England, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, and Spain, the Templars were arrested and brought to trial; and, rightly or wrongly, the order was dissolved. Its members were left to find some other kind of life; and its property was made over to the order of the Hospital, or to some other military order. In France, however, Philip contrived to lay his hands on so much that the Hospitallers for a time were rather made poorer than richer by this addition to their possessions.
NOTES
CHAPTER XVIII.
THE POPES AT AVIGNON (continued).
A.D. 1314-1352.
Pope Clement V. died a few months before Philip (April, 1314), and was succeeded by John XXII., a Frenchman, who was seventy years old at the time of his election, and lived to ninety. The most remarkable thing in John's papacy was his quarrel with Lewis of Bavaria, who had been chosen emperor by some of the electors, while others voted for Frederick of Austria. For the choice of an emperor (or rather of a king of the Romans) had by this time fallen into the hands of seven German princes, of whom four were laymen and three were the archbishops of Mentz, Cologne, and Treves. And hence it is that at a later time we find that some German princes had elector for their title, as the electors of Hanover and the electors of Brandenburg; and even that the three clerical electors were more commonly called electors than archbishops. It is not exactly known when this way of choosing the kings of the Romans came in; but, as I have said, it was quite settled before the time of which we are now speaking.
There was, then, a disputed election between Lewis of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria; and Pope John was well pleased to stand by and watch their quarrel, so long as they only weakened each other without coming to any settlement of the question. But when Lewis had got the better of Frederick, then John stepped in and told him that it was for the pope to judge in such a case which of the two ought to be king of the Romans. And he forbade all people to obey Lewis as king, and declared that whatever he might have done as king should be of no effect. But people had become used to such sentences, so that they would not mind them unless they thought them just; and thus Pope John's thunder was very little heeded. Although he excommunicated Lewis, the sentence had no effect; and by this and other things (especially a quarrel which John had with a part of the Franciscan order) people were set on inquiring into the rights of the papacy in a way which was quite new, so that their thoughts took a direction which was very dangerous to the power of the popes.
Lewis answered the pope by setting up an antipope against him. But this was a thing which had never succeeded; and so it was that John's rival was obliged to submit, and, in token of the humblest repentance, appeared with a rope round his neck at Avignon, where the rest of his life was spent in confinement.
The pope on his part set up a rival emperor, Charles of Moravia, son of that blind King John of Bohemia whose death at the battle of Cressy is known to us from the history of England. But Charles found little support in Germany so long as Lewis was alive.
The next pope, Benedict XII. (A.D. 1334-1342), although of himself he would have wished to make peace with Lewis, found himself prevented from doing so by the king of France; and his successor, Clement VI. (A.D. 1342-1352), who had once been tutor to Charles of Moravia, strongly supported his old pupil. Lewis died excommunicate in 1347, and was the last emperor who had to bear that sentence. But, although he suffered much on account of it, he had yet kept his title of emperor as long as he lived; and he left a strong party of supporters, who were able to make good terms for themselves before Charles was allowed to take peaceable possession of the empire.
CHAPTER XIX.
RELIGIOUS SECTS AND PARTIES.
While the popes were thus trying to lord it over all men, from the emperor downwards, there were many who hated their doctrines and would not allow their authority. The Albigenses and Waldenses, although persecuted as we have seen, still remained in great numbers, and held the opinions which had drawn so much suffering on them. The Albigenses, indeed, were but a part of a greater body, the Cathari, who were spread through many countries, and had an understanding and fellowship with each other which were kept up by secret means. And there were other sects, of which it need only be said here that in general their opinions were very wild and strange, and very unlike, not only to the papal doctrines, but to the Christianity of the Bible and of the early Church. Whenever any of the clergy, from the pope downwards, gave an occasion by pride or ambition, or worldly living, or neglect of duty, or any other fault, these sects took care to speak of the whole Church as having fallen from the faith, and to gain converts for themselves by pointing out the blemishes which were allowed in it.
On the other hand, as I have mentioned,[85] the Inquisition was set on foot for the discovery and punishment of such doctrines as the Roman Church condemned; and it was worked with a secrecy, an injustice, and a cruelty which made men quake with fear wherever it was established. It is a comfort to know that in the British islands this hateful kind of tyranny never found a footing.
There were large numbers of persons called Mystics, who thought to draw near to God, and to give up their own will to His will, in a way beyond what ordinary believers could understand. Among these was a society which called itself the Friends of God; and these friends belonged to the Church at the same time that they had this closer and more secret tie of union among themselves. There is a very curious story how John Tauler, a Dominican friar of Strasburg, was converted by the chief of this party, Nicolas of Basel. Tauler had gained great fame as a preacher, and had reached the age of fifty-two, when Nicolas, who had been one of his hearers, visited him, and convinced him that he was nothing better than a Pharisee. In obedience to the direction of Nicolas, Tauler shut himself up for two years, without preaching or doing any other work as a clergyman, and even without studying. When, at the end of that time, he came forth again to the world, and first tried to preach, he burst into tears and quite broke down; but on a second trial, it was found that he preached in a new style, and with vastly more of warmth and of effect than he had ever done before. Tauler was born in 1294, and died in 1361.
In these times many were very fond of trying to make out things to come from the prophecies of the Old Testament and of the Revelation, and some people of both sexes supposed themselves to have the gift of prophecy. And in seasons of great public distress, multitudes would break out into some wild sort of religious display, which for a time carried everything before it, and seemed to do a great deal of good, although the wiser people looked on it with distrust; but after a while it passed away, leaving those who had taken part in it rather worse than better than before. Among the outbreaks of this kind was that of the Flagellants, which showed itself several times in various places. The first appearance of it was in 1260, when it began at Perugia, in the middle of Italy, and spread both southwards to Rome and northwards to France, Hungary, and Poland. In every city, large companies of men, women, and children moved about the streets, with their faces covered, but their bodies naked down to the waist. They tossed their limbs wildly, they dashed themselves down on the ground in mud or snow, and cruelly flagellated (or flogged) themselves with whips, while they shouted out shrieks and prayers for mercy and pardon.
Again, after a terrible plague called the Black Death, which raged from Sicily to Greenland about 1349,[86] parties of flagellants went about half-naked, singing and scourging themselves. Whenever the Saviour's sufferings were mentioned in their hymns, they threw themselves on the ground like logs of wood, with their arms stretched out in the shape of a cross, and remained prostrate in prayer until a signal was given them to rise.
These movements seemed to do good at first by reconciling enemies and by forcing the thoughts of death and judgment on ungodly or careless people. But after a time they commonly took the line of throwing contempt on the clergy and on the sacraments and other usual means of grace. And when the stir caused by them was over, the good which they had appeared to do proved not to be lasting.
NOTES
CHAPTER XX.
JOHN WYCLIF.
(BORN ABOUT 1324. DIED 1384.)
At this time arose a reformer of a different kind from any of those who had gone before him. He was a Yorkshireman, named John Wyclif, who had been educated at Oxford, and had become famous there as a teacher of philosophy before he began to show any difference of opinions from those which were common in the Church. Ever since the time when King John disgusted his people by his shameful submission to the pope,[87] there had been a strong feeling against the papacy in England; and it had been provoked more and more, partly because the popes were always drawing money from this country, and thrusting foreigners into the richer places of the English Church. These foreigners squeezed all that they could out of their parishes or offices in England; but they never went near them, and would have been unable to do much good if they had gone, because they did not understand the English language. And another complaint was, that, while the popes lived at Avignon, they were so much in the hands of their neighbours, the kings of France, that the English had no chance of fair play if any question arose between the two nations, and the pope could make himself the judge. And thus the English had been made ready enough to give a hearing to any one who might teach them that the popes had no right to the power which they claimed.
There had always been a great unwillingness to pay the tribute which King John had promised to the Roman see. If the king was weak, he paid it; if he was strong, he was more likely to refuse it. And thus it was that the money had been refused by Edward I., paid by Edward II., and again refused by Edward III., whom Pope Urban V., in 1366, asked to pay up for thirty-three years at once. In this case, Wyclif took the side of his king, and maintained that the tribute was not rightly due to the pope. And from this he went on to attack the corruptions of the Church in general. He set himself against the begging friars, who had come to great power, worming themselves in everywhere, so that they had brought most of the poorer people to look only to them as spiritual guides, and to think nothing of the parish clergy. In order to oppose the friars, Wyclif sent about the country a set of men whom he called poor priests. These were very like the friars in their rough dress and simple manner of living, but taught more according to a plain understanding of the Scriptures than to the doctrines of the Roman Church. It is said that once, when Wyclif was very ill, and was supposed to be dying, some friars went to him in the hope of getting him to confess that he repented of what he had spoken and written and done against them. But Wyclif, gathering all his strength, rose up in his bed, and said, in words which were partly taken from the 118th Psalm, "I shall not die but live, and declare the evil deeds of the friars." He was several times brought before assemblies of bishops and clergy, to answer for his opinions; but he found powerful friends to protect him, and always came off without hurt.
It was in Wyclif's time that the rebellion of Wat Tyler and Jack Straw broke out, as we read in the history of England (A.D. 1381); but, although Wyclif's enemies would have been very glad to lay some of the blame of it at his door, it is quite certain that he had nothing to do with it in any way.
In those days almost all books were written in Latin, so that none but learned people could read them. But Wyclif, although he wrote some books in Latin for the learned, took to writing other books in good, plain English, such as every one could understand; and thus his opinions became known to people of all classes. But the greatest thing that he did was the translation of the Bible into English. The Roman Church would not allow the Scriptures to be turned into the language of the country, but wished to keep the knowledge of it for those who could read Latin, and expected the common people to content themselves with what the Church taught. But Wyclif, with others who worked under him, translated the whole Bible into English, so that all might understand it. We must remember, however, that there was no such thing as printing in his days, so that every single book had to be written with the pen, and of course books were still very dear, and could not be at all common.
It is said that Pope Urban V. summoned Wyclif to appear before him at Rome; but Wyclif, who was old, and had been very ill, excused himself from going; and soon after this he died, on the last day of the year 1384.
Wyclif had many notions which we cannot agree with; and we have reason to thank God's good providence that the reform of the Church was not carried out by him, but at a later time and in a more moderate and sounder way than he would have chosen. But we must honour him as one who saw the crying evils of the Roman Church and honestly tried to cure them.
Wyclif's followers were called Lollards, I believe from their habit of lulling or chanting to themselves. After his death they went much farther than he had done, and some of them grew very wild in their opinions, so that they would not only have made strange changes in religious doctrine, but would have upset the government of kingdoms. Against them a law was made by which persons who differed from the doctrines of the Roman Church were sentenced to be burnt, under the name of heretics, and many Lollards suffered in consequence. The most famous of these was Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, a brave but rather hot-headed and violent soldier, who was suspected of meaning to get up a rebellion. For this and his religious opinions together he was burnt in Smithfield, which was then just outside London (A.D. 1417); the same place where, at a later time, many suffered for their religion in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Mary.
NOTES
CHAPTER XXI.
THE POPES RETURN TO ROME.
A.D. 1367-1377.
While the popes lived at Avignon, Rome suffered very much from their absence. There was nothing like a regular government. The great Roman families (such as the Colonnas, whom I have mentioned in speaking of Boniface VIII.) carried on their quarrels with each other, and no one attempted or was strong enough to check them. Murders, robberies, and violences of all sorts were common. The vast and noble buildings which had remained from ancient times were neglected; the churches and palaces fell to decay; even the manners of the Romans became rough and rude, from the want of anybody to teach them better and to show them an example.
And not only Rome, but all Italy missed the pope's presence. The princes carried on their wars by means of hired bands of soldiers, who were mostly strangers from beyond the Alps. These bands hired out their services to any one who would pay enough, and, although they were faithful to each employer for the time that was agreed on, they were ready at the end of that time to engage themselves for money to one who might be their late master's enemy. The most famous captain of such hireling soldiers was Sir John Hawkwood, an Englishman, who is commonly said to have been a tailor in London before he took to arms; but this I believe to be a mistake. He fought for many years in Italy, and a picture of him on horseback, which serves for his monument, is still to be seen in Florence Cathedral.
The Romans again and again entreated the popes to come back to their city. The chief poet and writer of the age, Petrarch, urged them both in verse and in prose to return. But the cardinals, who at this time were mostly Frenchmen, had grown so used to the pleasures of Avignon that they did all they could to keep the popes there. At length, in 1367, Urban V. made his way back to Rome, where the emperors both of the East and of the West met to do him honour; but after a short stay in Italy he returned to Avignon, where he soon after died (A.D. 1370). His successor, Gregory XI., however, was more resolute, and removed the papacy to Rome in 1377; and this was the end of what was styled the seventy years' captivity in Babylon.[88]
NOTES
CHAPTER XXII.
THE GREAT SCHISM.
A.D. 1378-1410.
Gregory XI. died in 1378, and the choice of a successor to him was no easy matter. The Romans were bent on having a countryman of their own, that they might be sure of his continuing to live among them. They guarded the gates, they brought into the city a number of rough and half-savage people from the hills around, to terrify the cardinals; and, when these were shut up for the election, the mob surrounded the palace in which they were, with cries of "We will have a Roman, or at least an Italian!" Day and night their shouts were kept up, with a frightful din of other kinds. They broke into the pope's cellars, got drunk on the wine, and were thus made more furious than before. At length, the cardinals, driven to extreme terror, made choice of Bartholomew Prignano, archbishop of Bari, in south Italy, who was not one of their own number. It is certain that he was not chosen freely, but under fear of the noise and threats of the Roman mob; but all the forms which follow after the election of a pope, such as that of coronation, were regularly gone through, and the cardinals seem to have given their approval of the choice in such a way that they could not well draw back afterwards.
But Urban VI. (as the new pope called himself), although he had until then been much esteemed as a pious and modest man, seems to have lost his head on being raised to his new office. He held himself vastly above the cardinals, wishing to reform them violently, and to lord it over them in a style which they had not been used to. By such conduct he provoked them to oppose him. They objected that he had not been freely chosen, and also that he was not in his right mind; and a party of them met at Fondi, and chose another pope, Clement VII., a Frenchman, who settled at Avignon.
Thus began what is called the Great Schism of the West. There were now two rival popes—one of them having his court at Rome, and the other at Avignon; and the kingdoms of Europe were divided between the two. The cost of keeping up two courts weighed heavily on the Christians of the West; and all sorts of tricks were used to squeeze out fees and money on all possible occasions. As an instance of this, I may mention that Boniface IX., one of the Roman line of popes, celebrated two jubilees, with only ten years between them, although in Boniface VIII.'s time it had been supposed that the jubilee was to come only once in a hundred years.
The princes of Europe were scandalized by this division, and often tried to heal it, but in vain; for the popes, although they professed to desire such a thing, were generally far from hearty in saying so. At length it seemed as if the breach were to be healed by a council held at Pisa in 1409, which set aside both the rivals, and elected a new pope, Alexander V. But it was found that the two old claimants would not give way; and thus the council of Pisa, in trying to cure the evil of having two popes, had saddled the Church with a third.
Alexander did not hold the papacy quite eleven months (June, 1409, to May, 1410). He had fallen wholly under the power of a cardinal named Balthasar Cossa; and this cardinal was chosen to succeed him, under the name of John XXIII. John was one of the worst men who ever held the papacy. It is said that he had been a pirate, and that from this he had got the habit of waking all night and sleeping by day. He had been governor of Bologna, where he had indulged himself to the full in cruelty, greed, and other vices. He was even suspected of having poisoned Alexander; and, although he must no doubt have been a very clever man, it is not easy to understand how the other cardinals can have chosen one who was so notoriously wicked to the papacy.
CHAPTER XXIII.
JOHN HUSS.
A.D. 1369-1414.
It would seem that after a time Wyclif's opinions almost died out in England. But meanwhile they, or opinions very like them, were eagerly taken up in Bohemia. If we look at the map of Europe, we might think that no country was less likely than Bohemia to have anything to do with England; for it lies in the midst of other countries, far away from all seas, and with no harbours to which English ships could make their way. And besides this, the people are of a different race from any that have ever settled in this country, or have helped to make the English nation, and their language has no likeness to ours. But it so happened that Richard II. of England married the Princess Anne, granddaughter of the blind king who fell at Cressy, and daughter of the emperor Charles IV., who usually lived in Bohemia. And when Queen Anne of England died, and the Bohemian ladies and servants of her court went back to their own country, they took with them some of Wyclif's writings, which were readily welcomed there; for some of the Bohemian clergy had already begun a reform in the Church, and Wyclif's name was well known on account of his writings of another kind.
Among those who thus became acquainted with Wyclif's opinions was a young man named John Huss. He had been an admirer of Wyclif's philosophical works; but when he first met with his reforming books, he was so little taken with them that he wished they were thrown into the Moldau, the river which runs through Prague, the chief city of Bohemia. But Huss soon came to think differently, and heartily took up almost all Wyclif's doctrines.
Huss made many enemies among the clergy by attacking their faults from the pulpit of a chapel called Bethlehem, where he was preacher. He was, however, still so far in favour with the archbishop of Prague, that he was employed by him, together with some others, to inquire into a pretended miracle, which drew crowds of pilgrims to seek for cures at a place called Wilsnack, in the north of Germany. But he afterwards fell out of favour with the archbishop who had appointed him to this work, and he was still less liked by later archbishops.
From time to time some doctrines which were said to be Wyclif's were condemned at Prague. Huss usually declared that Wyclif had been wrongly understood, and that his real meaning was true and innocent. But at length a decree was passed that all Wyclif's books should be burnt (A.D. 1410), and thereupon a grand bonfire was made in the courtyard of the archbishop's palace, while all the church bells of the city were tolled as at a funeral. But as some copies of the books escaped the flames, it was easy to make new copies from these.
Huss was excommunicated, but he still went on teaching. In 1412, Pope John XXIII. proclaimed a crusade against Ladislaus, king of Naples, with whom he had quarrelled, and ordered that it should be preached, and that money should be collected for it all through Latin Christendom. Huss and his chief friend, whose name was Jerome, set themselves against this with all their might. They declared it to be unchristian that a crusade should be proclaimed against a Christian prince, and that the favours of the Church should be held out as a reward for paying money or for shedding of blood. One day, as a preacher was inviting people to buy his indulgences (as they were called) for the forgiveness of sins, he was interrupted by three young men, who told him that what he said was untrue, and that Master Huss had taught them better. The three were seized, and were condemned to die; and, although it would seem that a promise was afterwards given that their lives should be spared, the sentence of death was carried into effect. The people were greatly provoked by this, and when the executioner, after having cut off the heads of the three, proclaimed (as was usual), "Whosoever shall do the like, let him look for the like!" a cry burst forth from the multitude around, "We are ready to do and to suffer the like." Women dipped their handkerchiefs in the blood of the victims, and treasured it up as a precious relic. Some of the crowd even licked the blood. The bodies were carried off by the people, and were buried in Bethlehem chapel; and Huss and others spoke of the three as martyrs.
By this affair his enemies were greatly provoked. Fresh orders were sent from Rome for the destruction of Wyclif's books, and for uttering all the heaviest sentences of the Church against Huss himself. He therefore left Prague for a time, and lived chiefly in the castles of Bohemian noblemen who were friendly to him, writing busily as well as preaching against what he supposed to be the errors of the Roman Church.
We shall hear more of Huss by-and-by.
CHAPTER XXIV.
THE COUNCIL OF CONSTANCE.
A.D. 1414-1418.
PART I.
The division of the Church between three popes cried aloud for settlement in some way; and besides this there were general complaints as to the need of reform in the Church. The emperor Sigismund urged Pope John to call a general council for the consideration of these subjects; and, although John hated the notion of such a meeting, he could not help consenting. He wished that the council should be held in Italy, as he might hope to manage it more easily there than in any country north of the Alps; and he was very angry when Constance, a town on a large lake in Switzerland, was chosen as the place. It seemed like a token of bad luck when, as he was passing over a mountain on his way to the council, his carriage was upset, and he lay for a while in the snow, using bad words as to his folly in undertaking the journey; and when he came in sight of Constance at the foot of the hill, he said that it looked like a trap for foxes. In that trap Pope John was caught.
The other popes, Gregory XII. and Benedict XIII., did not attend, although both had been invited; but some time after the opening of the council (which was on the 5th of November, 1414), the emperor Sigismund arrived. He reached Constance in a boat which had brought him across the lake very early on Christmas morning, and at the first service of the festival, which was held before daybreak, he read the Gospel which tells of the decree of Cæsar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. For it was considered that the emperor was entitled to take this part in the Christmas service of the Church.
It was proposed that all the three popes should resign, and that a new pope should be chosen. In answer to this, John said that he was ready to resign if the others would do the same; but it soon became clear that he did not mean to keep his promise honestly. He tried by all manner of tricks to ward off the dangers which surrounded him; and, after he had more than once tried in vain to get away from Constance, he was able to escape one day when the members of the council were amusing themselves at a tournament given by a prince whom John had persuaded to take off their attention in this way. The council, however, in his absence went on to examine the charges against him, many of which were so shocking that they were kept secret, out of regard for his office. John, by letters and messengers, asked for delay, and did all that he could for that purpose; but, notwithstanding all his arts, he was sentenced to be deposed from the papacy for simony (that is, for trafficking in holy things),[89] and for other offences. On being informed of this, he at once put off his papal robes, saying, that since he had put them on he had never enjoyed a quiet day (May 31, 1415).
John Huss, the Bohemian reformer, had been summoned to Constance, that he might give an account of himself, and had been furnished with a safe-conduct (as it was called), in which the emperor assured him of protection on his way to the council and back. But, although at first he was treated as if he were free, it was pretended, soon after his arrival, that he wished to run away; and under this pretence he was shut up in a dark and filthy prison. Huss had no friends in the council; for the reforming part of the members would have nothing to do with him, lest it should be thought that they agreed with him in all his notions. And when he was at length brought out from prison, where his health had suffered much, and when he was required to answer for himself, without having been allowed the use of books to prepare himself, all the parties in the council turned on him at once. His trial lasted three days. The charges against him were mostly about Wyclif's doctrines, which had been often condemned by councils at Rome and elsewhere, but which Huss was supposed to hold; and when he tried to explain that in some things he did not agree with Wyclif, nobody would believe him. Some of his bitterest persecutors were men who had once been his friends, and had gone with him in his reforming opinions.
After his trial, Huss was sent back to prison for a month, and all kinds of ways were tried to persuade him to give up the opinions which were blamed in him; but he stood firm in what he believed to be the truth. At length he was brought out to hear his sentence. He claimed the protection of the emperor, whose safe-conduct he had received (as we have seen). But Sigismund had been hard pressed by Huss's enemies, who told him that a promise made to one who is wrong in the faith is not to be kept; and the emperor had weakly and treacherously yielded, so that he could only blush for shame when Huss reminded him of the safe-conduct.
Huss was condemned to death, and was degraded from his orders, as the custom was; that is to say, they first put into his hands the vessels used at the consecration of the Lord's Supper, which were the signs of his being a priest; and by taking away these from him, they reduced him from a priest to a deacon. Then they took away the tokens of his being a deacon, and so they stripped him of his other orders, one after another; and when at last they had turned him back into a layman, they led him away to be burnt. It is said that, as he saw an old woman carrying a faggot to the pile which was to burn him, he smiled and said, "O holy simplicity!" meaning that her intention was good, although the poor old creature was ignorant and misled. He bore his death with great patience and courage; and then his ashes and such scorched bits of his dress as remained were thrown into the Rhine, lest his followers should treasure them up as relics (July 6, 1415).
About ten months after the death of Huss, his old friend and companion, Jerome of Prague, was condemned by the council to be burnt, and suffered with a firmness which even those who were most strongly against him could not but admire (May 30, 1416).
When Pope John had been got rid of, Gregory XII., the most respectable of the three rival popes, agreed to resign his claims. But the third pope, Benedict XIII., would hear of no proposals for his resignation, and shut himself up in a castle on the coast of Spain, where he not only continued to call himself pope, but after his death two popes of his line were set up in succession. The council of Constance, however, finding Benedict obstinate, did not trouble itself further about him, and went on to treat the papacy as vacant.
There was a great dispute whether the reform of the Church (which people had long asked for), or the choice of a new pope, should be first taken in hand; and at length it was resolved to elect a pope without further delay. The choice was to be made by the cardinals and some others who were joined with them; and these electors were all shut up in the Exchange of Constance—a building which is still to be seen there. While the election was going on, multitudes of all ranks, and even the emperor himself among them, went from time to time in slow procession round the Exchange, chanting in a low tone litanies, in which they prayed that the choice of the electors might be guided for the good of the Church. And when at last an opening was made in the wall from within, and through it a voice proclaimed, "We have a pope: Lord Otho of Colonna!" the news spread at once through all Constance. The people seemed to be wild with joy that the division of the Church, which had lasted so long, was now healed. All the bells of the town pealed forth joyfully, and it is said that a crowd of not less than 80,000 people hurried at once to the Exchange. The emperor in his delight threw himself at the new pope's feet; and for hours together vast numbers thronged the cathedral, where the pope was placed on the high altar, and gave them his blessing. It was on St. Martin's day, the 11th of November, 1417, that this election took place; and from this the pope styled himself Martin V. But the joy which had been shown at his election was more than the effect warranted. The council had chosen a pope before taking up the reform of the Church; and the new pope was no friend to reform. During the rest of the time that the council was assembled, he did all that he could to thwart attempts at reform; and when, at the end of it, he rode away from Constance, with the emperor holding his bridle on one side and one of the chief German princes on the other, while a crowd of princes, nobles, clergy, and others, as many as 40,000, accompanied him, it seemed as if the pope had got above all the sovereigns of the world.
The great thing done by the council of Constance was, that it declared a general council to be above the pope, and entitled to depose popes if the good of the Church should require it.
NOTES
CHAPTER XXV.
THE HUSSITES.
A.D. 1418-1431.
The news of Huss's death naturally raised a general feeling of anger in Bohemia, where his followers treated his memory as that of a saint, and kept a festival in his honour. And when the emperor Sigismund, in 1419, succeeded his brother Wenceslaus in the kingdom of Bohemia, he found that he was hated by his new subjects on account of his share in the death of Huss.
But, although most of the Bohemians might now be called Hussites, there were great divisions among the Hussites themselves. Some had lately begun to insist that in the sacrament of the Lord's Supper both the bread and the wine should be given to all the people, according to our Lord's own example, instead of allowing no one but the priest to receive the wine, according to the Roman practice. These people who insisted on the sacramental cup were called Calixtines, from the Latin calix, which means a cup or chalice. But among those who agreed in this opinion there were serious differences as to some other points.
In the summer of 1419, the first public communion was celebrated at a place where the town of Tabor was afterwards built. It was a very different kind of ceremony from what had been usual. There were three hundred altars, but they were without any covering; the chalices were of wood, the clergy wore only their every-day dress; and a love-feast followed, at which the rich shared with their poorer brethren. The wilder party among the Hussites were called Taborites, from Tabor, which became the chief abode of this party. They now took to putting their opinions into practice. They declared churches and their ornaments, pictures, images, organs, and the like, to be abominable; and they went about in bands, destroying everything that they thought superstitious. And thus Bohemia, which had been famous for the size and beauty of its churches, was so desolated that hardly a church was left in it; and those which are now standing have almost all been built since the time when the Hussites destroyed the older churches.
The chief leader of the Taborites was John Ziska, whose name is said by some to mean one-eyed; and at least he had lost an eye in early life. Ziska had such a talent for war, that, although his men were only rough peasants, armed with nothing better than clubs, flails, and such like tools, which they had been accustomed to use in husbandry, he trained them to encounter regular armies, and always came off with victory. He taught his soldiers to make their flails very dangerous weapons by tipping them with iron; and to place their waggons together in such a way that each block of waggons made a sort of little fortress, against which the force of the enemy dashed in vain. But Ziska's bravery and skill were disgraced by his savage fierceness. He never spared an enemy; he took delight in putting clergy and monks to the sword, or in burning them in pitch, and in burning and pulling down churches and monasteries. In the course of the war he lost his remaining eye; but he still continued to act as general with the same skill and success as before. His cruelty became greater continually, and the last year of his life was the bloodiest.
Ziska died in October, 1424. It is said that he directed that his skin should be taken off his body, and made into the covering of a drum, at the sound of which he expected all enemies to flee in terror; but the story is probably not true. At his death, a part of his old companions called themselves orphans, as if they had lost their father, and could never find another. But other generals arose to carry on the same kind of war, while their wild followers were wrought up to a sort of fury which nothing could withstand.
On the side of the Church a holy war was proclaimed, and vast armies, made up from all nations of Europe, were gathered for the invasion of Bohemia. One of these crusades was led by Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, and great-uncle of King Henry VI. of England; another, by a famous Italian cardinal, Julian Cesarini. But the courage and fury of the Bohemians, with their savage appearance and their strange manner of fighting, drove back all assaults, with immense loss, in one campaign after another; until Cesarini, the leader in the last crusade, was convinced that there was no hope of putting the Bohemians down by force, and that some other means must be tried.
CHAPTER XXVI.
COUNCILS OF BASEL AND FLORENCE.
A.D. 1431-9.
It had been settled at the council of Constance that regularly from time to time there should be held a general council, by which name was then meant a council gathered from the whole of the Western Church, but without any representatives of the Eastern Churches; and according to this decree a council was to meet at Basel, on the Rhine, in the year 1431. It was just before the time of its opening that Cardinal Cesarini was defeated by the Hussites of Bohemia, as we have seen. Being convinced that some gentler means ought to be tried with them, he begged the pope to allow them a hearing; and he invited them to send deputies to the council of Basel, of which he was president.
The Bohemians did as they were asked to do, and thirty of them appeared before the council,—rough, wild-looking men for the most part, headed by Procopius, who was at once a priest and a warrior, and was called the great, in order to distinguish him from another of the same name. A dispute, which lasted many weeks, was carried on between the leaders of these Bohemians and some members of the council; and, at length, four points were agreed on. The chief of these was, that the chalice at the Holy Communion should not be confined to the priest alone, but might be given to such grown-up persons as should desire it. This was one of the things which had been most desired by the Bohemian reformers. We need not go further into the history of the Hussites and of the parties into which they were divided; but it is worth while to remember that the use of the sacramental cup was allowed in Bohemia for two hundred years, while in all other churches under the Roman authority it was forbidden.
Soon after the meeting of the council of Basel, the pope, whose name was Eugenius IV., grew jealous lest it should get too much power, and sent orders that it should break up. But the members were not disposed to bear this. They declared that the council was the highest authority in the Church, and superior to the pope; and they asked Eugenius to join them at Basel, and threatened him in case of his refusal. Just at that time Eugenius was driven from Rome by his people, and therefore he found it convenient to try to smooth over differences, and to keep good terms with the council; but after a while the disagreement broke out again. The pope had called a council to meet at Ferrara, in Italy, in order to consult with some Greeks (at the head of whom were the emperor and the patriarch of Constantinople) as to the union of the Greek and Latin Churches; and he desired the members of the Basel council to remove to Ferrara, that they might take part in the new assembly. But only a few obeyed; and those who remained at Basel were resolved to carry on their quarrel to the uttermost. First, they allowed Eugenius a certain time, within which they required him either to appear at Basel or to send some one in his stead; then, they lengthened out this time somewhat; and as he still did not appear, they first suspended him from his office, then declared him to be deposed, and at length went on to choose another pope in his stead (Nov. 17, 1439).
The person thus chosen was Amadeus, who for nearly thirty years had been duke of Savoy, but had lately given over his dukedom to his son, and had put himself at the head of twelve old knights, who had formed themselves into an order of hermits at Ripaille, near the lake of Geneva. The new pope bargained that he should not be required to part with the long white beard which he had worn as a hermit; but after a while, finding that it looked strange among the smooth chins of those around him, he, of his own accord, allowed it to be shaved off. But this attempt to set up an antipope came to very little. Felix V. (as the old duke called himself on being elected) was obliged to submit to Eugenius; and the council of Basel, after dwindling away by degrees, and being removed from one place to another, died out so obscurely that its end was unnoticed by any one.
Eugenius held his council at Ferrara, and afterwards removed it to Florence (A.D. 1438-9); and it seemed as if by his management the Greeks, who were very poor, and were greatly in need of help against the Turks, were brought to an agreement with the Latins as to the questions which had been so long disputed between the Churches. The union of the Churches was celebrated by a grand service in the cathedral of Florence. But, as in former times,[90] the Greeks found, on their return home, that their countrymen would not agree to what had been done; and thus the breach between the two Churches continued, until a few years later Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and so the Greek Empire came to an end.
NOTES
CHAPTER XXVII.
NICOLAS V. AND PIUS II.
A.D. 1447-1464.
The next pope, Nicolas V., was a man who had raised himself from a humble station by his learning, ability, and good character. He was chiefly remarkable for his love of learning, and for the bounty which he spent on learned men. For learning had come to be regarded with very high honour, and those who were famous for it found themselves persons of great importance, who were welcome at the courts of princes, from the Emperor of the West down to the little dukes and lords of Italy. But we must not fancy that these learned men were all that they ought to have been. They were too commonly selfish and jealous, vain, greedy, quarrelsome, unthrifty; they flattered the great, however unworthy these might be; and in religion many of them were more like the old heathen Greeks than Christians.
In the time of Nicolas, a terrible calamity fell on Christendom by the loss of Constantinople. The Turks, a barbarous and Mahometan people, had long been pressing on the Eastern empire, and swallowing up more and more of it. It was the fear of these advancing enemies that led the Greeks repeatedly to seek for union with the Latin Church, in the hope that they might thus get help from the West for the defence of what remained of their empire. But these reconciliations never lasted long, more especially as the Greeks did not gain that aid from their Western brethren for the sake of which they had yielded in matters of religion. One more attempt of this kind was made after the council of Florence; but it was vain, and in 1453 the Turks, under Sultan Mahomet II., became masters of Constantinople.
A great number of learned Greeks, who were scattered by this conquest, found their way into the West, bringing with them their knowledge and many Greek manuscripts; and such scholars were gladly welcomed by Pope Nicolas and others. Not only were their books bought up, but the pope sent persons to search for manuscripts all over Greece, in order to rescue as much as possible from destruction by the barbarians. Nicolas founded the famous Vatican library in the papal palace at Rome, and presented a vast number of manuscripts to it. For it was not until this very time that printing was invented, and formerly all books were written by hand, which is a slow and costly kind of work, as compared with printing. For in writing out books, the whole labour has to be done for every single copy; but when a printer has once set up his types, he can print any number of copies without any other trouble than that of inking the types and pressing them on the paper, by means of a machine, for each copy that is wanted. The art of printing was brought from Germany to Rome under Nicolas V., and he encouraged it, like everything else which was connected with learning.
Nicolas also had a plan for rebuilding Rome in a very grand style, and began with the Church of St. Peter; which he intended to surround with palaces, gardens, terraces, libraries, and smaller churches. But he did not live to carry this work far.
One effect of the new encouragement of learning was, that scholars began to inquire into the truth of some things which had long been allowed to pass without question. And thus in no long time the story of Constantine's donation and the false Decretals[91] were shown to be forged and worthless.
The shock of the loss of Constantinople was felt all through Christendom, and Nicholas attempted to get up a crusade, but died before much came of it. When, however, the Turks, in the pride of victory, advanced further into Europe, and laid siege to Belgrade on the Danube, they were driven back with great loss by the skill of John Huniades, a general, and by the courage which John of Capistrano, a Franciscan friar, was able by his exhortations and his prayers to rouse in the hearts of the besieged.
Nicolas died in 1455, and his successor, Calixtus III., in 1458. The next pope, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, who took the name of Pius II., was a very remarkable man. He had taken a strong part against Pope Eugenius at Basel, and had even been secretary to the old duke-antipope Felix. But he afterwards made his peace by doing great services to Eugenius, and then he rose step by step, until at the death of Calixtus he was elected pope. Pius was a man of very great ability in many ways; but his health was so much shaken before he became pope, that he was not able to do all that he might have done if he had been in the fulness of his strength. He took up the crusade with great zeal, but found no hearty support from others. A meeting which he held at Mantua for the purpose had little effect. At last, although suffering from gout and fever, the pope made his way from Rome to Ancona, on the Adriatic, where he expected to find both land and sea forces ready for the crusade. But on the way he fell in with some of the troops which had been collected for the purpose, and they turned out to be such wretched creatures, and so utterly unfit for the hardships of war, that he could only give them his blessing and tell them to go back to their homes. And, although, after reaching Ancona, he had the pleasure of seeing twenty-four Venetian ships enter the harbour for his service, he was so worn out by sickness that he died on the next day but one (Aug. 14, 1464). And after his death the crusade, on which he had so much set his heart, came to nothing.
NOTES
CHAPTER XXVIII.
JEROME SAVONAROLA.
A.D. 1452-1498.
PART I.
There is not much to tell about the popes after Pius II. until we come to Alexander VI., who was a Spaniard named Roderick Borgia, and was pope from 1492 to 1503. And the story of Alexander is too shocking to be told here; for there is hardly anything in all history so bad as the accounts which we have of him and of his family. He is supposed to have died of drinking, by mistake, some poison which he had prepared for a rich cardinal whose wealth he wished to get into his hands.
Instead, therefore, of telling you about the popes of this time, I shall give some account of a man who became very famous as a preacher—Jerome Savonarola.
Savonarola was born in 1452 at Ferrara, where his grandfather had been physician to the duke; and his family wished him to follow the same profession. But Jerome was set on becoming a monk, and from this nothing could move him. He therefore joined the Dominican friars, and after a while he was removed to St. Mark's, at Florence, a famous convent of his order. He found things in a bad state there; but he was chosen prior (or head) of the convent, and reformed it, so that it rose in character, and the number of the monks was much increased. He also became a great preacher, so that even the vast cathedral of Florence could not hold the crowds which flocked to hear him. He was especially fond of preaching on the dark prophecies of the Revelation, and of declaring that the judgments of God were about to come on Florence and on all Italy because of sin; and he sometimes fancied that he not only gathered such things from Scripture, but that they were revealed to him by visions from heaven.
At this time a family named Medici had got the chief power in Florence into their hands; and Savonarola always opposed them, because he thought that they had no right to such power in a city which ought to be free. But when Lorenzo, the head of the family, was dying (A.D. 1492), he sent for Savonarola, because he thought him the only one of the clergy who would be likely to speak honestly to him of his sins, and to show him the way of seeking forgiveness. Savonarola did his part firmly, and pointed out some of Lorenzo's acts as being those of which he was especially bound to repent. But when he desired him to restore the liberties of Florence, it was more than the dying man could make up his mind to; and Savonarola, thinking that his repentance could not be sincere if he refused this, left him without giving him the Church's absolution.
But, although Savonarola was a very sincere and pious man, he did not always show good judgment. For instance, when he wished to get rid of the disorderly way in which the young people of Florence used to behave at the beginning of Lent, he sent a number of boys about the city (A.D. 1497), where they entered into houses, and asked the inhabitants to give up to them any vanities which they might have. Then these vanities (as they were called) were all gathered together, and were built up into a pile fifteen stories high. There were among them cards and dice, fineries of women's dress, looking-glasses, bad books, musical instruments, pictures, and statues. The whole heap was of great value, and a merchant from Venice offered a large sum for it. But the money was refused, and he was forced to throw in his own picture as an addition to the other vanities. When night came, a long procession under Savonarola's orders passed through the streets, and then the pile was set on fire, amidst the sound of bells, drums, and trumpets, and the shouts of the multitude, who had been worked up to a share of Savonarola's zeal.
But the wiser people were distressed by the mistakes of judgment which he had shown in setting children to search out the faults of their elders, and in mixing up harmless things in the same destruction with those which were connected with deep sinfulness and vice. And this want of judgment was still more shown a year later, when, after having repeated the bonfire of vanities, Savonarola's followers danced wildly in three circles around a cross set up in front of St. Mark's, as if they had been so many crazy dervishes of the East.
Savonarola had raised up a host of enemies, and some of them were eagerly looking for an opportunity of doing him some mischief. At length one Francis of Apulia, a Franciscan friar, challenged him to what was called the ordeal (or judgment) of fire, as a trial of the truth of his doctrine; and after much trouble it was settled that a friend of each should pass through this trial, which was supposed to be a way of finding out God's judgment as to the truth of the matter in dispute. Two great heaps of fuel were piled up in a public place at Florence. They were each forty yards long and two yards and a half high, with an opening of a yard's width between them; and it was intended that these heaps should be set on fire, and that the champions should try to pass between the two, as a famous monk had done at Florence in Hildebrand's time, hundreds of years before. But when a vast crowd had been brought to see the ordeal, they were much disappointed at finding that it was delayed, because Savonarola's enemies fancied that he might perhaps make use of some magical charms against the flames. There was a long dispute about this, and, while the parties were still wrangling, a heavy shower came down on the crowd. The magistrates then forbade the trial; the people, tired and hungry from waiting, drenched by the rain, provoked by the wearisome squabble which had caused the delay, and after all balked of the expected sight, broke out against Savonarola; and he had great difficulty in reaching St. Mark's under the protection of some friends, who closed around him and kept off the angry multitude. Two days later, the convent was besieged; and when the defenders were obliged to surrender it, Savonarola and the friar who was to have undergone the ordeal on his side were sent to prison.
Savonarola had a long trial, during which he was often tortured; but whatever might be wrung from him in this way, he afterwards declared that it was not to be believed, because the weakness of his body could not bear the pain of torture, and he confessed whatever might be asked of him. This trial was carried on under the authority of the wicked Pope Alexander VI.
Although no charge of error as to the faith could be made out against Savonarola, his enemies were bent on his death; and he and two of his companions were sentenced to be hanged and burnt. Like Huss, they had to go through the form of being degraded from their orders; and at the end of this it was a bishop's part to say to each, "I separate thee from the Church militant" (that is, from the Church which is carrying on its warfare here on earth). But the bishop, who had once been one of Savonarola's friars at St. Mark's, was very uneasy, and said in his confusion, "I separate thee from the Church triumphant" (that is, from the Church when its warfare has ended in victory and triumph). Savonarola saw the mistake, and corrected it by saying, "from the militant, not from the triumphant; for that is not thine to do."
Savonarola's party did not die out with him, but long continued to cherish his memory. Among those who were most earnest in this was the great artist, Michael Angelo Buonarotti, who had been one of his hearers in youth, and even to his latest days used to read his works with interest, and to speak of him with reverence.
CHAPTER XXIX.
JULIUS II. AND LEO X.
A.D. 1503-1521.
Alexander VI. was succeeded by a pope who took the title of Pius III., and lived only six and twenty days after his election. And after Pius came Julius II., who was pope from 1503 to 1513, and Leo X., who lived to the year 1521.
Julius, who owed his rise in life to the favour of his uncle Sixtus IV. (one of the popes who had come between Pius II. and Alexander VI.), was desirous to gain for the Roman see all that it had lost or had ever claimed. He was not a man of religious character, but plunged deeply into politics, and even acted as a soldier in war. Thus, at the siege of Mirandola, in the winter of 1511, he lived for weeks in a little hut, regardless of the frost and snow, of the roughness and scantiness of his food; and when most of those around him were frightened away by the cannon-balls which came from the walls of the fortress, the stout old pope kept his place, and directed the pointing of his own cannon against the town.
His successor, Leo, who was of the Florentine family of Medici,[92] was fond of elegant pleasures and of hunting. His tastes were costly, and continually brought him into difficulties as to money. The manner of life in Leo's court was gay, luxurious, and far from strict. He had comedies acted before him, which were hardly fit for the amusement of the chief bishop of Christendom. He is famous for his encouragement of the arts; and it was in his time that the art of painting reached its highest perfection through the genius of Michael Angelo Buonarotti (who has been already mentioned as a disciple of Savonarola)[93] and of Raphael Sanzio. In the art of architecture a great change took place about this time. For some hundreds of years it had been usual to build in what is called the Gothic style, of which the chief mark is the use of pointed arches. Not that there was no change during all that time; for there are great differences between the earlier and the later kinds of Gothic, and these have since been so carefully studied that skilful people can tell from the look of a building the time at which every part of it was erected. But a little before the year 1500, the Gothic gave way to another style, and one of the greatest works ever done in this new style was the vast church of St. Peter, at Rome. I have mentioned that Nicolas V. thought of rebuilding the ancient church, which had stood since the time of Constantine the Great, and that he had even begun the work.[94] But now both the old basilica[95] and the beginning of a new church which Nicolas had made were swept away, and something far grander was designed. There were several architects who carried on the building of this great church, one after another; but the grand dome of St. Peter's, which rises into the air over the whole city, was the work of Michael Angelo, who was not only a painter, but an architect and a sculptor. It was by offering indulgences (or spiritual favours, forgiveness of sins, and the like) as a reward for gifts towards the new St. Peter's, that Julius raised the anger and disgust of the German reformer, Martin Luther. And thus it was the building of the most magnificent of Roman churches that led to the revolt which took away from the popes a great part of their spiritual dominion.
NOTES
CHAPTER XXX.
MISSIONS.—THE INQUISITION.
All through the times of which I had been speaking, missions to the heathen were actively carried on. Much of this kind was done in Asia, and, indeed, the heart of Asia seems to have been more open and better known to Europeans during some part of the middle ages than it has ever been since. But as those parts were so far off, and so hard to get at, it often happened that dishonest people, for their own purposes, brought to Europe wonderful tales of the conversion of Eastern nations, or of their readiness to be converted, which had no real ground. And sometimes the crafty Asiatic princes themselves made a pretence of willingness to receive the Gospel when all that they really wanted was to get some advantages of other kinds from the pope and the Christians of the West.
A great deal was heard in Europe of a person who was called Prester (that is to say, presbyter or priest) John. He was believed to live in the far East, and to be both a king and a Christian priest. And there really was at one time a line of Christian princes in Asia, between lake Baikal and the northern border of China, whose capital was Karakorum; but in 1202 their kingdom was overthrown by the Tartar conqueror, Genghis-khan; although the belief in Prester John, which had always been mixed with a good deal of fable, continued long after to float in the minds of the Western Christians.
The mendicant orders, which (as we have seen) were founded in the time of Innocent III.,[96] took up the work of missions with great zeal; and some of the Franciscan missionaries especially, by undergoing martyrdom, gained great credit for their order in its early days. There were also travellers who made their way into the East from curiosity or some other such reason, and brought home accounts of what they had seen. The most famous of these travellers was Marco Polo, a Venetian of a trading family, who lived many years in China, and found his way back to Europe by India and Ceylon. Some of these travellers report that they found the Nestorian[97] clergy enjoying great influence at the courts of Asiatic sovereigns; for the Nestorians had been very active in missions at an earlier time, and had made many converts in Asia; but the travellers, who saw them only after they had been long settled there, describe them very unfavourably in all ways. John of Monte Corvino, an Italian, was established by Pope Clement V. as Archbishop of Cambalu (or Pekin), with seven bishops under him; and Christianity seemed thus far to be flourishing in that region (A.D. 1307).
In the meantime the people of countries bordering on the Baltic Sea were converted, although not without much trouble. Sometimes they would profess to welcome the Gospel; but as soon as the preachers had left them they disowned it, and washed themselves, as if by doing so they might get rid of their Christian baptism. And the missionaries often found themselves at a loss how to deal with the ignorant superstition of these people. Thus a missionary in Livonia, named Dietrich, was threatened with death because an eclipse had taken place during his visit to their country, and they fancied that he had swallowed the sun! At another time his life was in danger because the natives saw that his fields were in better condition than theirs, and, instead of understanding that this was the effect of his greater skill and care, they charged him with having brought it about by magical arts. They therefore resolved to settle his fate by bringing forward a horse who was regarded as sacred to their gods, and observing how the beast behaved. At first the horse put forward his right foot, which would have saved the missionary's life; but the heathen diviners said that the God of Christians was sitting on the horse's back, and directing him; and they insisted that the back should be rubbed, in order to get rid of such influence. But after this had been done, the horse again put forward the same foot, and, much against the will of the Livonians, Dietrich was allowed to go free.
Sometimes the missionaries tried other things to help the effect of their preaching. Thus, a later missionary in Livonia, Albert of Apeldern, in order to give the people some knowledge of Scripture history, got up what was called a prophetical play, in which Gideon, David, and Herod were to appear. But when Gideon and his men began to fight the Midianites on the stage, the heathens took alarm lest some treacherous trick should be practised on them, and they all ran away in affright.
Albert of Apeldern founded a military order, somewhat on the plan of the Templars, for the conversion of the heathen on the Baltic; and it was afterwards joined with another order. The Teutonic (or German) order, which was thus formed, became very famous. By subduing the nations of the Baltic coasts, it forced them to receive Christianity, got possession of their lands, and laid the foundation of a power which has grown by degrees into the great Prussian (or German) empire.
The work of missions was carried on also in Russia, Lithuania, and other northern countries, so that by the time which we have now reached it might be said that all Europe was in some way or other converted to profess the Gospel.
About the end of the fifteenth century the discoveries of the Portuguese in Africa and the East, and those of the Spaniards in the great Western continent, opened new fields for missionary labour; but of this we need not now speak more particularly.
Unhappily the Church was not content with trying to convince people of the truth of its doctrine by gentle means, but disgraced itself by persecution. We have already noticed the horrible wars against the Albigenses in the south of France;[98] and cruel persecutions were carried on in Spain against Jews, Mahometans, and persons suspected of heresy, or such like offences. The conduct of these persecutions was in the hands of the Inquisition, which did its work without any regard to the rules of Justice, and was made more terrible by the darkness and mystery of its proceedings. It kept spies to pry into all men's concerns and to give secret information against them; even the nearest relatives were not safe from each other under this dreadful system. Multitudes were put to death, and others were glad to escape with such punishments as entire loss of their property, or imprisonment, which was in many cases for life.
In the course of all these hundreds of years, Christian religion had been much corrupted from its first purity. The power of the clergy over the ignorant people had become far greater than it ought to have been; and too commonly it was kept up by the encouragement of superstitions and abuses. The popes claimed supreme power on earth. They claimed the right of setting up and plucking down emperors and kings. They meddled with appointments to sees, parishes, and all manner of offices in the Church, throughout all Western Europe. They wished to make it appear as if bishops had no authority except what they held through the grant of the pope. There were general complaints against the faults of the clergy, and among the mass of men religion had become in great part little better than an affair of forms. From all quarters cries for reform were raised, and a reform was speedily to come, by which, among other things, our own country was set free from the power of the popes, and the doctrine of our Church was brought back to an agreement with Holy Scripture and with the Christianity of early times.
NOTES
WYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, GREAT QUEEN STREET, LONDON, W.C.