The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 08

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BOOK II. THE PAPACY

INTRODUCTION
HISTORY IN OUTLINE OF THE PAPACY

THE BISHOPS OF ROME [42-590 A.D.]

The early history of the Papacy is involved in much obscurity. For the early centuries we shall attempt little more than to repeat the names of the successive bishops, as accepted by the traditions of the church of Rome. According to these traditions, the Apostle Peter founded the Church in the year 42 (modern criticism does not accept this date, which is almost surely too early by about a score of years); he was martyred in 67, and succeeded by Linus, who was followed in 79 by Cletus or Anacletus. 91, Clement I or Clemens Romanus. Some writers make him the third bishop in 68 A.D. 100, Evarestus.

109 Alexander I. The political life of Rome extinguished by the empire, begins to revive in the organisation of the Christian church. 119, Sixtus I. 129, Telesphorus. 139, Hyginus. 143, Pius I. 157, Anicetus. 168, Soter. 177, Eleutherius. 193, Victor I. The bishop of Rome is beginning to assume supremacy over other bishops. This is resented in some quarters.

202 Zephyrinus. 219, Calixtus I. 223, Urban I. 230, Pontianus. 235, Anterius. 236, Fabianus. 251, Cornelius. 252, Lucius I. 253, Stephen I. 257, Sixtus II. 259, Dionysius. 269, Felix I. 275, Eutychianus. 283, Caius. 296, Marcellinus.

308 Marcellus I. 310, Eusebius. 311, Melchiades. 314, Silvester I. 325, The authority of the metropolitan is distinctly recognised. The idea has been developing since the primacy of Fabianus and Cornelius. 330, Removal of the capital from Rome to Constantinople. This increases greatly the power of the Roman bishop, who henceforth announces his supremacy in more decided tones. 336, Marcus I. 337, Julius I. He is the recognised protector of the orthodox faith against Arianism and other heresies. The church begins to organise landed properties by bequests from emperors and nobles.

352 Liberius. 356, First instance of schism in the church of Rome. Felix maintains a rival claim to the primacy.

366 Damasus I elected to the see, after a bitter and violent contest, over his rival, Ursinus. Damasus represents the cause of orthodoxy. 384, Siricius. In his primacy the decretals—pastoral letters—are begun.

398 Anastasius I. The papacy has emerged from obscurity. Paganism is in its death throes.

402 Innocent I. He does much to free the church from political interference. 417, Zosimus. He attempts to temporise with paganism.

418 Boniface I. His election is contested. Eulalius maintains a rival claim. The emperor Honorius intervenes, and the provisions for election are revised. This is the first instance of imperial interference.

422 Celestine I. 432, Sixtus III. 440, Leo (I) the Great, sometimes called the real founder of the papacy. The precedence of the bishops of Rome is now fully recognised. 461, Hilarius. 468, Simplicius. 476, The fall of the Western Empire increases the bishops’ authority. 483, Felix II (or III, if the rival bishop in 356 is reckoned as Felix II). He feels himself powerful enough to summon the patriarch of Constantinople to Rome, and excommunicates him on his refusal to obey. 492, Gelasius I. He enunciates the principle that his acts are not to be controlled by synods. 496, Anastasius II. 498, Symmachus. The election is contested by Laurentius, who maintains a rival claim. The Palmary synod disavows its own right to sit in judgment on the acts of the Roman bishop.

514 Hormisdas. 523, John I. Theodoric sends John to Constantinople to obtain indulgence for the Arians. Not entirely successful, Theodoric imprisons the bishop on his return (525), and he dies the following year. 526, Felix III or IV. Dionysius Exiguus collects and publishes the canons of the councils and the papal decretals. 530, Boniface II. His election contested by Dioscorus until the latter’s death, the same year. Boniface obtains the power of appointing his own successor, but a second synod annuls it.

532 John II. 535, Agapetus I. Theodotus sends him to Constantinople in his behalf. 536, Belisarius enters Rome; the pope becomes the vassal of the emperor. Silverius. 537, Through the intrigues of the empress Theodora and the deacon Vigilius, Silverius is deposed and banished to the island of Pandataria. Vigilius becomes bishop of Rome. The bishops now become mere puppets of the Eastern court.

552 Vigilius, resisting the will of Justinian, is imprisoned.

553 Vigilius again seized, and sent to exile.

554 Pelagius I. 560, John III. 574, Benedict I. 578, Pelagius II.

FROM GREGORY THE GREAT TO THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE PAPACY AS A LEGISLATIVE POWER [590-867 A.D.]

590 Gregory (I) the Great elected pope. He raises the papacy to eminence and determines its future policy. Gregory’s work is of threefold character. (1) He perfects the church ritual and introduces a new mode of chanting, and organises the revenues of the church. (2) He exercises supreme authority over the churches of western Europe. The Lombards are converted from Arianism, 599, and Britain is converted by St. Augustine. (3) He makes the pope a temporal sovereign. By this time the bishop of Rome has become the largest landholder in Italy. The Lombard invasion has given the bishops opportunity for temporal control, and in Rome and its vicinity the people recognise Gregory at the head of affairs.

604 Sabinianus.

607 Boniface III. The emperor Phocas bestows title of universal bishop on Boniface, but the patriarch of Constantinople resumes it on Phocas’ death.

608 Boniface IV. He converts the Roman Pantheon into a Christian church.

615 Deusdedit.

618 Boniface V.

625 Honorius I. The monothelitic controversy begins.

638 Severinus. He is not confirmed until 640.

640 John IV. The monothelite doctrine condemned.

642 Theodore I.

649 Martin I. The whole West repudiates monothelitism. Martin condemns the Type of Constans II.

653 Martin seized by the exarch and carried to Constantinople, by order of Constans.

654 Eugenius I elected in place of the absent Martin.

655 Martin banished to Cherson, where he soon dies.

657 Vitalianus.

672 Adeodatus.

676 Domnus or Donus I.

678 Agatho. Time of Wilfrid’s preaching in Britain and Gaul.

680 The Sixth Œcumenic Council at Constantinople settles the monothelitic question.

682 Leo II. 683, Benedict II. 685, John V. 686, Conon.

687 Sergius I. Paschal and Theodore are supported as anti-popes by different factions. The exarch finally recognises Sergius.

701 John VI. He saves the life of the exarch in a rising of the army. He drives the invading duke of Benevento back to his own territory.

705 John VII. The emperor Justinian II tries to force certain decrees objectionable in the West upon the church of Rome.

708 Sisinnius lives but twenty days after election. Constantine. Justinian perseveres in his aim to reduce the West to obedience.

710 Constantine goes to Constantinople at order of Justinian, who remains content with this act of submission.

715 Gregory II. Time of Bede’s teaching.

725 Boniface establishes the German church.

726 The emperor Leo issues edict against image-worship. Italy rebels.

728 Rebellion of Ravenna over the iconoclastic edict. Liutprand, the Lombard king, captures the city. The papacy begins to free itself from the Eastern Empire. The popes are unwilling to submit themselves to the Lombards. Gregory appeals to Charles Martel for aid against the Lombards.

731 Gregory III. He defies Leo in the matter of image-worship.

739 War with the Lombards. Appeal of Gregory to the Franks for help against them.

741 Zacharias. He is the first pope to be elected without obtaining the customary consent of the exarch. The papacy is now free of the empire. It has become practically a political dukedom.

742 Zacharias visits Liutprand and obtains treaty of peace. Many possessions of the church restored by the Lombards.

749 The Lombards renew attacks on the pope.

751 Zacharias sanctions the transfer of the French crown to the Carlovingian line.

752 Stephen II dies before his consecration. Usually not reckoned in list of popes. Stephen II or III.

755 Pepin of France forces Aistulf, the Lombard king, to relinquish all territory taken from the exarch and the pope. Ravenna, Pentapolis, and other territory turned over to the pope. “The Donation of Pepin.” The foundations of the papal states are laid. Pepin bestows title of Patrician of Rome on the king of the Franks.

757 Paul I. The Lombards do not encroach upon the papacy.

767 On death of Paul, Toto, duke of Nepi, compels a bishop to ordain one of his brothers, Constantine, a layman. He discharges all the offices of pontiff for a year, when

768 Desiderius, the Lombard king, sends a band to rescue Rome. Constantine is seized. Election of Stephen III or IV. All of Constantine’s acts are declared null and void. Cruel treatment of Constantine.

772 Adrian I. Troubles with the Lombards are renewed. Adrian appeals to Charlemagne.

774 Charlemagne captures Desiderius in Pavia, and assumes title of king of the Lombards. End of the Lombard kingdom. Charlemagne gives a large amount of territory to the pope. “Donation of Charlemagne.” Adrian takes possession of the exarchate, with all power and privileges of a temporal prince.

780 The pope summons Charlemagne to protect him against a coalition of his Byzantine enemies. Peace is purchased.

786 Charlemagne reduces Arichis of Benevento to subjection. The pope’s dominions extend to Calabria.

795 Leo III. He recognises the supremacy of Charlemagne.

799 Assault, attempted mutilation, and imprisonment of Leo by an armed band headed by his nephews. Leo escapes to Charlemagne, but returns to Rome.

800 Charlemagne goes to Rome to inquire into charges against Leo. Leo crowns him emperor. Foundation of the empire of Charlemagne. The pope and emperor begin the upbuilding of the fabric of the Middle Ages. The pope is subordinate to the emperor.

816 Stephen IV. He is unpopular, and makes the Romans swear fealty to the emperor. Is compelled to take refuge with Louis le Débonnaire. Returns to Rome, and dies.

817 Paschal I. Assumes pontificate without imperial sanction. The Romans, admonished by the emperor, agree not to allow this again.

824 Eugenius II.

827 Valentinus dies in five weeks. Gregory IV. He mediates between Louis le Débonnaire and his sons. His pontificate is uneventful, but materially advances pretensions of the hierarchy.

844 Sergius II consecrated without consent of the emperor Lothair. Lothair sends his son, Louis, with an army to Rome, but his meeting with the pope is amicable. Louis II made king of Lombardy.

847 Leo IV. The Saracens invade Italy as far as the gates of Rome. Driven off by Louis. Leo fortifies a portion of Rome, henceforth known as the Leonine city, including the Vatican and church of St. Peter.

850 The “False Decretals” come to light.

855 Benedict III. His election contested by Anastasius, who, at head of armed faction, seizes the Lateran. The imperial legates decide in favour of Benedict, and Anastasius is expelled. Beginning of the strife between Photius and Ignatius for the see of Constantinople, which ends in the permanent schism between the eastern and western churches.

858 Nicholas I. Under him the papacy makes a signal advance in power. He interferes in the quarrel over the patriarchate of Constantinople, espousing the cause of Ignatius, and pronouncing sentence of deposition upon Photius. He adopts and declares authentic the “False Decretals,” thus establishing the principle of the sole legislative power of the pope.

861-864 Humiliation of the archbishops of Cologne, Trèves, and Ravenna. The act of archbishop Hincmar of Rheims in deposing Rothrad, bishop of Soissons, is reversed by Nicholas, on authority of the “False Decretals.”

863 Nicholas forbids Lothair II to divorce his wife.

FROM THE DEATH OF NICHOLAS I TO THE BEGINNING OF THE ERA OF PRACTICAL REFORM [867-1046 A.D.]

867 Adrian II.

868 On death of Lothair II of Lorraine, Adrian attempts to bestow that crown on the emperor Louis II. This extension of the papal prerogatives is not welcome to the German bishops, and they rebuke Adrian.

870 Hincmar renews his struggle with the pope, and the whole Frankish church arrays itself against the power of the pope in dealing directly with bishops.

872 John VIII. During his pontificate, Rome is constantly in danger from the Saracens.

875 John bestows the imperial crown on Charles the Bald, not as his right, but as a gift. Victory over Hincmar and the Frankish church by the appointment of Ansegis as primate of France.

876 Beginning of quarrel with Formosus, bishop of Porto.

877 In league with Athanasius, duke-bishop of Naples, the Saracens reach the walls of Rome. Charles the Bald ignores John’s appeals for help. The pope compelled to pay the Saracens tribute.

878 Lambert, duke of Spoleto, in the interest of the imperial claimant, Carloman, enters Rome, seizes John, and imprisons him. John escapes, and flees to Provence. He returns to Rome.

881 John crowns Charles the Fat emperor.

882 Death of John, possibly murdered. Martin II.

884 Adrian III.

885 Stephen V.

887 On deposition of Charles the Fat the Carlovingian empire comes to an end.

891 Formosus elected by influence of Guido of Spoleto. The papacy enters a period of anarchy. The popes are elevated by whichever rival party is in the ascendant, “obtaining,” says Reichel, “their pontificate by crime, and vacating it by murder.”

896 Boniface VII dies in a few days. The Italian party elects Stephen VI. He mutilates the dead body of Formosus.

897 Stephen imprisoned and strangled. Romanus occupies the see a few months. Theodore II, who belongs to the faction of Formosus.

898 John IX, though of Formosus’ party, submits to the emperor Lambert. The right of plundering the pope’s palace, on his decease, is prohibited.

900 Benedict IV.

901 He crowns Louis of Provence, the rival of Berengar.

903 Leo V. In a few months he is imprisoned by Christopher, one of his chaplains, who secures his own election.

904 Christopher driven from Rome by the soldiers of Berengar. Election of Sergius III. The infamous Theodora and her daughters, Marozia and Theodora, have complete influence over Sergius. They further the aims of Berengar’s party. Complete degradation of the papacy.

911 Anastasius III.

913 Lando.

914 John X, archbishop of Ravenna, is elected through influence of Theodora, whose paramour he is. He proves an able pontiff, and forms a league among the Italian dukes to resist the Saracens, and, in furtherance of this project,

916 crowns Berengar emperor; then, for the first time in the history of the papacy, the pope goes forth to battle, defeats the Saracens, and destroys the fortress of Garigliano.

925 John expels the marquis Alberic, lover or husband of Marozia. Marozia’s power increases. She seizes the castle of St. Angelo. On death of Alberic she marries Duke Guido of Tuscany.

926 Treaty between Hugo of Provence and John.

928 John imprisoned by Marozia’s party, and dies, probably by violence. Leo VI.

929 Stephen VII.

931 John XI, son of Marozia and Sergius III or Alberic, elected through his mother’s influence. Guido is dead, and Marozia marries Hugo of Provence.

932 Rome rebels at this. Alberic, brother of the pope, casts him and Marozia into prison, and makes himself master of Rome. Alberic marries the daughter of Hugo.

936 Death of John in prison. He has exercised his spiritual functions, but the government of Rome has been conducted by Alberic. Leo VII.

939 Stephen VIII.

941 Martin III.

946 Agapetus II. These four are appointed by the sole will of Alberic—they have no power.

953 Death of Alberic, leaving his authority to his son, Octavian.

955 On death of Agapetus, Octavian is elected pope. He takes the name of John XII, the first to take an ecclesiastical name.

961 John, threatened by Berengar II, appeals to King Otto I of Germany, who comes at once to Germany and is crowned king at Pavia.

962 John crowns Otto emperor at Rome. Pope and Roman people take oath of allegiance to Otto. Otto returns to Pavia, and learns that John, fearing his mastery, has entered into correspondence with the deposed Italian king, Adalbert. He sends officers to investigate this, and they return with a long list of crimes charged against John by the Roman people.

963 Adalbert returns to Rome. Otto marches thither. The pope and Adalbert flee. Trial and deposition of the pope by Otto. Leo VIII, the chief secretary of the Roman see, is elected.

964 Otto leaves Rome. A rebellion forces Leo to flee, and the gates are opened to John, who reassumes his office. The people embrace his cause. Death of John, probably at the hands of an injured husband. Disregarding the emperor and Leo, the people elect a new pope, Benedict V. Otto proceeds against the anti-pope, who submits and is degraded. Leo, in council, recognises right of Otto and his successors in the kingdom of Italy to elect his own successors to the empire.

965 John XIII (bishop of Narni). On account of his haughtiness the Romans expel him. The prefect Rotfred assumes government of Rome.

966 Otto comes to Rome on appeal of John. Rotfred killed; John restored. Otto treats the Romans barbarously. Overawed by Otto, the Romans let John reign in peace.

972 The see vacant for three months, on death of John, while Otto is consulted. Benedict VI elected.

974 Bonifazio Francone, at the instigation of the Tuscan party, imprisons Benedict, strangles him, and assumes the papacy as Boniface VII. This anti-pope compelled to flee in a month to Constantinople. He carries off all the treasure from St. Peter’s. Election of Benedict VII, who excommunicates Boniface and, under protection of Otto II, rules in peace.

983 John XIV. Death of Otto in Rome.

984 Boniface suddenly reappears, imprisons John (who dies by starvation or poison), and seats himself in the papal chair. Re-establishment of the Roman Republic with the consul Crescentius at its head.

985 Sudden death of Boniface. John XV. Crescentius compels him to leave Rome, and he appeals to Otto III.

987 John is permitted to return. He now rules, but in subjection to the consul and senate.

996 On death of John, Otto brings about election of his kinsman, Gregory V (Bruno, duke of Carinthia). He crowns Otto emperor. Crescentius condemned to exile, but pardoned at intercession of Gregory, to whom he takes oath of fidelity. Crescentius compels Gregory to flee, and puts John XVI (Philagathus) in the papal chair.

998 Otto, as soon as possible, comes to Italy. John escapes, but is brought back and horribly punished. Crescentius surrenders, and is put to death. Gregory restored.

999 Death of Gregory, perhaps by poison. Silvester II (Gerbert). Otto and Gregory plan together to restore the empire to its grandeur in the Augustan Age—the emperor to have boundless temporal, and the pope boundless spiritual, power.

1001 The Roman nobles revolt at this idea, but are quickly brought to terms.

1002 Death of Otto, probably by poison administered by Stephania, widow of Crescentius.

1003 Death of Gregory, perhaps due also to poisoning by Stephania. The plans to rescue the papacy from the patricians and populace of Rome have thus failed. John XVII (Sicco) occupies the see six months. John XVIII (Fanasus).

1009 Sergius IV. Rome is again a republic, with the patrician John, son of Crescentius, at its head. The Tuscan party is in the ascendency.

1012 Benedict VIII elected by the Tusculan party, to which the house of Crescentius has yielded the power. An anti-pope, Gregory, is set up by the party of Crescentius. Benedict has to flee, but soon returns to Rome, protected by the emperor Henry II.

1014 Benedict administers a defeat to the Saracens near Pisa.

1021 Benedict assists Henry II in his war against the Byzantines in southern Italy.

1024 On Benedict’s death the Tusculan party elevates his brother, John XIX, a layman, to the papal chair.

1033 On John’s death the power of the Tusculan house secures the pontificate for his young nephew, Benedict IX.

1042 The “Truce of God” sanctioned.

1044 Benedict, after leading a vicious and depraved life, is driven from Rome by the people. They then elect Silvester III, but Benedict returns in triumph, and the anti-pope flees.

1045 Benedict sells the pontificate to Gregory VI (Johannes Gratianus) of the house of Tusculum, a man of learning and unimpeachable chastity, who endeavours to institute reforms.

1046 The scandal of Benedict’s act leads to Henry III assembling the Council of Sutri, which deposes the three popes and elects Suidgar bishop of Bamberg, Clement II, to the papal chair. The council gives the emperor the right of nominating future popes, which displeases the Roman clergy and people.

THE AGE OF GREATNESS [1046-1305 A.D.]

A new era is inaugurated for the papacy. The power of the popes begins to overshadow that of the emperors.

1047 Clement summons a council to condemn the all-pervading vice of simony. Death of Clement. Benedict IX seizes the throne and holds it for nine months.

1048 Poppo, bishop of Brixen, Damasus II, appointed pope by the emperor. Benedict flees on his appearance. Damasus dies in less than a month. Hildebrand voices the objections of the Roman clergy as to the power of the emperor to appoint the popes. Bruno, bishop of Toul, Leo IX, is the imperial choice for the next pope.

1049 With the assistance of Hildebrand, Leo plans many reforms, including prohibition of marriage to the clergy, simony, etc. The synods of Rome, Rheims, and Mainz enact reformatory canons. Leo forms the college of cardinals.

1049-1051 Leo visits France and Germany.

1052 Third visit of Leo to Germany to mediate between Henry III and Andrew of Hungary.

1053 Campaign of Leo against the Normans. Capture of Leo at Civitella. Treaty of Hildebrand with Berengar of Tours.

1054 Leo returns to Rome and dies. Hildebrand goes to the emperor as plenipotentiary of the Roman clergy and people.

1055 Gebhard of Eichstadt, Victor II, Hildebrand’s candidate, made pope. He carries on Leo’s work of reform.

1056 Death of Henry III, leaving infant son, furthers plan of Hildebrand.

1057 The Romans reassert their right to create popes on death of Victor. Cardinal Frederick of Lorraine, Stephen IX, made pope.

1058 Stephen dies. Ignoring the empress Agnes, the Roman party makes Giovanni di Velletri, Benedict X, pope, getting the most lavish grants from him. The empress empowers Hildebrand to proceed with new election.

1059 Gerard, archbishop of Florence, Nicholas II, is elected and Benedict declared deposed. Hildebrand determines to deal a blow at the imperial prerogative. Second Lateran Council. The election of pope is vested solely with the cardinal-bishops. Simony and clerical marriage forbidden.

1061 Election of Anselmo Baggio, Alexander II, without consent of emperor, inaugurates the great struggle between pope and emperor. The imperial party calls a council at Bâle and elects Pietro Cadolaus Honorius II. He advances to Rome.

1063 The anti-pope driven by the Normans into the castle of St. Angelo, where he holds his position until

1064 when the fall of Adalbert crushes his last hopes. The schism is healed by Hanno, and Alexander universally acknowledged pope. Resistance to the decrees of celibacy is strong.

1073 Hildebrand, Gregory VII. His election is confirmed by the emperor. His main objects are the enforcement of celibacy among the clergy and the prohibition of investiture by the laity which is the great cause of simony. He demands that Henry IV shall acquiesce in all the newly assumed prerogatives of the papacy.

1075 Lay investiture prohibited. Breach between pope and Henry IV.

1076 Henry calls diet at Worms and declares pope deposed. Gregory excommunicates Henry, who is suspended from his royal office by Diet of Tribur.

1077 Henry humbles himself before the pope at Canossa. Gregory establishes the principle of the papal power to judge kings.

1080 Second excommunication of Henry. His adherents call a council and declare Gregory deposed. Election of Guibert, archbishop of Ravenna, Clement III, as anti-pope.

1084 Henry finally takes Rome. Gregory shuts himself in the castle of St. Angelo. Clement crowns Henry emperor. The Normans take Rome. Robert Guiscard releases Gregory, who goes to Salerno and dies the following year. Clement III rules at Rome.

1086 The cardinals elect Desiderius, abbot of Monte Cassino, Victor III, pope. He lives mostly at Monte Cassino.

1087 Death of Victor.

1088 Five months after Victor’s death Eudes, bishop of Ostia, Urban II, is elected pope. He resides at Monte Cassino.

1094 Urban in Rome. Clement holds only the Vatican, St. Angelo, and the Lateran.

1095 Urban preaches the First Crusade in France. Council of Clermont.

1099 Paschal II. He expels Clement III from Rome, who dies the following year.

1100 On Clement’s death, Theodore, anti-pope, is elected by the imperial party. He falls into Paschal’s hands and condemned to be a hermit.

1102 Albert anti-pope—he is thrust into a monastery.

1105 Silvester IV, anti-pope. He is eventually deposed by the emperor himself.

1106 On death of Henry IV, the question of investiture is renewed with Henry V.

1110 Henry V makes a warlike descent on Italy. Treaty of Sutri, compromising rights of the church.

1111 Paschal refuses to crown Henry, who imprisons both pope and cardinals. Paschal compelled to bestow the crown on Henry.

1115 Death of the countess Matilda, leaving her possessions to the pope. Henry threatens another visit to Rome.

1116 Excommunication of Henry in the Lateran Council. Henry advances on Rome. The pope retreats to Benevento.

1118 Paschal returns to Rome. He dies. The cardinals elect Giovanni da Gaeta, Gelasius II. He is at once seized by Cencius Frangipani. The Transteverines compel his surrender. Henry V arrives in Rome. The pope flees to Gaeta, where he is consecrated. Henry, with the assent of the people, makes Maurice Bourdin, Gregory VIII, anti-pope. On Henry’s departure, Gelasius returns to Rome, but, again attacked, leaves Rome for France.

1119 Death of Gelasius at Lyons. Election of Guido, archbishop of Vienne, Calixtus II. He excommunicates Henry and the anti-pope, and sets out for Rome.

1120 Calixtus captures Gregory and submits him to great degradation.

1121 Death of Gregory in prison. Celestine II anti-pope.

1122 The Concordat of Worms settles the question of investiture. The emperor cedes the right of investiture by ring and staff. The pope allows the election of bishops and abbots according to canonical procedure in the presence of the emperor, but without bribery or compulsion.

1124 Lambert di Fagnano, Honorius II, elected through the Frangipani influence. He rules in peace with Germany, but heads the papal forces in the south of Italy.

1130 At death of Honorius, a portion of the cardinals elect Gregorio de’ Papi, Innocent II. The remainder choose Peter Leonis, Anacletus II, who gains the support of Roger of Sicily. Innocent wins over Bernard of Clairvaux, and, through him, Lothair II.

1132 Lothair goes to Italy against Anacletus and Roger.

1133 Coronation of Lothair by Innocent, who gives him the allodial possessions of the countess Matilda as a fief.

1138 Death of Anacletus settles the disputed election. Gregorio Conti, Victor IV, the new anti-pope, holds out for two months. All Rome acknowledges Innocent.

1139 Great Lateran Council. It condemns Arnold of Brescia. The pope asserts his unlimited power over the episcopal order. Innocent goes to war with Roger of Sicily and is taken prisoner. He is released on recognising Roger’s title and kingdom.

1143 Guido di Castello, Celestine II.

1144 Lucius II. The Roman people carry out the plans of Arnold of Brescia, institute a republic, and accept only the spiritual authority of the pope. Lucius appeals to the emperor, Conrad, in vain.

1145 Death of Lucius while storming the Capitol. The abbot, Bernard, of Pisa, Eugenius III, succeeds. He recovers Rome from Arnold of Brescia. The republic capitulates.

1146 Arnold regains Rome. Eugenius flees to France. He becomes the satellite of Bernard of Clairvaux. Council of Vézelay promotes Second Crusade.

1153 Conrad, bishop of Sabina, Anastasius IV.

1154 Nicholas Breakspear, Adrian IV.

1155 Rome put under religious interdiction. The clergy and people compel the senate to yield. Banishment and execution of Arnold of Brescia. Coronation of Frederick Barbarossa.

1156 Frederick retires to Germany. Alliance of Adrian with Sicily.

1157 Quarrel of Frederick and Adrian.

1158 Frederick goes to Italy to settle quarrel.

1159 Frederick threatened with excommunication. Adrian dies. The election divided: Rolando Ranuci, Alexander III, and Octavian, cardinal of St. Cecilia, Victor IV.

1160 Frederick summons Council of Pavia to decide claim of the two popes. On account of Alexander’s haughty attitude Frederick recognises Victor.

1162 After many struggles with Victor, Alexander takes refuge in France.

1164 Death of Victor. Guido of Crema, Paschal III, chosen by a small faction to succeed as anti-pope. He does not dare enter Rome.

1165 Alexander returns to Rome where the senate receives him.

1167 Frederick takes Rome and installs Paschal. His second coronation by Paschal.

1168 The cause of Paschal much weakened by departure of Frederick. Death of Paschal. John, bishop of Tusculum, Calixtus III succeeds as anti-pope. His power grows weaker.

1176 Frederick makes armistice with pope and Lombards after defeat at Legnano.

1177 Reconciliation of Frederick and Alexander at Venice.

1178 Calixtus abdicates his title. End of the schism.

1181 Ubaldo Allucingoli, Lucius III.

1182 Rebellion in Rome drives Lucius out.

1185 Humbert Crivelli, Urban III. He lives chiefly at Verona. He quarrels with Frederick over several matters.

1187 Death of Urban as he is about to excommunicate Frederick. Albert, cardinal of San Lorenzo, Gregory VIII. He preaches a crusade. He goes to Pisa to settle quarrel between Genoa and Pisa and dies. Paolo Scolari, Clement III.

1188 Clement makes peace with the Roman people.

1191 Giacinto Orsini, Celestine III. Surrender of Tusculum to the Romans.

1194 The pope excommunicates Henry VI for his cruelty to the Sicilians.

1198 Lothario Conti, Innocent III. His pontificate marks the culmination of the papal power. Innocent preaches the Fifth Crusade. He compels the prefect of Rome to swear allegiance to him, thus practically establishing the temporal sovereignty of the pope over Rome. He orders the seneschal Markwald of Anweiler to surrender the march of Ancona. Death of Constanza. Markwald lays claim to the administration of Sicily. Association of Guelfs with papal party.

1199 Conrad of Lutzenberg, count of Spoleto, is forced to return to Germany. The Italian cities welcome Innocent as a deliverer.

1201 Decision in favour of Otto IV, of Germany. Defeat of Markwald by Walter de Brienne and the papal army. Innocent compels Philip Augustus to take back his divorced wife.

1202 Alfonso IX refuses to annul his marriage to his cousin. Papal interdict in the kingdom of Leon. Innocent protests against the crusaders’ expedition against Zara.

1204 Innocent sends legate to crown Joannice king of Bulgaria. Dominic begins to preach in Languedoc.

1208 Resistance of King John of England to the consecration of Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. Interdiction placed on England.

1209 Otto abandons the lands of the countess Matilda and other territories in Italy to the pope. Innocent crowns him. Excommunication of King John. Crusade against the Albigenses is begun.

1210 Excommunication of Otto who has not given up all the territories he promised. Foundation of the Franciscan order.

1212 Innocent makes Frederick II king of Germany. He deposes King John and offers crown of England to Philip Augustus.

1213 John submits to the pope.

1215 Innocent attempts to annul Magna Charta. Fourth Lateran Council. Transubstantiation a doctrine. Auricular confession enforced. Coronation of Frederick II as king of Germany, who promises to undertake a crusade.

1216 Confirmation of the Dominican order. Death of Innocent. Cencio Savelli, Honorius III, elected.

1217 Honorius obliges Andrew of Hungary to undertake a crusade.

1220 Coronation of Frederick as emperor. He renews promises to go to the Holy Land.

1223 Congress at Ferentino. Frederick pledges himself to start within two years.

1225 Frederick obtains another delay. On account of trouble with the senate Honorius goes to Tivoli.

1227 Ugolino Conti, Gregory IX. He excommunicates Frederick, who makes an unsuccessful attempt to start for the Holy Land. Ezzelino da Romano drives the Guelfs out of Verona and Vicenza.

1228 Second excommunication of Frederick for starting without absolution. The pope sends his army into Apulia.

1229 The papal army ravages Apulia but Frederick hastens back from Syria to recover his territory. He is excommunicated a third time. Close of the Albigensian Crusade. Council of Toulouse forbids reading of Scripture by laymen and adopts severe measures for the suppression of heresy.

1230 The pope and Frederick are reconciled. Great flood in Rome.

1231 Negotiations are opened for the union of the Greek and Latin churches.

1232 Tribunals of the Inquisition established in southern France.

1233 The Germans put to death the first inquisitor.

1234 Rising in Rome drives Gregory from the city.

1238 League of Venice, Genoa, and the pope against Frederick, on account of his growing power and successes in Lombardy.

1239 Excommunication of Frederick and charges preferred against him.

1240 Gregory proclaims a crusade against Frederick, who invades the papal territory.

1241 Frederick’s fleets capture twenty-two Genoese galleys, containing many ecclesiastics on their way to a council at Rome. They are imprisoned. Death of Gregory. Goffredo Castiglione, Celestine IV, elected. He dies in eighteen days. The see is vacant.

1243 Frederick releases some of the imprisoned ecclesiastics that an election may take place. Senibaldi di Fieschi, Innocent IV, is chosen. Peace negotiations fail.

1244 Innocent escapes to Lyons.

1245 Innocent calls the Thirteenth General Council at Lyons. Frederick is excommunicated and deposed.

1246 Louis IX fails in an attempt to reconcile Innocent and Frederick. Innocent demands large sums from England, France, and Italy, to prosecute his struggle with Frederick, and this causes great discontent in those countries.

1247 Frederick besieges the papal forces in Parma.

1248 Frederick raises the siege.

1250 Death of Frederick.

1251 Return of Innocent to Italy. He goes to Perugia to reside. Excommunication of Conrad. The pope incites Sicily and Apulia to rebellion. Manfred puts the rebels down.

1252 Conrad IV and Manfred attack Naples, and capture Capua.

1253 Surrender of Naples to Conrad.

1254 The pope bestows the crown of Sicily on Prince Edmund of England. Death of Innocent, at Naples, on an expedition against Manfred. Rinaldo di Segni, Alexander IV. Rise of the Flagellants.

1255 The people of Messina expel the papal governor. The papal legate makes treaty with Manfred, but Alexander will not ratify it, claiming that Edmund is king of Sicily. The English parliament will not grant Edmund the money to take the throne.

1256 Manfred makes himself supreme in Sicily in the name of Conradin. Imprisonment of the senator Brancaleone, who is released by the people (1258). Establishment of the Augustine order of mendicant friars.

1257 Interdiction of Portugal on account of divorce of Alfonso III.

1258 Battle of Corticella. Ezzelino da Romano defeats the pope’s army, and captures Brescia.

1259 Excommunication of Manfred, who has been crowned the previous year. The pope decides the question of emperorship in favour of Richard of Cornwall. Fall of the Ghibelline champion, Ezzelino da Romano.

1260 The Ghibellines regain Florence. Execution of Alberic da Romano.

1261 Death of Alexander in exile. Jacques Pantaléon, patriarch of Jerusalem, Urban IV.

1262 Urban, to resist Conradin, offers crown of Sicily to Charles of Anjou. The Ghibellines in Tuscany acknowledge Manfred.

1263 Milan refuses to accept Otto Visconti as archbishop of the city.

1264 Charles of Anjou appointed senator of Rome. Death of Urban.

1265 Guy Foulques, Clement IV. Coronation of Charles of Anjou as king of Sicily.

1269 Death of Clement. The see is vacant for over two years, owing to discord among the cardinals.

1271 Teobaldo di Visconti, Gregory X. Rudolf of Habsburg acknowledges papal supremacy.

1273 Gregory excommunicates the inhabitants of many north Italian cities for banding against Charles of Anjou.

1274 Fourteenth General Council at Lyons. A new crusade is preached, and a union of the Greek and Latin churches is effected. The union is never fully accepted in the Eastern Empire, and soon falls to pieces.

1276 Death of Gregory. Pietro di Tarantasia, Innocent V, dies in five months. Ottoboni Fiesco, Adrian V, dies in six weeks. Pedro Juliani, John XX or XXI.

1277 Giovani Gaetano, Nicholas III, “Il Comperto.” He belongs to the Orsini family.

1278 Cession of Romagna, the exarchate of Ravenna, and other territory, by Rudolf of Habsburg, to the pope, who acts as ruling sovereign over all his dominions. Nicholas is hostile to Charles. Nepotism practised by Nicholas.

1280 Death of Nicholas in the midst of plans to establish his family in kingdoms in Italy. Discord caused by Charles in the College of Cardinals.

1281 Simon de Brion, Martin IV, elected after six months, through influence of Charles. The pope retires to Orvieto.

1282 Martin excommunicates Pedro of Aragon, who has been declared king of Sicily after the “Sicilian Vespers.”

1283 The pope offers crown of Aragon to Charles of Valois.

1285 Death of Charles quiets the affairs of Sicily. Giacomo Savelli, Honorius IV.

1287 Honorius prevents ratification of treaty between Aragon and France. Death of Honorius, and owing to disputes, the cardinals fail for ten months to elect a new pope.

1288 Girolamo d’Ascoli, Nicholas IV.

1289 After liberation of Charles the Lame of Naples, the pope absolves him from all conditions, by which he obtains his freedom. The Guelf and Ghibelline contest continues fiercely in the north. Nicholas becomes enslaved to the Colonnas.

1292 Death of Nicholas. The see vacant for over two years.

1294 Election of Pietro di Murrhone, Celestine V, a lowly hermit. The cardinals repent, and compel him to abdicate. Benedict Cajetan, Boniface VIII, elected. He carries the papal pretensions further than any other pope, and prepares the way for the Reformation.

1296 Boniface begins his great struggle with Philip the Fair by issuing a bull excommunicating all princes who tax the clergy. Edward I of England outlaws all the clergy who obey this bull, and Philip retaliates by prohibiting the exportation of gold and silver out of France. Interdiction of Sicily. The Sicilians invade Calabria.

1297 Excommunication of the entire Colonna family because a member of it plundered a papal convoy.

1298 The pope proclaims a crusade against the Colonnas.

1299 Surrender of Palestrina to the papal army. It is razed to the ground.

1300 Plenary indulgence of Boniface.

1301 Boniface is prevented by the English parliament from interfering in the affairs of Scotland. Renewed quarrel with Philip over his imprisonment of the bishop of Pamiers. Charles of Valois is invited into Italy.

1302 Publication of the bull declaring that the church can have only one head.

1303 Philip burns a bull of excommunication issued by Boniface and refuses to acknowledge him as pope. Capture of Boniface by Guillaume de Nogaret. Death of Boniface. Niccolo Boccasini, Benedict XI. He attempts to conciliate France and the Colonna family.

1304 Benedict excommunicates those who take part in the capture of Boniface. Death of Benedict, probably by poison, at the hands of the French party.

THE “BABYLONISH CAPTIVITY” [1305-1378 A.D.]

1305 The influence of Philip the Fair in the College of Cardinals brings about the election of Bertrand d’Agoust, Clement V. The pope does not interfere in Philip’s persecution of the Templars.

1309 The pope removes his residence to Avignon, principally because of the strife between the Orsini and Colonnas, in Rome. He pronounces a fearful ban of excommunication against the Venetians, in a quarrel over the possession of Ferrara. The Venetians driven from Ferrara, which is annexed to the papal states.

1310 Revolt of Ferrara and its severe punishment by the papal government.

1311 Suppression of the Templars at the Council of Vienne.

1314 The pope makes the king of Naples viceroy of Italy. The Guelf party is now in the ascendant. Death of Clement. The see is vacant for over two years.

1316 Jacques d’Euse, John XXI or XXII, of the French party, elected.

1317 The people of Ferrara restore the city to the Este family.

1322 The Visconti capture Cremona, and the whole family is excommunicated. John offers to recognise Frederick of Austria king of Germany, in return for his help. Frederick sends an army to Italy, but withdraws it.

1323 Excommunication of Ludwig IV of Bavaria. The papal forces take Alessandria and Tortona, and lay siege to Milan. Excommunication of Ludwig IV of Bavaria for helping the Visconti.

1324 The papal and Sicilian forces defeated by Galeazzo Visconti at Vaprio.

1326 John incites the duke of Lithuania to attack the Teutonic knights. The papal forces capture Parma and Reggio.

1328 Ludwig IV, crowned in Rome by Sciarra Colonna, obtains a decree from the Roman people that the pope must reside in Rome. John is declared deposed, and Pietro di Corvara, Nicholas V, made pope.

1329 The Ghibellines turn against Ludwig; the Visconti and Este families treat with the pope. Nicholas abdicates, and is imprisoned at Avignon.

1332 John of Bohemia, who has settled the troubles of the Ghibellines, plots with the pope to obtain Italy.

1333 The papal forces defeated at Ferrara. John abandons his designs on Italy, and returns to Bohemia.

1334 The papal party loses most of its captured cities. Death of John, as he is about to be tried for heresy. Jacques Fournier, Benedict XII. He begins to build the palace of the popes at Avignon, and attempts to curb the luxury of the monastic orders.

1338 The German electors declare that the pope has no jurisdiction over Germany.

1342 Pierre Roger, Clement VI. The Romans send an embassy to urge him to return to Rome. He appoints the Fifty Year Jubilee.

1343 Clement renews excommunication of Ludwig.

1347 Revolution of Rienzi in Rome. He is elected tribune, and carries out many reforms. After a defeat of the nobles he commits many extravagant acts, and is compelled to abdicate.

1348 Joanna of Naples sells Avignon to the pope.

1349 The Flagellants declared to be heretics.

1351 Rienzi delivered to the custody of the pope by Charles IV of Germany.

1352 Etienne d’Albert, Innocent VI.

1354 Cardinal Albornoz restores papal power in Rome. Rienzi made senator. He rules badly, and is killed.

1356 The Golden Bull terminates the long strife between papacy and empire.

1362 Guillaume de Grimoard, Urban V. Most of the pope’s enemies have been quieted, but the Visconti still remain in open hostility. The pope desires to return to Rome, since the papal states are reduced to obedience.

1367 Urban removes to Rome. Death of Albornoz.

1370 Urban returns to Avignon and dies. Pierre Roger de Beaufort, Gregory XI. England and France reject his offers of mediation with contempt. Italy, after the death of Albornoz, attempts to free herself from the pope. The Visconti are all-powerful in the north. The whole south revolts. The Free Companies ravage the country. Sir John Hawkwood serves now the Guelfs and now the Ghibellines.

1376 Mission of St. Catherine of Siena to urge the pope to return to Rome.

1377 Arrival of Gregory at Rome.

1378 Death of Gregory.

THE GREAT SCHISM OF THE WEST [1378-1417 A.D.]

1378 The Romans urge the election of a Roman pope; under this pressure the cardinals choose Bartolommeo Prignani, Urban VI. The French cardinals immediately band against him, and, withdrawing to Fondi, pronounce the election invalid and elect Robert of Geneva, Clement VII. Germany, England, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and Italy (except Naples) support Urban. France, Naples, Scotland, Savoy, Lorraine, and the Spanish kingdoms support Clement. Urban resides at Rome; Clement, at Avignon. Urban excommunicates Clement. Wycliffe attacks the papal primacy.

1379 War between the two popes. Bloodshed and strife in Italy. Defeat of Clement’s forces in Urban’s crusade against Naples. St. Angelo surrenders. Clement retreats to Avignon.

1380 Joanna I of Naples attempts to poison Urban, who allies himself with Hungary. Charles of Durazzo reaches Rome on his way to Naples.

1381 Conquest of Naples by Charles of Durazzo and the Hungarians. He takes the throne.

1383 Urban VI goes to Naples, which Louis of Anjou, adopted by Joanna, has invaded. Urban obtains many advantages there for himself and family.

1384 Hostilities arise between Urban and Charles, owing to the former’s arrogance. Louis dies, and his forces are dispersed.

1385 Charles induces several cardinals to plot against Urban. They are seized and tortured. Urban excommunicates Charles, who ignores the bull. Siege and capture of Nocera by Charles’ army. Urban flees to Genoa. Charles goes to Hungary, leaving Naples to his son, Ladislaus.

1386 Urban orders the imprisoned cardinals (except one) put to death. The doge of Venice compels Urban to leave Genoa; he goes to Lucca.

1387 Urban moves to Perugia.

1388 Urban leaves Perugia for Naples, to which he has laid claim. His army breaks up, and he retires to Rome.

1389 Death of Urban. Pietro Tomacelli, Boniface IX. Clement crowns Louis II of Anjou king of Naples. Boniface adopts a conciliatory spirit and recognises Ladislaus.

1390 The Jubilee brings a great revenue into Boniface’s treasury. He recognises the many dynasties within the papal states.

1392 Through influence of Boniface, who goes to Perugia, the warfare among the states of northern Italy is terminated.

1394 Death of Clement VII. Pedro de Luna, Benedict XIII, anti-pope.

1395 The University of Paris tries without success to heal the schism.

1398 France withdraws its allegiance from Benedict, who resists all efforts to make him abdicate. Scotland and Aragon alone remain faithful to him. Boniface makes himself master of Rome.

1399 Surrender of Benedict, who has been besieged by the French in Avignon. He promises to abdicate if Boniface will do the same.

1400 A reaction in favour of Benedict sets in. Rising of the Colonnas in Rome interferes with the Jubilee. The plague destroys many pilgrims. Edicts against the Bianchi.

1402 Boniface declares Ladislaus king of Hungary.

1403 The Visconti begin to lose their power. Boniface recovers Perugia, Bologna, and other towns by treaty. Benedict escapes from Avignon and recovers the allegiance of France.

1404 Death of Boniface, followed by a rising in Rome. The Orsini defeat the Colonnas. Cosimo de’ Migliorati, Innocent VII. He possesses nothing in Rome but the Vatican and St. Angelo. Ladislaus of Naples comes to Rome to settle differences between pope and Romans.

1405 Innocent takes refuge at Viterbo. Sack of the Vatican by the Roman populace. Ladislaus attempts to seize Rome, and the people return to the pope. Futile negotiations between Innocent and Benedict, who leave France for Genoa.

1406 Benedict at Savona. The University of Paris proceeds against him. Innocent returns to Rome and dies. Angelo di Corraro, Gregory XII.

1408 France, having tried in vain to end the schism, renounces obedience to either pope. Benedict at Perpignan. Ladislaus seizes Rome. Gregory finally settles in Rimini. The cardinals of both parties arrange for a council at Pisa.

1409 Council of Pisa. The two popes refuse to appear, and are deposed. Pietro Philarghi, Alexander V, elected. The greater part of Christendom gives him allegiance, but Gregory is obeyed in Bavaria, Naples, and Friuli, and Benedict in Aragon. The three popes issue bulls of excommunication against each other. Alexander issues bull against heresy in Bohemia.

1410 Rome is captured from Ladislaus by Alexander’s party. Death of Alexander. Baltasare Cossa, John XXII or XXIII. He allies himself with the cause of Louis of Anjou.

1411 On the election of the emperor Sigismund, Germany gives allegiance to John. The pope, Louis, and the Orsini defeat Ladislaus at Roccasecca.

1412 Peace between the pope and Ladislaus, who abandons Gregory. The latter flees from Gaeta to Rimini. John Huss protests against the sale of indulgences, and is excommunicated.

1413 Ladislaus makes treaty, and seizes Rome and other papal possessions. John retreats to Florence, and turns to Sigismund for help. The Council of Constance is agreed on.

1414 Ladislaus enters Rome, but dies shortly after. The people restore Rome to John. John goes to Constance, and opens council. Gregory and Benedict send representatives.

1415 Deposition of John by the council. He is imprisoned. Voluntary abdication of Gregory. Benedict refuses to give up. Perfidious treatment and execution of John Huss.

1416 Execution of Jerome of Prague at Constance.

1417 The council considers measures of reform. Election of Otto di Colonna, Martin V, as pope. Benedict still opposes him. Death of Gregory. Andrea Braccio takes Rome. Sforza and the Neapolitans drive him out, and restore the papal governor.

FROM THE RESTORATION TO THE ERA OF THE PROTESTANT REFORMATION [1417-1513 A.D.]

1418 Close of the Council of Constance. Martin goes to Italy, accompanied by Sigismund.

1419 Martin fixes his residence at Florence. John is pardoned, and dies.

1420 Martin Sforza assists Louis III of Anjou in his attempts on Naples. Reconciliation of Martin and Braccio. The latter recovers Bologna for the pope. Martin goes to Rome.

1424 Death of Benedict XIII. Some of the cardinals elect Gil de Munion (Ægidius Nuños), Clement VIII, and a single French one elects Benedict XIV. Reform constitution of Martin. Death of Braccio. Martin soon recovers all the papal possessions.

1429 Clement VIII submits to Martin. Cardinal Beaufort’s crusade against the Hussites.

1431 Gabriel Condolmieri, Eugenius IV. He quarrels with the Colonnas, and deprives them of their offices. They take up arms against him, but peace is made. Eugenius favours the Orsini. Opening of the Council of Bâle. It declares itself, in spiritual matters, superior to the pope. Eugenius orders the council dissolved.

1432 The council refuses to dissolve, and accuses the pope of contumacy.

1433 Eugenius revokes his dissolution. Negotiations for a union with the Greek church are begun.

1434 The limits of papal authority fixed by the council. Eugenius gives Francesco Sforza the march of Ancona. Rising in Rome against Eugenius, Niccolo Fortebraccio captures the city. Eugenius escapes to Florence.

1435 Defeat and death of Fortebraccio. Eugenius quarrels with the council.

1436 Eugenius removes to Bologna.

1437 The Council of Bâle summons Eugenius to answer charges; he replies with a bull dissolving council and summoning another at Ferrara, to which the emperor of Constantinople, Joannes VIII, is invited, that a union between the two churches may be effected. The council ignores the bull, and continues its sittings.

1438 The Council of Bâle passes a decree suspending the pope. Opening of the Council of Ferrara attended by the emperor and patriarch of Constantinople. The pope’s fiscal rights annulled in France. The Council of Bâle is henceforth recognised only in Germany.

1439 The council removed to Florence. Union of the Greek and Latin churches effected. It comes to nothing, through hostile influences at Constantinople and the failure of Eugenius to keep his promises. Deposition of Eugenius at Bâle. Amadeus VIII of Savoy, Felix V, elected anti-pope. Eugenius excommunicates the Council of Bâle.

1440 Coronation of Felix.

1441 Felix quarrels with the council over questions of money. General peace in northern Italy concluded at Cremona.

1443 Felix deserts the council, but retains allegiance of Germany. Henceforth it exists only in name. Eugenius leaves Florence for Rome.

1445 Eugenius’ deposition of the archbishop of Cologne and Trèves brings his dispute with the electors of Germany to a climax. The emperor Frederick III comes to his aid.

1446 Treaty between Frederick and Eugenius. Two electors are deposed, and the electors league against the pope.

1447 Through efforts of Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini the obedience of Germany is restored. Death of Eugenius. Tommaso Parentucelli, Nicholas V. Under him the revival of learning properly begins. The Vatican library is founded. Frederick III forbids any allegiance to Felix in Germany.

1448 Nicholas recognised by the German electors. Dissolution of the Council of Bâle.

1449 Abdication of Felix.

1450 Francesco Sforza becomes lord of Milan. Peace restored in Italy.

1451 Nicholas begins great building operations.

1452 Nicholas crowns Frederick III emperor. Cardinal Isidore and a small force are sent to the relief of Constantinople.

1453 Plot of Stefano Porcaro to re-establish the Roman Republic. It fails, and Porcaro is exiled. The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople brings many learned men to Rome, who assist in the Renaissance. Nicholas proclaims a crusade against the Turks.

1454 League of Lodi.

1455 Alfonso Borgia, Calixtus III. His election is unpopular.

1456 Calixtus proclaims war against the Turks. The papal fleet is sent, but only wins a few unimportant victories.

1458 At death of Alfonso of Naples, Calixtus claims Naples, which he wants for a fief for his nephew, Pedro. These plans are terminated by Calixtus’ death. Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, Pius II. He recognises Ferdinand as king of Naples.

1459 Congress of Mantua. Pius dreams of converting Muhammed to Christianity.

1460 Publication of the bull “Execrabilis” in which appeals to future councils are condemned. Revolt of Tiburzio in Rome. Pius returns from Mantua and subdues it.

1463 Excommunication of George of Bohemia. Pius issues bull retracting opinions he held at the Council of Bâle.

1464 In league with Venice and Hungary, Pius starts a crusade against the Turks. He dies at Ancona and the crusade is abandoned. Pietro Barbo, Paul II. He is apathetic about the crusade. The moral corruption of the court begins to alienate the respect of Germany.

1465 Paul recovers the patrimony from the sons of Everso di Anguillara.

1469 Departure of Frederick III from Rome—the last appearance of an emperor in Rome.

1470 Paul resigns his claim to Rimini. Publication of statutes for the government of Rome.

1471 Francesco della Rovere, Sixtus IV. He pursues a policy of family aggrandisement. He attempts a new crusade.

1472 The papal fleet plunders the Turkish coast, but makes little effect.

1478 Sixtus tacitly abets the conspiracy against the Medici. Interdiction of Florence for the execution of Archbishop Salviati. War declared on the Florentines who are in alliance with the king of Naples. Louis XI of France fails in offers of mediation.

1480 Peace arranged. The conquest of Otranto by the Turks unites all Italy (except Venice) against the invaders. Absolution of Florence.

1481 The Turks surrender Otranto after death of Muhammed II. Girolamo Riario seizes Forlì.

1482 Sixtus goes to war with Ferrara. Feuds in Rome. Victory at Campo Morto of Roberto Malatesta, the papal general. Peace with Ferrara.

1483 Excommunication of Venice for not making peace with Ferrara. Savonarola begins to preach.

1484 Sixtus attacks the Colonnas in his designs to increase power of Girolamo Riario. Death of Sixtus. The Romans attack Riario and other members of the pope’s family. Giovanni Battista Cibo, Innocent VIII.

1485 Siege of Rome by Virginio Orsini in a quarrel at the instigation of Naples. Innocent intimidated. Relief of Rome by Roberto Sanseverino.

1486 Rumours of French intervention lead the cardinals to urge the pope to make peace with Ferdinand, which he does in a manner favourable to Naples.

1487 Alliance of Innocent with Lorenzo de’ Medici.

1489 Djem, brother of Bajazet II, arrives a prisoner in Rome. Innocent claims the kingdom of Naples because Ferdinand will not pay tribute.

1492 Peace made between the pope and Naples after three years of bickering. Death of Innocent. Rodrigo Borgia, Alexander VI. He suppresses the disorder in Rome occasioned by Innocent’s death. Naples offers obedience.

1493 Lodovico Il Moro arrays the pope, Milan, and Venice against Florence and Naples and invites Charles VIII of France to revive the Anjou claim to Naples. Alexander divides the lands of the new world between the Spanish and Portuguese. Peace made with Naples.

1494 Close alliance of the pope and Naples. Charles VIII arrives in Italy.

1495 Charles in Rome. The pope comes to terms with him and receives the obedience of France. Djem is delivered to Charles. Death of Djem, probably due to natural causes and not to poison administered by the pope, as usually believed. The pope joins a league to expel Charles from Naples. Charles’ retreat. Inundation of Rome.

1496 Alexander makes war upon the Orsini.

1497 Excommunication of Savonarola. Peace with the Orsini. Divorce of Lucrezia Borgia from Giovanni Sforza. Murder of Alexander’s son, the duke of Gandia, who has been made duke of Benevento. Alexander’s mock plans for reform.

1498 The Orsini and Colonnas make peace in order to unite against the pope. Alexander allies himself with France. His object is the consolidation of Italy. Execution of Savonarola.

1499 Venice joins the pope and France against Milan. Louis XII captures Milan.

1500 Cesare Borgia captures Imola and Forlì. Murder of Lucrezia’s third husband, Alfonso of Este, at instigation of Cesare. Year of Jubilee. Indulgences sold in foreign countries.

1501 Conquest of the Romagna by Cesare Borgia completed. Conquest of Naples by the French. The Colonnas submit to the pope.

1502 Cesare seizes Urbino and Sinigaglia.

1503 The pope takes violent measures against the Orsini family. Death of Alexander. Francesco Piccolomini, Pius III. His great desire is for peace. Cesare’s dominions begin to fall to pieces. Death of Pius after a rule of less than four weeks. Giuliano della Rovere, Julius II. He imprisons Cesare.

1504 Liberation of Cesare, who is again imprisoned and sent to Spain. His domains are restored to the papacy. Inquisition introduced into Naples. Julius begins to practise nepotism.

1505 Treaty between the pope and Venice.

1506 Foundation of the present St. Peter’s cathedral laid. Capture of Perugia and Bologna by Julius.

1507 The emperor Maximilian plans to unite the empire and papacy.

1508 League of Cambray against Venice.

1509 Julius joins the league and excommunicates the Venetians. Defeat of Venice at Agnadello.

1510 Venice makes humiliating terms with Julius and is absolved. France placed under the ban. At synod of Tours the French bishops withdraw obedience and seek to depose Julius. Julius makes an alliance with the Swiss. The Swiss guard of the pope still exists. Julius makes war on the duchy of Ferrara.

1511 Julius besieges and captures Mirandola. Failure of the expedition against Ferrara. The “Holy League” of the papacy. Ferdinand and Venice to recover Bologna, captured by the French. Gaston de Foix continues hostilities against Ferrara and Venice.

1512 Successes of Gaston de Foix. His death at the battle of Ravenna. Many cities surrender to the Holy League. Opening of the Lateran Council to consider the schismatic French bishops. Julius recovers Bologna.

1513 Death of Julius.

THE POPES FROM THE DEATH OF JULIUS II. [1513-1903 A.D.]

(The main political events of the papacy during this period are treated in the History of Italy; the list of popes is continued here for the sake of completeness.)

1513 Leo X, Giovanni de’ Medici. Concordat with Francis I concerning appointment of French bishops (1515). Authorisation of sale of indulgences (1517) brings about the Reformation. Annexes Urbino and Perugia to the papal states. Alliance with Charles V against Francis I. A great patron of literature and art.

1522 Adrian VI, tutor of Charles V. Attempts reforms, but is unable to stay the progress of the Reformation.

1523 Clement VII, Giulio de’ Medici. Enters the league against Charles V. Imprisoned at the sack of Rome (1527). Forbids the divorce of Henry VIII (1534).

1534 Paul III, Alessandro Farnese. Approves the establishment of the Jesuits (1540) and calls Council of Trent (1545). Makes his son duke of Parma and Piacenza.

1550 Julius III (Gianmaria de’ Medici).

1555 Marcellus II, Marcellus Cervius, dies in three weeks. Paul IV, Giovanni Pietro Caraffa, intolerant and tyrannical. Quarrels with Philip II of Spain who besieges Rome and makes Paul sue for peace.

1559 Pius IV, Giovanni Angelo de’ Medici.

1566 Pius V, Michele Ghislieri. A violent persecutor of dissenters.

1572 Gregory XIII, Ugo Buoncompagni. Introduces the Gregorian calendar.

1585 Sixtus V, Felice Peretti. Builds Vatican library and other great works.

1590 Urban VII, Giovanni Battista Castagna, lives thirteen days. Gregory XIV, Niccolo Sfondrati.

1591 Innocent IX, Giovanni Antonio Facchinetti. Lives two months.

1592 Clement VIII, Ippolito Aldobrandini. The Molinist and Jansenist controversy begins. Ferrara annexed to the papal states.

1604 Leo XI, Alessandro de’ Medici. Dies in four weeks. Paul V, Camillo Borghese. Contest with Venice in regard to ecclesiastical authority.

1621 Gregory XV, Alessandro Ludovisi. Founds the congregation of the Propaganda.

1623 Urban VIII, Maffeo Barberini. Supports France in Thirty Years’ War; annexes Urbino to his states.

1644 Innocent X, Giovanni Battista Pamfili. Condemns Treaty of Westphalia and the Jansenists.

1655 Alexander VII, Fabio Chigi. Louis XIV takes Avignon from him (1662).

1667 Clement IX, Giulio Rospigliosi. Temporary peace between the French Jansenists and Jesuits.

1670 Clement X, Emilio Altieri.

1676 Innocent XI, Benedetto Odescalchi. Controversy with Louis XIV over the ambassador’s privileges at Rome.

1689 Alexander VIII, Pietro Ottoboni. Aids Venice against the Turks.

1691 Innocent XII, Antonio Pignatelli.

1700 Clement XI, Giovanni Francesco Albani. Jansenist controversy renewed in France. Clement aids pretender to the English throne.

1721 Innocent XIII, Michelangelo Conti.

1724 Benedict XIII, Vincenzo Marco Orsini. Makes an ineffectual attempt to reconcile all divisions of Christianity.

1730 Clement XII, Lorenzo Corsini.

1740 Benedict XIV, Prospero Lambertini.

1758 Clement XIII, Carlo della Torre di Rezzonico. The papacy loses Avignon for the second time (1768). The Neapolitans seize Benevento.

1769 Clement XIV, Giovanni Vincenzo Antonio Ganganelli. He suppresses the Jesuits.

1775 Pius VI, Giovanni Angelo Braschi. The French seize his states and carry him to France a prisoner.

1800 Pius VII, Gregorio Luigi Barnaba Chiaramonti. Ratifies concordat with France; crowns Napoleon emperor (1804). The French take his states and imprison him (1809). Is restored 1814.

1823 Leo XII, Annibale della Genga.

1829 Pius VIII, Francesco Castiglione.

1831 Gregory XVI, Bartolommeo Alberto Cappellari.

1846 Pius IX, Mastai Ferretti. Begins as a reformer but afterwards changes his policy. In 1870 the last of his dominions are added to the kingdom of Italy.

1878 Leo XIII, Giacchino Pecci.

---

CHAPTER I. ORIGIN AND RISE OF THE PAPACY

[42-842 A.D.]

Like almost all the great works of nature and of human power in the material world and in the world of man, the papacy grew up in silence and obscurity. The names of the earlier bishops of Rome are known only by barren lists, by spurious decrees and epistles inscribed, centuries later, with their names; by their collision with the teachers of heretical opinions, almost all of whom found their way to Rome; by martyrdoms ascribed with the same lavish reverence to those who lived under the mildest of the Roman emperors, as well as those under the most merciless persecutors. Yet the mythic or imaginative spirit of early Christianity has either respected, or was not tempted to indulge its creative fertility by the primitive annals of Rome. After the embellishment, if not the invention, of St. Peter’s pontificate, his conflict with Simon Magus in the presence of the emperor, and the circumstance of his martyrdom, it was content with raising the successive bishops to the rank of martyrs without any peculiar richness or fullness of legend.

The dimness and obscurity which veiled the growing church, no doubt threw its modest concealment over the person of the bishop. He was but one man, with no recognised function, in the vast and tumultuous population. He had his unmarked dwelling, perhaps in the distant Transteverine region, or in the then lowly and unfrequented Vatican. By the vulgar, he was beheld as a Jew, or as belonging to one of those countless eastern religions, which, from the commencement of the empire, had been flowing, each with its strange rites and mysteries, into Rome. The emperor, the imperial family, the court favourites, the military commanders, the consulars, the senators, the patricians by birth, wealth, or favour, the pontiffs, the great lawyers, even those who ministered to the public pleasures, the distinguished mimes or gladiators, when they appeared in the streets, commanded more public attention than the Christian bishop, except when sought out for persecution by some politic or fanatic emperor. Slowly, and at long intervals, did the bishop of Rome emerge to dangerous eminence.

Christianity itself might seem, even from the first, to have disdained obscurity—to have sprung up or to have been forced into terrible notoriety in the Neronian persecution and the subsequent martyrdom of one at least, according to the vulgar tradition, of its two great apostles. What caprice of cruelty directed the attention of Nero to the Christians, and made him suppose them victims important enough to glut the popular indignation at the burning of Rome, it is impossible to determine. The cause and extent of the Domitian persecution is equally obscure. The son of Vespasian was not likely to be merciful to any connected with the fanatic Jews. Its known victims were of the imperial family, against whom some crime was necessary, and an accusation of Christianity served the end.

At the commencement of the second century, under Trajan, persecution against the Christians is raging in the East. That, however, was a local or rather Asiatic persecution, arising out of the vigilant and not groundless apprehension of the sullen and brooding preparation for insurrection among the whole Jewish race (with whom Roman terror and hatred still confounded the Christians), which broke out in the bloody massacres of Cyrene and Cyprus, and in the final rebellion during the reign of Hadrian, under Barchochebas (Bar Koziba). But while Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, is carried to Rome to suffer martyrdom, the Roman community is in peace, and not without influence. Ignatius entreats his Roman brethren not to interfere with injurious kindness between himself and his glorious death.

The wealth of the Roman community, and their lavish Christian use of their wealth, by contributing to the wants of foreign churches, at all periods, especially in times of danger and disaster (an ancient usage which lasted till the time of Eusebius), testifies at once to their flourishing condition, to their constant communication with more distant parts of the empire, and thus incidentally, perhaps, to the class, the middle or mercantile class, which formed the greater part of the believers.

But the history of Latin Christianity has not begun. For some considerable (it cannot but be an undefinable) part of the first three centuries, the church of Rome, and most, if not all the churches of the West, were, if we may so speak, Greek religious colonies. Their language was Greek, their organisation Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures Greek; and many vestiges and traditions show that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek. Through Greek the communication of the churches of Rome and of the West was constantly kept up with the East; and through Greek every heresiarch, or his disciples, having found his way to Rome, propagated with more or less success his peculiar doctrines. Pope Leo I (440-461) was the first celebrated Latin preacher, and his brief and emphatic sermons read like the first essays of a rude and untried eloquence, rather than the finished compositions which would imply a long study and cultivation of pulpit oratory. Compare them with Chrysostom.

[42-312 A.D.]

Africa, not Rome, gave birth to Latin Christianity. Tertullian was the first Latin writer, at least the first who commanded the public ear; and there is strong ground for supposing that, since Tertullian quotes the sacred writings perpetually and copiously, the earliest of those many Latin versions, noticed by Augustine, and on which Jerome grounded his Vulgate, were African. Cyprian kept up the tradition of ecclesiastical Latin. Arnobius, too, was an African.

Thus the Roman church was but one of the confederation of Greek religious republics, founded by Christianity. As of apostolic origin, still more as the church of the capital of the world, it was, of course, of paramount dignity and importance. It is difficult to exaggerate the height at which Rome, before the foundation of Constantinople, stood above the other cities of the earth; the centre of commerce, the centre of affairs, the centre of empire. The Christians, like the rest of mankind, were constantly ebbing and flowing out of Rome and into Rome. The church of the capital could not but assume something of the dignity of the capital; it was constantly receiving, as it were, the homage of all the foreign Christians, who, from interest, business, ambition, curiosity, either visited or took up their residence in the Eternal City.

But if Rome, or the church of Rome, was thus the centre of the more peaceful influences of Christianity, and of the hopes and fears of the Christian world, it was no less inevitably the chosen battle-field of her civil wars; and Christianity has ever more faithfully recorded her dissensions than her conquests. In Rome every feud which distracted the infant community reached its height; nowhere do the judaising tenets seem to have been more obstinate, or to have held so long and stubborn a conflict with more full and genuine Christianity. In Rome every heresy, almost every heresiarch, found welcome reception. All new opinions, all attempts to harmonise Christianity with the tenets of the Greek philosophers, with the oriental religions, the cosmogonies, the theophanies, and mysteries of the East, were boldly agitated, either by the authors of the gnostic systems or by their disciples. Valentinus the Alexandrian was himself in Rome, so also was Marcion of Sinope. The Phrygian Montanus, with his prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla, if not present, had their sect, a powerful sect, in Rome and in Africa. In Rome their convert, for a time at least, was the pope; in Africa, Tertullian. Somewhat later, the precursors of the great Trinitarian controversy came from all quarters. Praxeas, an Asiatic; Theodotus, a Byzantine; Artemon, an Asiatic; Noetus, a Smyrniote, at least his disciples the deacon Epigenes and Cleomenes, taught at Rome. Sabellius, from Ptolemais in Cyrene, appeared in person; his opinions took their full development in Rome. Not only do all these controversies betray the inexhaustible fertility of the Greek or eastern imagination, not only were they all drawn from Greek or oriental doctrines, but they must have been still agitated, discussed, ramified into their parts and divisions, through the versatile and subtile Greek. They were all strangers and foreigners; not one of all these systems originated in Rome, in Italy, or in Africa. On all these opinions the bishop of Rome was almost compelled to sit in judgment; he must receive or reject, authorise or condemn; he was a proselyte, whom it would be the ambition of all to gain.

Thus, down to the conversion of Constantine, the biography of the Roman bishops, and the history of the Roman episcopate, are one; the acts and peculiar character of the pontiffs, the influence and fortunes of the see, excepting in the doubtful and occasional gleams of light which have brought out Victor, Zephyrinus, Calixtus, Cornelius, Stephen, into more distinct personality, are involved in a dim and vague twilight. On the establishment of Christianity, as the religion if not of the empire, of the emperor, the bishop of Rome rises at once to the rank of a great accredited functionary; the bishops gradually, though still slowly, assume the life of individual character. The bishop is the first Christian in the first city of the world, and that city is legally Christian. The supreme pontificate of heathenism might still linger from ancient usage among the numerous titles of the emperor; but so long as Constantine was in Rome, the bishop of Rome, the head of the emperor’s religion, became in public estimation the equal, in authority and influence immeasurably the superior, to all of sacerdotal rank. The schisms and factions of Christianity now become affairs of state. As long as Rome is the imperial residence, an appeal to the emperor is an appeal to the bishop of Rome. It was the slow and imperceptible accumulation of wealth, the unmarked ascent to power and sovereignty, which enabled the papacy to endure for centuries.

[312-395 A.D.]

The obscurity of the bishops of Rome was not in this alone their strength. The earlier pontiffs (Clement is hardly an exception) were men who of themselves commanded no great authority, and awoke no jealousy. Rome had no Origen, no Athanasius, no Ambrose, no Augustine, no Jerome. The power of the hierarchy was established by other master-minds; by the Carthaginian Cyprian, by the Italian Ambrose, the prelate of political weight as well as of austere piety, by the eloquent Chrysostom. The names of none of the popes, down to Leo and Gregory the Great, appear among the distinguished writers of Christendom. This more cautious and retired dignity was no less favourable to their earlier power, than to their later claim of infallibility. If more stirring and ambitious men, they might have betrayed to the civil power the secret of their aspiring hopes; if they had been voluminous writers, in the more speculative times, before the Christian creed had assumed its definite and coherent form, it might have been more difficult to assert their unimpeachable orthodoxy.

The removal of the seat of empire to Constantinople consummated the separation of Greek and Latin Christianity; one took the dominion of the East, the other of the West. Greek Christianity has now another centre in the new capital; and the new capital has entered into those close relations with the great cities of the East, which had before belonged exclusively to Rome. Alexandria has become the granary of Constantinople; her Christianity and her commerce, instead of floating along the Mediterranean to Italy, pour up the Ægean to the city on the Bosporus. The Syrian capitals, Antioch, Jerusalem, the cities of Asia Minor and Bithynia, Ephesus, Nicæa, Nicomedia, own another mistress. The tide of Greek trade has ebbed away from the West, and found a nearer mart; political and religious ambition and adventure crowd to the new eastern court. That court becomes the chosen scene of Christian controversy; the emperor is the proselyte to gain whom contending parties employ argument, influence, intrigue.

That which was begun by the foundation of Constantinople, was completed by the partition of the empire between the sons of Constantine. There are now two Roman worlds, a Greek, and a Latin. In one respect, Rome lost in dignity, she was no longer the sole metropolis of the empire; the East no longer treated her with the deference of a subject. On the other hand, she was the uncontested, unrivalled head of her own hemisphere; she had no rival in those provinces, which yet held her allegiance, either as to civil or religious supremacy. The separation of the empire was not more complete between the sons of Constantine or Theodosius, than between Greek and Latin Christianity.[b]

[42-395 A.D.]

The advance of Christianity involved an emancipation of religion from all political elements, and this was inevitably followed by the establishment of a distinct ecclesiastical body, with a constitution peculiar to itself. In this separation of the church from the state consists, perhaps, the most important and most effectually influential peculiarity of Christian times. The spiritual and temporal powers may come into close contact—they may remain in the most intimate communion; but a perfect coalition can only take place occasionally, and for short periods of time. In their reciprocal relations and position with regard to each other, has since then been involved one of the most important questions presented by all history.

St. Radegonde, Wife of King Clotaire, receiving Religious Robes from St. Medard

(From an old woodcut)

It was nevertheless imperative on the ecclesiastical body to form their constitution on the model of that of the empire; and accordingly the hierarchy of the bishops, metropolitan patriarchs, was formed in close correspondence with the degradations of the civil power. No long time had elapsed before the bishops of Rome acquired the supremacy. It is, indeed, a vain pretence to assert that this supremacy was universally acknowledged by East and West, even in the first century, or, indeed, at any time; but it is equally certain that they quickly gained a pre-eminence, raising them far above all other ecclesiastical dignitaries. Many causes concurred to secure them this position; for if the relative importance of each provincial capital secured to its bishop a corresponding weight and dignity, how much more certainly would this result take place as regarded the ancient capital of the empire—that city whence the whole had derived its name? Rome was, besides, one of the most illustrious seats of the apostles; here had the greater number of the martyrs shed their blood. The bishops of Rome had displayed the most undaunted firmness throughout the different persecutions, and had sometimes been scarcely installed in their sacred office before they followed their predecessor in the path of that martyrdom by which his seat had been vacated. In addition to all this, the emperors now found it advisable to favour the advancement of a great patriarchal authority. In a law that became decisive for the predominance of Rome as well as of Christianity, Theodosius the Great commands that all nations claiming the protection of his grace should receive the faith as propounded by St. Peter to the Romans. Valentinian also forbade the bishops, whether of Gaul or of other provinces, to depart from the received customs of the church without the sanction of that venerable man, the pope of the Holy City. Thenceforth the power of the Roman bishops advanced beneath the protection of the emperor himself. But in this political connection lay also a restrictive force; had there been but one emperor, a universal primacy might also have established itself; but this was prevented by the partition of the empire. The emperors of the East were too eagerly tenacious of their ecclesiastical rights to make it possible that they should promote the extension of power desired by the western patriarchs in their dominions. In this respect also the constitution of the church presents the closest resemblance to that of the empire.

THE PAPACY IN CONNECTION WITH THE FRANKISH EMPIRE

[312-754 A.D.]

Scarcely was this great change completed, the Christian religion established, and the church founded, when new events of great importance took place; the Roman Empire, so long conquering and paramount, was now to see itself assailed by its neighbours; in its turn it was invaded and overcome.

Amidst the general convulsion that ensued, Christianity itself received a violent shock. In their terror, the Romans bethought themselves once more of the Etruscan mysteries, the Athenians hoped to be saved by Achilles and Minerva, the Carthaginians offered prayers to the genius Cœlestis; but these were only temporary waverings, for even whilst the empire was shattered in the western provinces, the church remained firm and undisturbed throughout all. But she fell, as was inevitable, into many embarrassments, and found herself in an entirely altered condition. A pagan people took possession of Britain; Arian kings seized the greater part of the remaining West; while the Lombards, long attached to Arianism, and as neighbours most dangerous and hostile, established a powerful sovereignty before the very gates of Rome.

The Roman bishops meanwhile, beset on all sides, exerted themselves with all the prudence and pertinacity which have remained their peculiar attributes to regain the mastery—at least in their ancient patriarchal diocese; but a new and still heavier calamity now assailed them. The Arabs—not conquerors merely, as were the Germans, but men inspired even to fanaticism by an arrogant and dogmatising creed, in direct opposition to the Christian faith—now poured themselves over the West as they had previously done over the East. After repeated attacks, they gained possession of Africa; one battle made them masters of Spain, their general Musa boasting that he would march into Italy by the passes of the Pyrenees and across the Alps, and cause the name of Mohammed to be proclaimed from the Vatican.

This position was all the more perilous for the western portion of Roman Christendom, from the fact that the iconoclastic dissensions were at that time raging with the most deadly animosity on both sides. The emperor of Constantinople had adopted the opposite party to that favoured by the pope of Rome; nay, the life of the latter was more than once in danger from the emperor’s machinations. The Lombards did not fail to perceive the advantages derivable to themselves from these dissensions; their king Aistulf took possession of provinces that till then had always acknowledged the dominion of the emperor, and again advancing towards Rome, he summoned that city also to surrender, demanding payment of tribute with vehement threats.

The Roman see was at this moment in no condition to help itself, even against the Lombards, still less could it hope to contend with the Arabs, who were beginning to extend their sovereignty over the Mediterranean, and were threatening all Christendom with a war of extermination.

But now the faith was no longer confined within the limits of the Roman Empire. Christianity, in accordance with its original destiny, had long overpassed these limits; more especially had it taken deep root among the German tribes of the West; nay, a Christian power had already arisen among these tribes, and towards this the pope had but to stretch forth his hands, when he was sure to find the most effectual succour and earnest allies against all his enemies.

[496-715 A.D.]

Among all the Germanic nations, the Franks alone had become Catholic from their first rise in the provinces of the Roman Empire. This acknowledgment of the Roman see had secured important advantages to the Frankish nation. In the Catholic subjects of their Arian enemies, the western Goths and Burgundians, the Franks found natural allies. We read so much of the miracles by which Clovis was favoured—how St. Martin showed him the ford over the Vienne by means of a hind, how St. Hilary preceded his armies in a column of fire—that we shall not greatly err if we conclude these legends to shadow forth the material succours afforded by the natives to those who shared their creed, and for whom, according to Gregory of Tours,[i] they desired victory “with eager inclination.” But this attachment to Catholicism, thus confirmed from the beginning by consequences so important, was afterwards renewed and powerfully strengthened by a very peculiar influence arising from a totally different quarter.

It chanced that certain Anglo-Saxons, being exposed for sale in the slave market of Rome, attracted the attention of Pope Gregory the Great; he at once resolved that Christianity should be preached to the nation whence these beautiful captives had been taken. Never, perhaps, was resolution adopted by any pope whence results more important ensued; together with the doctrines of Christianity, a veneration for Rome and for the holy see, such as had never before existed in any nation, found place among the Germanic Britons. The Anglo-Saxons began to make pilgrimages to Rome; they sent their youth thither to be educated, and King Offa established the tax called “St. Peter’s penny” for the relief of pilgrims and the education of the clergy. The higher orders proceeded to Rome, in the hope that, dying there, a more ready acceptance would be accorded to them by the saints in heaven. The Anglo-Saxons appear to have transferred to Rome and the Christian saints the old Teutonic superstition, by which the gods were described as nearer to some spots of earth than to others, and more readily to be propitiated in places thus favoured.

But besides all this, results of higher importance still ensued when the Anglo-Saxons transplanted their modes of thought to the mainland, and imbued the whole empire of the Franks with their own opinion. Boniface (originally Winfrid or Winfrith), the apostle of the Germans, was an Anglo-Saxon; this missionary, largely sharing in the veneration professed by his nation for St. Peter and his successors, had from the beginning voluntarily pledged himself to abide faithfully by all the regulations of the Roman see; to this promise he most religiously adhered. On all the German churches founded by him was imposed an extraordinary obligation to obedience. Every bishop was required expressly to promise that his whole life should be passed in unlimited obedience to the Romish church, to St. Peter and his representative. Nor did he confine this rule to the Germans only. The Gallican bishops had hitherto maintained a certain independence of Rome; Boniface, who had more than once presided in their synods, availed himself of these occasions to impress his own views on this western portion of the Frankish church; thenceforward the Gallic archbishops received their pallium from Rome, and thus did the devoted submission of the Anglo-Saxons extend itself over the whole realm of the Franks.

The empire had now become the central point for all the German tribes of the West. The fact that the reigning family, the Merovingian race, had brought about its own destruction by its murderous atrocities had not affected the strength of the empire. Another family, that of Pepin of Heristal, had risen to supreme power—men of great energy, exalted force of character, and indomitable vigour. While other realms were sinking together into one common ruin, and the world seemed about to become the prey of the Moslem, it was this race, the house of Pepin of Heristal, afterwards called the Carlovingian, by which the first and effectual resistance was offered to the Mohammedan conquerors.

[395-715 A.D.]

The religious development then in progress was also equally favoured by the house of Pepin; we find it early maintaining the best understanding with Rome, and it was under the special protection of Charles Martel and Pepin le Bref that Boniface proceeded in his apostolic labours. Let us consider the temporal condition of the papal power. On the one side the East Roman Empire, weakened, fallen into ruin, incapable of supporting Christendom against Islamism, or of defending its own domains in Italy against the Lombards, yet continuing to claim supremacy even in spiritual affairs. On the other hand, we have the German nations full of the most vigorous life; victorious over the Moslem, attached with all the fresh ardour and trusting enthusiasm of youth to that authority of whose protecting and restricting influences they still felt the need, and filled with an unlimited and most freely rendered devotion.

Already Gregory II perceived the advantages he had gained; full of a proud self-consciousness, he writes thus to that iconoclast emperor, Leo the Isaurian: “All the lands of the West have their eyes directed towards our humility; by them are we considered as a God upon earth.” His successors became ever more and more impressed with the conviction that it was needful to separate themselves from a power (that of the Roman Empire) by which many duties were imposed on them, but which could offer them no protection in return. They could not safely permit a succession to the mere name and empire to fetter them, but turned themselves rather towards those from whom help and aid might also be expected. Thus they entered into strict alliance with those great captains of the West, the Frankish monarchs; this became closer and closer from year to year, procured important advantages to both parties, and eventually exercised the most active influence on the destinies of the world.[c]

With the division of the empire in the year 395, the question of the Roman precedence of Constantinople was left for a time in abeyance; but in the West the authority of the bishop of Rome became more and more firmly established. In the following century the general conditions under which he was called upon to act became so materially modified as to constitute a new period in the history of our subject.

The characters of the men who filled the papal chair during this century, most of them of exemplary life, some of commanding genius, would alone suffice to constitute it a memorable era. “Upon the mind of Innocent I,” says Milman,[b] “seems first distinctly to have dawned the vast conception of Rome’s universal ecclesiastical supremacy.” Innocent I (402-417) seems indeed to have been the first of the popes who ventured to repudiate those political conceptions which threatened to circumscribe the extending influence of his office. Innocent was succeeded by Zosimus (417-418) and Boniface (418-422). The former, whose pontificate lasted only twenty-one months, exhibits a noteworthy exception to the traditions of his see, in the disposition he at one time showed to temporise with Pelagianism, and even to set aside in its favour the decrees of his predecessor. The pontificate of Boniface is notable as having been preceded by a contested election which afforded the emperor Honorius an opportunity for the exercise of his intervention, thereby establishing a precedent for imperial interference on like occasions. At the instance of Boniface himself, Honorius enacted an ordinance designed to avert the scandals incident to such contests. By the new provisions, all canvassing for the vacant chair was strictly prohibited; in the event of a disputed election both candidates were to be deemed ineligible. The successor of Boniface was Celestine I (422-432). The evidence afforded by the events of his pontificate is somewhat conflicting in character. On the one hand, we find the churches of Africa putting forward their latest recorded protest against the Roman pretensions, adducing the sixth canon of the Council of Nicæa in support of their protest; on the other hand, the success with which Celestine intervened in Illyricum, and again in connection with the sees of Narbonne and Vienne, proves that the papal jurisdiction was being accepted with increasing deference in other parts of the empire.

[418-461 A.D.]

Barbaric invasion, although resulting in the overthrow of many of the institutions of civilisation, and in widespread suffering and social deterioration, served but to enhance the influence and importance of the Roman see. The apparent fulfilment of prophecy, pagan as well as Christian, when the city was taken and sacked by Alaric (410), seemed to complete the effacement of the temporal power in Rome. Neither the western emperors nor the Gothic conquerors held their court in the ancient capital, where the pope was now at once the most important and conspicuous authority. In the African provinces, the demoralisation occasioned by the fierce controversies and dissensions concerning Pelagianism and Donatism compelled the Catholic communities to exchange their former attitude of haughty independence for one of suppliant appeal, and to solicit the intervention and counsel which they had before rejected. Such was the aspect of affairs in the West when Leo the Great (440-461), by some regarded as the true founder of the mediæval popedom, succeeded to the primacy. A citizen of Rome by birth, he exemplified in his own character many of the ancient Roman virtues—a tenacious adherence to tradition in matters of religious belief, an indomitable resolution in the assertion of the prerogatives of his office, and the austere practice of the recognised duties of social life. This rigid maintenance of orthodoxy had been instilled into him (or at least confirmed) by the exhortations of Augustine, with whom he had become personally acquainted when on a mission to the African province; and before his election to the papal office the celebrated Cassian had conceived so high an opinion of his virtues and abilities as to dedicate to him his treatise on the Incarnation. Regarded, indeed, simply as the able antagonist of the Manichæan and Eutychian heresies, and as the first author of the collect, Leo would fill no unimportant place in the annals of Latin Christendom; but his influence on church history in other respects is of a far deeper and more potent kind. In none was it followed by more important results than by the success with which he established the theory that all bishops who, in questions of importance, demurred to the decision of their metropolitan should be entitled to appeal to Rome. He obtained the recognition of this principle not only in Illyricum, as his predecessor Innocent had done, but also in Gaul; and the circumstances under which he did so in the latter province constitute the whole proceedings a memorable episode in church history.

[461-532 A.D.]

The chief obstacle to the recognition of the supremacy of the Roman pontiff was now to be found in the revival of Arianism, which, professed alike by the Goth and the Vandal, represented the dominant faith in the chief cities of northern Italy, as well as in Africa, Spain, and southern Gaul. But the rivalry thus generated only increased the disposition of the Catholic party to exalt the prerogatives of their head, and the attitude of Rome towards other churches continued to be more and more one of unquestionable superiority. In the year 483 Pope Felix II (or III)[84] ventured upon an unprecedented measure in citing Acacius, the patriarch of Constantinople, to Rome, to answer certain allegations preferred against him by John, patriarch of Alexandria, whom he designated as “frater et coepiscopus noster” (Thiel,[j] Epistolæ, p. 239). On Acacius’ refusing to recognise the legality of the letter of citation, he was excommunicated by Felix. The successor of Felix, Gelasius I (492-496), refused to notify, as was customary, his election to the patriarch of Constantinople, and by his refusal implicitly put forward a fresh assumption, viz., that communion with Rome implied subjection to Rome. Throughout the pontificate of Gelasius the primacy of the Roman see was the burden of his numerous letters to other churches, and he appears also to have been the first of the pontiffs to enunciate the view that the authority which he represented was not controllable by the canons of synods, whether past or present. In Italy these assumptions were unhesitatingly accepted. The Palmary synod, as it was termed, convened in Rome during the pontificate of Symmachus (498-514), formally disavowed its own right to sit in judgment on his administrative acts. Ennodius, bishop of Pavia, (circa 510), declared that the Roman pontiff was to be judged by God alone, and was not amenable to any earthly potentate or tribunal. It is thus evident that the doctrine of papal infallibility, though not yet formulated, was already virtually recognised.

During the Gothic rule in Italy (493-553), its representatives manifested the utmost tolerance in relation to religious questions, and showed little disposition to impose any restraints on the policy of the popes, although each monarch, by virtue of his title of “king of the Romans,” claimed the right to veto any election to the papal chair. In the year 483, when Odoacer sent his first lieutenant, Basilius, from Ravenna to Rome, the latter was invested with the titles eminentissimus and sublimis. The pope accordingly appeared as politically the subject of his Arian overlord. The advantage thus gained by the temporal power appears to have been the result of its intervention, which Simplicius (468-483) had himself solicited, in the elections to the papal office, and one of the principal acts of the Palmary synod (above referred to) was to repudiate the chief measures of Basilius, which had been especially directed against the abuses that prevailed on such occasions, and more particularly against bribery by alienation of the church lands. The assertion of this authority on the part of the civil power was declared by the synod to be irregular and uncanonical, and was accordingly set aside as not binding on the church. The fierce contests and shameless bribery which now accompanied almost every election were felt, however, to be so grave a scandal that the synod itself deemed it expedient to adopt the ordinance issued by Basilius, and to issue it as one of its own enactments. In order more effectually to guard against such abuses, Boniface II, in the year 530, obtained from a synod specially convened for the purpose the power of appointing his own successor, and nominated one Vigilius—the same who ten years later actually succeeded to the office. But a second synod, having decided that such a concession was contrary to the traditions of episcopal succession, annulled the grant, and Boniface himself committed the former decree to the flames. At his death, however, the recurrence of the old abuses in a yet more flagrant form induced the senate to obtain from the court of Ravenna a measure of reform of a more comprehensive character, and designed to check not only the simoniacal practices within the church itself, but also the extortion of the court officials.

An Ancient Conception of St. Peter

(From a woodcut in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris)

[526-590 A.D.]

In the year 526 Dionysius Exiguus, a monk in Rome, undertook the labour of preparing a new collection of the canons of the councils, and, finding his production favourably received, proceeded also to compile a like collection of the papal letters or decretals, from the earliest extant down to those of Anastasius II in his own day. The letters of the popes were thus placed on a level with the rescripts of the emperors, and in conjunction with the canons formed the basis of the canon law, which afterwards assumed such importance in connection with the history of the church. The negative value of the collection formed by Dionysius may be said, however, almost to equal that of its actual contents; for, from the simple fact that it does not contain those yet earlier decretals subsequently put forth by the pseudo-Isidorus, it affords the most convincing disproof of their genuineness.

The substitution of the rule of the Greek emperors for that of the Gothic monarchs was inimical in almost every respect to the independence and reputation of the popedom. For a short interval before Justinian landed in Italy, Agapetus (535-536), appearing as the emissary of Theodotus to the Eastern court, assumed a bearing which inspired the emperor himself with respect, and his influence was sufficiently potent to procure the deposition of one patriarch of the Eastern capital and to decide the election of another. But, after Belisarius entered Rome and the city had been reduced to subjection, the pontiff was seen to be the mere vassal of the emperor, and not only of the emperor but of the courtesan on the imperial throne. The deposition of Silverius (536-540), and his mysterious fate at Pandataria, together with the elevation of Vigilius (540-555), the nominee of the abandoned Theodora and her pliant slave, completed the degradation of the Roman see. Each successive pope was now little more than a puppet which moved at the pleasure of the Eastern court, and the apocrisiarius or deputy whom he maintained at that court was generally (as in the case of Pelagius I, Gregory I, Sabinian, Boniface III, Martin) his own successor—an honour purchased, it can hardly be doubted, by systematic compliance with the imperial wishes. In the career and fate of Vigilius the papal office was dishonoured as it had never been before, at once by the signal unworthiness of its bearer and by the indignities heaped upon him by the savage malice of his foes. So sinister, indeed, had become the relations between the Roman bishop and the eastern court that Pelagius I (555-560) is said to have besought Narses to send him to prison rather than to Constantinople.

In the year 568 the Lombards invaded Italy. Like the Goths they became converts to Arianism; but they were also far less civilised, and looked with little respect on Roman institutions and Roman habits of thought, while their arrogance, faithlessness, and cruelty gained for them the special detestation of the Roman see. Their conquests did not extend over all Italy. Ravenna and the Pentapolis, Venice, Rome, and its duchy (as the surrounding district was then termed), Naples, Calabria, and Sicily, remained subject to the empire. In the peninsula the pope was, after the exarch of Ravenna, the most powerful potentate, and the presence of a common foe caused the relations between himself and the empire to assume a more amicable character. The emperor, indeed, continued to control the elections and to enforce the payment of tribute for the territory protected by the imperial arms; but on the other hand the pontiff exercised a definite authority with the Roman duchy and claimed to have a voice in the appointment of the civil officers who administered the local government. From the time of Constantine the Great the church had possessed the right of acquiring landed property by bequests, and the Roman see had thus become greatly enriched. Some of its possessions lay far beyond the confines of Italy.[f]

GREGORY THE GREAT (590-604 A.D.)

[42-590 A.D.]

The papal monarchy thus rose insensibly upon the episcopal aristocracy. From the first, the word of the successor of St. Peter as bishop of the Eternal City had a high degree of authority. The title of “pope,” attributed in theory to every bishop, was finally reserved for him of Rome alone, a change already manifest under Leo the Great, but not completely brought about until the time of Gregory VII. The bishop of Rome had possessed since the days of the Roman Empire valuable property in the capital and throughout Italy. He had even acquired some across the Alps, for example, in the province of Arles, where he charged the bishop of that city with administering it. Besides this he occupied in Rome itself, that is to say in the most famous city in the world, that great estate which had been assigned to the bishops by the municipal régime in the last days of the empire.

St. Leo (440-461) gave much prestige to his office by the great rôle he played in public affairs and his successful intercession with Attila. He obtained from Valentinian III a decree in which the emperor invited “the entire church to recognise its head in order that peace might forever be preserved”; and at the same period we see him restoring a Gallican bishop to the see from which he had been driven, and transferring the metropolitan seat from Arles to Vienne.

Under the Ostrogoths the church of Rome, treated elsewhere with leniency, could make no progress. But when their power had fallen (553) and Rome came once more under the authority of the emperor of Constantinople, the great distance of her new master opened up a brighter future. The Lombard invasion brought into the church’s territory a large number of refugees, and the Roman population recovered some of its old energy in the double hatred for barbarians and Arians. As for the exarch whom the eastern emperor had charged with the government of his Italian provinces and invested with direct authority over the dukes and military counts of Naples, Rome, Genoa, etc., this official could scarcely make his authority felt in the western half of Italy, relegated as he was to Ravenna, and separated from Rome by the Lombard dominion which included Spoleto.

[590-604 A.D.]

It was at this juncture favourable, though dangerous in some respects, that Gregory I appeared (590-604). Descended from the noble Anicia family, Gregory added to distinction of birth every advantage of body and mind. While under thirty he was prefect of Rome, but at the end of several months he abandoned honours and thoughts of worldly things, and sought the retirement of the cloister. But his reputation did not permit him the obscurity he desired. Sent to Constantinople about 570 as secretary and later as apocrisiary (a sort of grand almoner) by Pope Pelagius II, he rendered valuable service to the holy see in its relations with the empire and in its struggles with the Lombards. In 590 the clergy, the senate, and the people raised him with one voice to the supreme pontificate, as successor to Pelagius; but as all elections had to be confirmed by the emperor at Constantinople, Gregory wrote in supplication that his might not be sanctioned. The letter was intercepted, and Maurice’s orders of ratification soon arrived. Gregory hid; he was discovered and brought back to Rome.

Pope in spite of himself, he used all his talent and power to fortify the papacy,[85] propagate Christianity, and improve the discipline and organisation of the church. Although he pleaded that the episcopacy, and especially his own, “was the office of a shepherd of souls and not of a temporal prince,” he did not neglect the temporal power of the holy see. It happened, since the emperor was so little in touch with Italian affairs, that the soldiers charged with defending Rome against the Lombards had received no pay. Gregory paid them, took upon himself the work of defence, and armed the clerics. When Agilulf, whose aggression had provoked these preparations, was compelled to withdraw, Gregory treated with him in the name of Rome, in spite of protests from the exarch.

Feeling thus strengthened in his position, he undertook to propagate Christianity and orthodoxy both within and without the limits of the ancient Roman Empire. Within its boundaries there were still some pagans in Sicily, Sardinia, even at Terracina (Tarracina) at the very gates of Rome, and doubtless also in some parts of Gaul, since there exists a decree of Childebert’s dated 554, with the title For the Abolition of the Remainder of Idolatry. There were Arians very close to Rome, the Lombards. By the intervention of Queen Theudelinda, Gregory succeeded in having the heir to the Lombard throne, Adalwald, raised in Catholicism. Since 587 the Visigoths in Spain under Recared had been converted.

As for Great Britain, it was still entirely pagan, and Gregory sent thither the monk Augustine and forty Roman missionaries (596). They landed on the island of Thanet, and going from there sought Ethelbert, king of Kent, who permitted them to preach their doctrines at Canterbury. From this point Christianity spread rapidly towards the north and west, until by 627 it was firmly established in Northumberland. St. Augustine, archbishop of Canterbury, had been named primate of England by Gregory the Great, with whom he kept up a constant correspondence that is still in existence.

Ireland, “the isle of saints,” had already been converted, and now monks were leaving it to win over the barbarians. At this period St. Columban, the monk who denounced Brunehild’s crimes with such boldness, set out to preach the Gospel to the mountaineers of Helvetia, and founded in their midst abbeys surrounded by fertile fields. After him St. Rupert travelled far into Bavaria and established the diocese of Salzburg.

Thus Christianity spread its spirit of proselytism, and St. Gregory fostered it greatly by the mild precepts he inculcated in his missionaries, and the skill with which he facilitated the transition from pagan to Catholic. He wrote to St. Augustine: “You must take care not to destroy the pagans’ temples, but only their idols; use holy water in washing out the edifice, build altars and deposit relics in them. If their temples are well built, so much the better; for it is important that these same ones pass from the cult of demons to that of the true God. When the nation sees its ancient places of worship remain, it will be more disposed to visit them through habit and to worship the true God.”

At home Gregory laboured with success to co-ordinate the powers of the church, in making recognised above everything that of the holy see. We find him bestowing the title of vicar of the Gauls upon the bishop of Arles, to correspond with Augustine archbishop of Canterbury, with the archbishop of Seville for Spain, and him of Thessalonica for Greece; and finally sending secret legates to Constantinople. In his pastoral which he wrote on the occasion of his election, and which became a general regulation throughout the West, he prescribed the bishops their duties according to the decision of several councils. To bind the hierarchy together he sought to prevent the encroachments of one bishop upon another. “I have given you Britain to direct spiritually,” he wrote to the ambitious Augustine, “and not Gaul.” He favoured the monasteries, looked with vigilance after their discipline, and reformed church singing, substituting for the Ambrosian chant, “which,” according to a contemporary, “was like the distant sound of a chariot rolling over the stones,” that Gregorian chant which bears his own name.[d]

The darkest stain on the name of Gregory is his cruel and unchristian triumph in the fall of the emperor Maurice—his base and adulatory praise of Phocas, the most odious and sanguinary tyrant who had ever seized the throne of Constantinople. It is the worst homage to religion to vindicate or even to excuse the crimes of religious men; and the apologetic palliation, or even the extenuation of their misdeeds rarely succeeds in removing, often strengthens, the unfavourable impression.

Gregory was spared the pain and shame of witnessing the utter falsehood of his pious vaticinations as to the glorious and holy reign of Phocas. In the second year of the tyrant’s reign he closed the thirteen important years of his pontificate. The ungrateful Romans paid but tardy honours to his memory. His death (March 10th, 604) was followed by a famine, which the starving multitude attributed to his wasteful dilapidation of the patrimony of the church—that patrimony which had been so carefully administered and so religiously devoted to their use. Nothing can give a baser notion of their degradation than their actions. They proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the library of Gregory, and were only deterred from their barbarous ravages by the interposition of Peter the faithful archdeacon. Peter had been interlocutor of Gregory in the wild legends contained in the Dialogues.[k] The archdeacon now assured the populace of Rome that he had often seen the Holy Ghost in the visible shape of a dove hovering over the head of Gregory as he wrote. Gregory’s successor therefore hesitated, and demanded that Peter should confirm his pious fiction or fancy by an oath. He ascended the pulpit, but before he had concluded his solemn oath he fell dead. That which to a hostile audience might have been a manifest judgment against perjury, was received as a divine testimony to his truth. The Roman church has constantly permitted Gregory to be represented with the Holy Ghost, as a dove, floating over his head.

The historian of Christianity is arrested by certain characters and certain epochs, which stand as landmarks between the close of one age of religion and the commencement of another. Such a character is Gregory the Great; such an epoch his pontificate, the termination of the sixth century. Gregory, not from his station alone, but by the acknowledgment of the admiring world, was intellectually, as well as spiritually, the great model of his age. He was proficient in all the arts and sciences cultivated at that time; the vast volumes of his writings show his indefatigable powers; their popularity and their authority, his ability to clothe those thoughts and those reasonings in language which would awaken and command the general mind.

His epoch was that of the final Christianisation of the world, not in outward worship alone, not in its establishment as the imperial religion, the rise of the church upon the ruin of the temple, and the recognition of the hierarchy as an indispensable rank in the social system, but in its full possession of the whole mind of man, in letters, arts as far as arts were cultivated, habits, usages, modes of thought, and in popular superstition.

Not only was heathenism, but, excepting in the laws and municipal institutions, Romanity itself absolutely extinct. The reign of Theodoric had been an attempt to fuse together Roman, Teutonic, and Christian usages. Cassiodorus, though half a monk, aspired to be a Roman statesman, Boethius to be a heathen philosopher. The influence of the Roman schools of rhetoric is betrayed even in the writers of Gaul, such as Sidonius Apollinaris; there is an attempt to preserve some lingering cadence of Roman poetry in the Christian versifiers of that age. At the close of the sixth century all this has expired; ecclesiastical Latin is the only language of letters, or rather letters themselves are become purely ecclesiastical. The fable of Gregory’s destruction of the Palatine library is now rejected as injurious to his fame; but probably the Palatine library, if it existed, would have been so utterly neglected that Gregory would hardly have condescended to fear its influence. His aversion to such studies is not that of dread or hatred, but of religious contempt; profane letters are a disgrace to a Christian bishop; the truly religious spirit would loathe them of itself.

What, then, was this Christianity by which Gregory ruled the world? Not merely the speculative and dogmatic theology, but the popular, vital, active Christianity, which was working in the heart of man; the dominant motive of his actions, as far as they were affected by religion; the principal element of his hopes and fears as regards the invisible world and that future life which had now become part of his conscious belief.

Christian Mythology

The history of Christianity cannot be understood without pausing at stated periods to survey the progress and development of this Christian mythology, which, gradually growing up and springing as it did from natural and universal instincts, took a more perfect and systematic form, and at length, at the height of the Middle Ages, was as much a part of Latin Christianity as the primal truths of the Gospel. This growth, which had long before begun, had reached a kind of adolescence in the age of Gregory, to expand into full maturity during succeeding ages. Already the creeds of the church formed but a small portion of Christian belief. The highest and most speculative questions of theology, especially in Alexandria and Constantinople, had become watchwords of strife and faction, had stirred the passions of the lowest orders; the two natures, or the single or double will in Christ, had agitated the workshop of the artisan and the seats in the circus. Christ assumed gradually more and more of the awfulness, the immateriality, the incomprehensibleness, of the Deity, and men sought out beings more akin to themselves, more open, it might seem, to human sympathies. Believers delighted in those ceremonials to which they might have recourse with less timidity; the shrines and the relics of martyrs might deign to receive the homage of those who were too profane to tread the holier ground. Already the worship of these lower objects of homage begins to intercept that to the higher; the popular mind is filling with images either not suggested at all, or suggested but very dimly by the sacred writings; legends of saints are supplanting, or rivalling at least, in their general respect and attention, the narratives of the Bible.

Of all these forms of worship, the most captivating, and captivating to the most amiable weaknesses of the human mind, was the devotion to the Virgin Mary. The worship of the Virgin had first arisen in the East; and this worship, already more than initiate, contributed, no doubt, to the passionate violence with which the Nestorian controversy was agitated, while that controversy, with its favourable issue to those who might seem most zealous for the Virgin’s glory, gave a strong impulse to the worship. The denial of the title “the mother of God,” by Nestorius, was that which sounded most offensive to the general ear; it was the intelligible odious point in his heresy. The worship of the Virgin now appears in the East as an integral part of Christianity. Among Justinian’s splendid edifices arose many churches dedicated to the mother of God. The feast of the Annunciation is already celebrated under Justin and Justinian. Heraclius has images of the Virgin on his masts when he sails to Constantinople to overthrow Phocas. Before the end of the century the Virgin is become the tutelar deity of Constantinople, which is saved by her intercession from the Saracens.

WORSHIP OF THE VIRGIN

In the time of Gregory the worship of the Virgin had not assumed that rank in Latin Christianity to which it rose in later centuries, though that second great impulse towards this worship, the unbounded admiration of virginity, had full possession of his monastic mind. With Gregory celibacy was the perfection of human nature; he looked with abhorrence on the contamination of the holy sacerdotal character, even in its lowest degree, by any sexual connection. No subdeacon, after a certain period, was to be admitted without a vow of chastity; no married subdeacon to be promoted to a higher rank. In one of his expositions he sadly relates the fall of one of his aunts, a consecrated virgin; she had been guilty of the sin of marriage. Of all his grievances against the exarch of Ravenna, none seems more worthy of complaint than that he had encouraged certain nuns to throw off their religious habits and to marry. Gregory does not seem to have waged this war against nature, however his sentiments were congenial with those of his age, with his wonted success.[86] His letters are full of appeals to sovereigns and to bishops to repress the incontinence of the clergy; even monasteries were not absolutely safe.

ANGELS AND DEVILS

It was not around the monastery alone, the centre of this preternatural agency, that the ordinary providence of God gave place to a perpetual interposition of miraculous power. Every Christian was environed with a world of invisible beings, who were constantly putting off their spiritual nature and assuming forms, uttering tones, distilling odours, apprehensible by the soul of man, or taking absolute and conscious possession of his inward being. A distinction was drawn between the pure, spiritual, illimitable, incomprehensible nature of the Godhead, and the thin and subtile but bodily forms of angels and archangels. These were perceptible to the human senses, wore the human form, spoke with human language; their substance was the thin air, the impalpable fire; it resembled the souls of men, but yet, whenever they pleased, it was visible, performed the functions of life, communicated not with the mind and soul only but with the eye and ear of man.

The hearing and the sight of religious terror were far more quick and sensitive. The angelic visitations were but rare and occasional; the more active demons were ever on the watch, seizing and making every opportunity of beguiling their easy victims. They were everywhere present, and everywhere betraying their presence. They ventured into the holiest places; they were hardly awed by the most devout saints; but, at the same time there was no being too humble, to whose seduction they would not condescend—nothing in ordinary life so trivial and insignificant but that they would stoop to employ it for their evil purposes. They were without the man, terrifying him with mysterious sounds and unaccountable sights. They were within him, compelling all his faculties to do their bidding, another indwelling will besides his own, compelling his reluctant soul to perform their service. Every passion, every vice, had its especial demon; lust, impiety, blasphemy, vainglory, pride were not the man himself, but a foreign power working within him. The slightest act, sometimes no act at all, surrendered the soul to the irresistible indwelling agent. In Gregory’s Dialogues[k] a woman eats a lettuce without making the sign of the cross; she is possessed by a devil, who had been swallowed in the unexorcised lettuce. Another woman is possessed for admitting her husband’s embraces the night before the dedication of an oratory.

MARTYRS AND RELICS

Happily there existed, and existed almost at the command of the clergy, a counterworking power to this fatal diabolic influence, in the perpetual presence of the saints, more especially in hallowed places, and about their own relics. These relics were the treasure with which the clergy, above all the bishops of Rome, who possessed those of St. Peter and St. Paul with countless others, ruled the mind; for by these they controlled and kept in awe, they repaired the evils wrought by this whole world of evil spirits. Happy were the churches, monasteries, whose foundations were hallowed and secured by these sacred talismans. To doubt their presence in these dedicated shrines, in the scenes of their martyrdom, obstinately to require the satisfaction of the senses as to their presence, was an impious want of faith; belief, in proportion to the doubtfulness of the miracle, was the more meritorious. Kings and queens bowed in awe before the possessors and dispensers of these wonder-working treasures.

Relics had now attained a self-defensive power; profane hands which touched them withered; and men who endeavoured to remove them were struck dead. Such was the declaration of Gregory himself, to one who had petitioned for the head or some part of the body of St. Paul. It was an awful thing even to approach to worship them. Men who had merely touched the bones of St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. Lawrence, though with the pious design of changing their position or placing the scattered bones together, had fallen dead, in one case to the number of ten. The utmost that the church of Rome could bestow would be a cloth which had been permitted to touch them; and even such cloths had been known to bleed. If, indeed, the chains of St. Paul would yield any of their precious iron to the file, which they often refused to do, this, he writes, he would transmit to the empress; and he consoles her for the smallness of the gift by the miraculous power which it will inherently possess.

Gregory doled out such gifts with pious parsimony. A nail which contained the minutest filings from the chains of St. Peter was an inestimable present to a patrician, or an ex-consul, or a barbaric king. Sometimes they were inserted in a small cross; in one instance with fragments of the gridiron on which St. Lawrence was roasted. One of the golden nails of the chains of St. Peter had tempted the avarice of a profane, no doubt a heathen or Arian, Lombard; he took out his knife to sever it off; the awe-struck knife sprang up and cut his sacrilegious throat. The Lombard king Authari and his attendants were witnesses of the miracle, and stood in terror, not daring to lift the fearful nail from the ground. A Catholic was fortunately found, by whom the nail permitted itself to be touched; and this peerless gift, so avouched, Gregory sends to a distinguished civil officer.

SANCTITY OF THE CLERGY

That sanctity which thus dwelt in the relics of the saints, was naturally gathered, as far as possible, around their own persons by the clergy, hallowed as they were and set apart by their ordination from the common race of man; and if the hierarchy had only wielded this power for self-protection, if they had but arrayed themselves in this defensive awe against the insults and cruelties of barbarians, such as the Lombards are described, it would be stern censure which would condemn even manifest imposture. We might excuse the embellishment, even the invention of the noble story of the bishop Sanctulus, who offered his life for that of a captive deacon, before whom the Lombard executioner, when he lifted up his sword to behead him, felt his arm stiffen, and could not move it till he had solemnly sworn never to raise that sword against the life of a Christian. But this conservative respect for the sanctity of their order darkens too frequently into pride and inhumanity; the awful inviolability of their persons becomes a jealous resentment against even unintentional irreverence. A demoniac accused the holy bishop Fortunatus of refusing him the rights of hospitality; a poor peasant receives the possessed into his house, and is punished for this inferential disrespect to the bishop by seeing his child cast into the fire and burned before his eyes. A poor fellow with a monkey and cymbals is struck dead for unintentionally interrupting a bishop Boniface in prayer.

The sacred edifices, the churches, especially, approachable to all, were yet approachable not without profound awe; in them met everything which could deepen that awe; within were the relics of the tutelar saint, the mysteries, and the presence of the Redeemer, of God himself; beneath were the remains of the faithful dead.

Burial in churches had now begun; it was a special privilege. Gregory dwells on the advantage of being thus constantly suggested to the prayers of friends and relatives for the repose of the soul. But that which was a blessing to the holy was but more perilous to the unabsolved and the wicked. The sacred soil refused to receive them; the martyrs appeared and commanded the fetid corpses to be cast out of their precincts. They were seized by devils, who did not fear to carry off their own even from those holy places. But oblations were still effective after death. The consecrated host has begun to possess in itself wonder-working powers. A child is cast forth from his grave, and is only persuaded to rest in quiet by a piece of the consecrated bread being placed upon his breast. Two noble women, who had been excommunicated for talking scandal, were nevertheless buried in the church; but every time the mass was offered, their spirits were seen to rise from their tombs and glide out of the church. It was only after an oblation had been “immolated” for them that they slept in peace.

STATE AFTER DEATH

The mystery of the state after death began to cease to be a mystery. The subtile and invisible soul gradually materialised itself to the keen sight of the devout. A hermit declared that he had seen Theodoric, the Ostrogothic king, at the instant of death, with loose garments and sandals, led between Symmachus the patrician and John the pope, and plunged into the burning crater of Lipari. Benedict, while waking, beheld a bright and dazzling light, in which he distinctly saw the soul of Germanus, bishop of Capua, ascend to heaven in an orb of fire, borne by angels.

Hell was by no means the inexorable dwelling which restored not its inhabitants. Men were transported thither for a short time, and returned to reveal its secrets to the shuddering world. Gregory’s fourth book is entirely filled with legends of departing and of departed spirits, several of which revisit the light of day. On the locality of hell Gregory is modest, and declines to make any peremptory decision. On purgatory, too, he is dubious, though his final conclusion appears to be that there is a purgatorial fire which may purify the soul from very slight sins. Some centuries must elapse before those awful realms have formed themselves into that dreary and regular topography which Dante partly created out of his own sublime imagination, partly combined from all the accumulated legends.

The most singular of these earlier journeys into the future world are the adventures of a certain Stephen, the first part of which Gregory declares he had heard more than once from his own mouth, and which he relates, apparently intending to be implicitly believed. Stephen had to all appearance died in Constantinople, but, as the embalmer could not be found, he was left unburied the whole night. During that time he went down into hell, where he saw many things which he had not before believed. But when he came before the Judge, the Judge said, “I did not send for this man, but for Stephen the smith.” Gregory’s friend Stephen was too happy to get back, and on his return found his neighbour Stephen the smith dead. But Stephen learned not wisdom from his escape. He died of the plague in Rome, and with him appeared to die a soldier, who returned to reveal more of these fearful secrets of the other world, and the fate of Stephen. The soldier passed a bridge, beneath it flowed a river, from which rose vapours, dark, dismal, and noisome. Beyond the bridge (the imagination could but go back to the old Elysian fields) spread beautiful, flowery, and fragrant meadows, peopled by spirits clothed in white. In these were many mansions, vast and full of light. Above all rose a palace of golden bricks; to whom it belonged he could not read. On the bridge he recognised Stephen, whose foot slipped as he endeavoured to pass. His lower limbs were immediately seized by frightful forms, who strove to drag him to the fetid dwellings below. But white and beautiful beings caught his arms, and there was a long struggle. The soldier did not see the issue of the conflict.

Such were among the stories avouched by the highest ecclesiastical authority, and commended it might seem by the uninquiring faith of the ruling intellect of his age—such among the first elements of that universal popular religion which was the Christianity of ages. This religion gradually moulded together all which arose out of the natural instincts of man, the undying reminiscences of all the older religions, the Jewish, the pagan, and the Teutonic, with the few and indistinct glimpses of the invisible world and the future state of being in the New Testament, into a vast system, more sublime perhaps for its indefiniteness, which, being necessary in that condition of mankind, could not but grow up out of the kindled imagination and religious faith of Christendom. And such religion the historian who should presume to condemn as a vast plan of fraud, or a philosopher who should venture to disdain as a fabric of folly only deserving to be forgotten, would be equally unjust, equally blind to its real uses, assuredly ignorant of its importance and its significance in the history of man. For on this, the popular Christianity, turns the whole history of man for centuries.

It is at once the cause and the consequence of the sacerdotal dominion over mankind; the groundwork of authority at which the world trembled; which founded and overthrew kingdoms, bound together or set in antagonistic array nations, classes, ranks, orders of society. Of this, the parent, when the time arrived, of poetry, of art, the Christian historian must watch the growth and mark the gradations by which it gathered into itself the whole activity of the human mind, and quickened that activity till at length the mind outgrew that which had been so long almost its sole occupation. It endured till faith, with the schoolmen, led into the fathomless depths of metaphysics, began to aspire after higher truths; with the reformers, attempting to refine religion to its primary spiritual simplicity, gradually dropped, or left but to the humblest and most ignorant, at least to the more imaginative and less practical part of mankind, this even yet prolific legendary Christianity, which had been the accessory and supplementary Bible, the authoritative and accepted, though often unwritten, Gospel of centuries.[b]

GREGORY’S SUCCESSORS

[604-649 A.D.]

Gregory left the papal chair far more securely settled on the lofty eminence where it had been placed than it was when he ascended it. But Sabinian, who succeeded him, expressed little gratitude for the service he had thus performed; indignant at finding the treasury exhausted of its gold, he accused him of having ruined the see by his liberality; and would have proceeded, but for the menaces of both the clergy and the people, publicly to burn his writings. He did not live long after this attempt; and his sudden death was ascribed to a blow on the head inflicted by the angry shade of the departed saint. A truer cause, however, may be found, perhaps, in the fact that he had made himself hated by the populace, by withdrawing the accustomed alms, that he might heal, as he pretended, the injuries inflicted by the liberality of Gregory; a mode of proceeding so little relished by his flock, that, whatever share they might have in his death, they conveyed his breathless body with contempt out of the city.

It was during the pontificate of Boniface III, who resided as Gregory’s legate at the court of Constantinople, and owed his elevation to the emperor, that the Roman pontiff was first dignified with the much-disputed title of universal bishop. For this honour Boniface was indebted to the enmity existing between Phocas and the patriarch of his imperial city. He lived to enjoy his triumph only a few months; and several of his successors seem to have contented themselves with the duties of their station, without entering into direct collision with any rival in authority. It is, however, a singular circumstance, that to the attempts of Boniface IV, who obtained the papal dignity immediately after the pontiff just named, to bring back the separatists from Rome to her communion, a resistance was made by the celebrated Irish apostle Columbanus, breathing much of the freedom and intelligence of later days.

Honorius, who succeeded to the papacy after the two unimportant pontificates of Deusdedit (Deodatus or Adeodatus I) and Boniface V, made a vain attempt to influence the Lombards to restore their king, Adalwald (Adalvaldus), whom they had deposed as a madman, and elected in his place an Arian named Ariwald (Ariovaldus). But the most conspicuous circumstance in his career was his agreement with Sergius, the patriarch of Constantinople, in establishing the celebrated edict by which it was intended to put an end to the monothelite controversy,[87] and render the renewal of it a crime against the laws of the empire. Yet Honorius, in the Sixth General Council, was solemnly anathematised, and classed with the known and most violent supporters of the monothelite heresy.

The death of this pontiff was followed by the pillage of the palace of the Lateran—an outrage which had its origin with the emperor, and was committed by his own officers. Severinus was then placed in the papal chair, but his pontificate was not marked by any important event. The same observation applies to those of his successors, John IV and Theodore. Theodore was succeeded by Martin I, the earliest act of whose pontificate was the calling of a council to condemn the principles of the monothelites, and the late acts of the emperors. The assembly held its first session October 5th, 649; in the fifth and last, which was held on the 31st of October, twenty articles were drawn up against the heresy in question, and its authors, Theodorus, Cyrus, Sergius, Pyrrhus, and Paul, together with all such as should embrace their opinions, were formally anathematised.

The Roman pontiff was by this proceeding brought into immediate collision with the emperor; and the power of the greatest potentate of the church was thus measured with that of the highest in the state. In this respect the issue of the controversy deserves particular note. Martin was a zealous and active churchman, learned and conscientious, strongly impressed with a sense of the importance of unity, and disposed to exercise the authority he possessed to the utmost in its favour. No sooner had the council given its decision, than he despatched letters to all orders of the clergy, acquainting them with the event and with the acts it had passed. But the information which the emperor Constans received of these proceedings filled him with the most violent indignation; and he at once resolved to punish the contempt with which his edict, and that of his predecessor, had been treated. He communicated his wishes to Calliopas, exarch of Italy, who soon after made the pontiff a prisoner and conveyed him to the island of Naxos. For three months he was kept nearly continually on board a ship, and carried from one place to the other, without being allowed even the commonest necessaries of life. At Naxos he remained twelve months in captivity; and was then taken to Constantinople, being exposed, during his passage thither, to a treatment which would have been cruel to a condemned malefactor. On his arrival, fresh indignities and barbarities awaited him. He was cast into a miserable prison, in which he lay apparently forgotten for more than three months, and when carried before the tribunal of justice was examined like a common criminal. The part he had taken in the late events, so far as they strictly pertained to religion, was not considered even by his fiercest opponents as involving a guilt sufficient to justify their severities. He was, therefore, arraigned as an enemy of the state. Twenty witnesses, of whom the greater part were soldiers, and who are said to have been bribed for the occasion, appeared as his accusers.

[649-682 A.D.]

This mockery of a trial being concluded, the pontiff was carried to an open terrace, where, exposed at once to the gaze of the emperor and the populace, the base servants of the court insulted him in so gross a manner that even the multitude pitied his fate. His outward mantle having been torn off, the officers took him, and stripping off the best of his habits, left only his tunic remaining, which they next rent down on each side, from top to bottom. An iron collar was then fastened round his neck, and he was led from the palace through the midst of the city, chained to one of the keepers of the prison, and preceded by another bearing the sword with which he was to be executed. As they dragged him along, his lacerated feet stained the pavement with blood; and he presented an appearance of humiliation and misery which might well humble the spirits of the haughtiest churchmen of either Rome or Constantinople. But his sufferings did not terminate here. Instead of being executed he was sent into the Chersonesus where he lingered through four months of the severest hardship, then expired. He was succeeded as pope by Eugenius, indebted for his elevation to the influence of the imperial court and his too ready tolerance of its reigning errors. He was consequently regarded at Rome with equal suspicion and dislike. Vitalian, the successor of Eugenius, had the merit of being a strict disciplinarian, and of sending Theodore to England as archbishop of Canterbury. At his death, Adeodatus (Deodatus II) was elected. It was in the pontificate of his successor Domnus that the church of Ravenna became permanently incorporated with that of Rome.

Agatho, the next pope, was not less conspicuous for the devoutness of his character; and the story which is told of his curing by a kiss some leprous person whom he accidentally met, indicates not merely the growing superstition of the age, but the influence which the pontiff’s piety had made upon the minds of the people. At his request it was that the emperor Constantine Pogonatus assembled the Sixth General Council; and it is somewhat singular to find that one of the main objects which his legates laboured at obtaining was a reduction of the sum usually paid by the newly elected pontiff into the imperial treasury. For this indulgence, Agatho willingly confirmed the ancient law, that no pope should be ordained till his election had been formally recognised and confirmed at Constantinople. The harmony which thus existed between the emperor and Agatho was happily continued through the pontificate of Leo II, in whose favour the monarch decreed that the new archbishop of Ravenna should receive his ordination at the hands of the pope. He possessed sufficient interest at the court of the emperor to obtain the important privilege for the Roman pontiffs, of being confirmed in their authority by the exarch of Ravenna, instead of having to make the long and difficult journey to Constantinople.

[682-701 A.D.]

The pontificate of John V was as unimportant as it was short; he was succeeded by Conon. Next, Sergius occupied the papal chair to the beginning of the eighth century; but, at the commencement of his pontificate, he saw himself opposed by two powerful rivals, and the palace of the Lateran was for some time besieged with open force by the partisans of these pretenders to the papacy. The contest was continued for a considerable period. Sergius, though supported by imperial influence, had to endure a seven years’ exile before he could possess himself of the dignity; and on his refusal to recognise the canons of the council in trullo,[88] was assailed by Justinian II with all the weapons of imperial authority. The conflict was thus renewed, which had so long disturbed the peace of Christendom; and another starting-point given, from which the two great candidates for universal and unlimited power were to begin the race. It is evident that the pontiff had not yet acquired strength sufficient to oppose his rival with certainty of success. At the council of Toledo, held in the year 688, the archbishop of that city obtained a resolution in favour of his opinions, which not simply established his creed in opposition to that of the pontiff, but was couched in terms of haughty defiance and rebuke. The contest, therefore, was as yet unattended by palpable prognostics of the final triumph of the papacy.

St. Wulfran, Bishop of Sens, who died in 720 A.D.

(From a miniature in the Bibliothèque du Havre)

The troubles which the church had suffered from the continual motions of half-barbarian hordes were many and severe, but they produced an equivalent advantage. Amid all the struggles to which churchmen were urged by ambition, they displayed, as a body, some of the noblest instances of charity, of care for the poor and distressed, which the world had seen. Pressed by the frequent prospect of immediate ruin, they simultaneously acquired the virtues of resignation and the skill of politicians. It was to them the people owed their preservation when threatened on the one side by foreign enemies, and on the other by the tyranny of their rulers; and till they themselves became oppressors, popular liberty found its best champions among the heads of the church. But when the progress of Christianity itself is considered—that is, the very interests for which the church, with all its attendant powers, was called into existence—doubt and dissatisfaction are almost the invariable result of the inquiry. In Rome, piety was shocked by the open contests which repeatedly took place by candidates for the papal dignity, and by the little less disgraceful plots with which the contending parties prepared for the onset. The provinces, perpetually appealed to on the subject of obedience to the supreme pontiff, saw their own pastors at one time yielding with submissive complacence to his decrees, at another resisting them both openly and in secret.

[701-731 A.D.]

Sergius was succeeded by John VI (701), in whose pontificate Campania was invaded by the Lombards, under Gisulf, duke of Benevento. His successor, John VII (705), is noted only for having been guilty of the weakness of returning the canons of the council in trullo to the emperor Justinian, without a single alteration. In his pontificate, moreover, the king of the Lombards restored the lands of which he had despoiled the church, and the deed which contained the grant was written in letters of gold. Sisinius was the next pontiff; but he died a few days after his election, and left the see to Constantine, a native of Syria, who retained it about seven years. He was summoned by Justinian to the capital of the East; but the object which the emperor had in view is unknown, and the only result of his journey seems to have been the restoration of Felix, the archbishop of Ravenna, to his diocese and honours. That unfortunate prelate had made an effort to recover the independence possessed by the former bishops of his see; but, though aided by the warlike masters of the district, his attempt failed; and the emperor sending a body of troops from Sicily, the walls of Ravenna were beaten down, and Felix, loaded with chains, was carried a prisoner to Constantinople. There he had to endure the punishment inflicted on the basest criminals. His eyes were put out, and he was banished to the inhospitable shores of Pontus—a punishment, it is said, which was regarded at Rome as the infliction of divine justice.

Notwithstanding the want of positive evidence as to the express object of Constantine’s journey, it is usually believed to have been occasioned by the emperor’s unceasing anxiety to secure the co-operation of the Roman hierarchy in the establishment of the late decrees. It is also argued, and with seeming reason, that his attendance on the imperial commands is a proof of the still unavoidable subjection which the pontiffs had to endure; while his failing to oppose the canons so objectionable to his church affords a similar proof of his weakness and his fears.

[715-741 A.D.]

Gregory II, by whom he was succeeded (715), pursued a bolder line of conduct.[89] The part which he took in opposition to Leo the Isaurian has been already stated; and his determined attack on the Lombards, who made themselves masters of one of the Neapolitan fortresses, indicated the spirit which, in later times, placed Christian prelates at the head of mail-clad armies. Gregory was in all respects the firm defender and zealous advocate of papal authority. At one moment engaged in open hostilities with the emperor, he was at another employed in directing the labours of missionaries and founding monasteries. Germany, at his direction, was traversed by the ardent and pious Boniface; and in Italy the rule of St. Benedict became, under his patronage, the universal canon of monastic institutions.

The pontificate of Gregory II lasted sixteen years, and he was succeeded by a priest of the same name, whom the people elected by some sudden impulse, while engaged in the obsequies of the former. Gregory III (731-741) carried the principles which had actuated his predecessor to a far greater extent. Unable to withdraw the emperor Leo, either by persuasion or threats, from the vigorous persecution of iconoclasm, he proceeded to the daring measure of excommunicating the sovereign, and then made known to the celebrated Charles Martel his readiness to proclaim him consul of Rome, on condition that he would enable him to support his separation from the dominion of the empire. Leo resented the conduct of the pontiff, by depriving him of part of his revenues and rejecting his legates. But the step which Gregory had taken led directly to the establishment of the papacy on the basis of temporal power and grandeur. A new career, new motives to exertion, were opened to the politicians of the church; and it was no longer with rival prelates the bishops of Rome were to contend, but with states and princes. The prizes for which they were henceforth to strive were to be tributary crowns and sceptres—the triumphs they were to celebrate, not those of truth over heresy, but of arbitrary superstition over the free-will, the natural sentiments, and the evangelical knowledge of Christian nations.[g]

That reign of terror known as the struggle of the iconoclasts has been alluded to already in the history of the Byzantine Empire. It may also be summed up here with its consequences.

DRAPER ON THE ORIGIN OF ICONOCLASM

Three causes gave rise to iconoclasm, or the revolt against image-worship; first, the remonstrances and derision of the Mohammedans; second, the good sense of a great sovereign, Leo the Isaurian, who had risen by his merit from obscurity, and had become the founder of a new dynasty at Constantinople; third, the detected inability of these miracle-working idols and fetiches to protect their worshippers or themselves against an unbelieving enemy. Moreover, an impression was gradually making its way among the more intelligent classes that religion ought to free itself from such superstitions. So important were the consequences of Leo’s actions, that some have been disposed to assign to his reign the first attempt at making policy depend on theology; and to this period they therefore refer the commencement of the Byzantine Empire. Through one hundred and twenty years, six emperors devoted themselves to this reformation. But it was premature. They were overpowered by the populace and the monks, by the bishops of Rome, and by a superstitious and wicked woman.

It had been a favourite argument against the pagans how little their gods could do for them when the hour of calamity came, when their statues and images were insulted and destroyed; and hence how vain was such worship, how imbecile such gods. When Africa and Asia, full of relics and crosses, pictures and images, fell before the Mohammedans, those conquerors retaliated the same logic with no little effect. There was hardly one of the fallen towns that had not some idol for its protector. Remembering the stern objurgations of the prophet against this deadly sin, prohibited at once by the commandment of God and repudiated by the reason of man, the Saracen caliphs had ordered all the Syrian images to be destroyed. Amid the derision of the Arab soldiery and the tears of the terror-stricken worshippers, these orders were remorselessly carried into effect, except in some cases where the temptation of an enormous ransom induced the avengers of the unity of God to swerve from their duty. Thus the piece of linen cloth on which it was feigned that our Saviour had impressed his countenance, and which was the palladium of Edessa, was carried off by the victors at the capture of that town, and subsequently sold to Constantinople at the profitable price of twelve thousand pounds of silver. This picture, and also some other celebrated ones, it was said, possessed the property of multiplying themselves by contact with other surfaces, as in modern times we multiply photographs. Such were the celebrated images “made without hands.”

[726 A.D.]

It was currently asserted that the immediate origin of iconoclasm was due to the caliph Yazid, who had completed the destruction of the Syrian images, and to two Jews, who stimulated Leo the Isaurian to his task. However that may be, Leo published an edict (726 A.D.), prohibiting the worship of images. This was followed by another directing their destruction, and the whitewashing of the walls of churches ornamented with them. Hereupon the clergy and the monks rebelled; the emperor was denounced as a Mohammedan and a Jew. He ordered that a statue of the Saviour in that part of the city called Chalcopratia should be removed, and a riot was the consequence. One of his officers mounted the ladder and struck the idol with an axe upon its face; it was an incident like that enacted centuries before in the temple of Serapis at Alexandria. The sacred image, which had often arrested the course of nature and worked many miracles, was now found to be unable to protect or to avenge its own honour. A rabble of women interfered in its behalf; they threw down the ladder and killed the officer; nor was the riot ended until the troops were called in and a great massacre perpetrated. The monks spread the sedition in all parts of the empire; they even attempted to proclaim a new emperor. Leo was everywhere denounced as a Mohammedan infidel, an enemy of the mother of God; but with inflexible resolution he persisted in his determination as long as he lived.[h]

MILMAN ON ICONOCLASM

Iconoclasm was an attempt by the Eastern emperor to change by his own arbitrary command the religion of his subjects. No religious revolution has ever been successful which has commenced with the government. Such revolutions have ever begun in the middle or lower orders of society, struck on some responsive chord of sympathy in the general feeling, supplied some religious want, stirred some religious energy, and shaken the inert strength of the established faith by some stronger counter emotion.

Whatever the motives of the emperor Leo the Isaurian (and on this subject, as in all the religious controversies where the writings of the unsuccessful party were carefully suppressed or perished through neglect, authentic history is almost silent), whether he was actuated by a rude aversion to what perhaps can hardly yet be called the fine arts with which Christianity was associating itself, or by a spiritual disdain and impatience of the degrading superstition into which the religion of the Gospel had so long been degenerating, the attempt was as politically unwise and unseasonable as the means employed were despotic and altogether unequal to the end. The time was passed, if it had ever been, when an imperial edict could change, or even much affect, the actual prevailing religion of the empire. For this was no speculative article of belief, no question of high metaphysical theology, but a total change in the universal popular worship, in the spirit and in the essence, if not of the daily ritual, of countless observances and habitual practices of devotion. It swept away from almost all the churches of the empire objects hallowed by devotion, and supposed to be endowed with miraculous agency; objects of hope and fear, of gratitude and immemorial veneration. It not merely invaded the public church, and left its naked walls without any of the old remembrancers of faith and piety; it reached the private sanctuary of prayer. No one could escape the proscription; learned or unlearned, priest or peasant, monk or soldier, clergyman or layman, man, woman, and even child were involved in the strife. Something to which their religious attachments clung, to which their religious passions were wedded, might at any time be forcibly rent away, insulted, trampled under foot; that which had been their pride and delight could only now be furtively visited, and under the fear of detection.

Nor was it possible for this controversy to vent itself in polemic writings. Here actual, personal, furious collision of man and man, of faction and faction, of armed troops against armed troops, was inevitable. The contending parties did not assail each other with mutual anathemas, which they might despise, or excommunication and counter excommunication, the validity of which might be questioned by either party. On one side it was a sacred obligation to destroy, to mutilate, to dash to pieces, to deface the objects on which the other had so long gazed with intense devotion, and which he might think it an equally sacred obligation to defend at the sacrifice of life. It was not a controversy, it was a feud; not a polemic strife, but actual war declared by one part of Christendom against the other. It was well perhaps for Christendom that the parties were not more equally balanced; that, right or wrong, one party in that division of the Christian world, where total change would have been almost extermination, obtained a slow but complete triumph.[b]

Milman then goes on to plead eloquently for the encouragement of the fine arts by the church which produced a Raphael and a Michelangelo, as the Greek religion produced and employed its Phidias and Praxiteles. He then proceeds to describe the ferocity of the dissension.[a]

THE WAR OF ICONOCLASM

[726-731 A.D.]

A formidable insurrection broke out in Greece and in the Ægean islands. A fleet was armed, a new emperor, one Cosmas, proclaimed, and Constantinople menaced by the rebels. The fleet, however, was scattered and destroyed by ships which discharged the Greek fire; the insurrection was suppressed, the leaders either fell or were executed, along with the usurper. The monks here and throughout the empire, the champions of this as of every other superstition, were the instigators to rebellion. Few monasteries were without some wonder-working image; the edict struck at once at their influence, their interest, their pride, their most profound religious feelings.

But the more eminent clergy were likewise at first almost unanimous in their condemnation of the emperor. Constantine, bishop of Nacolia, indeed, is branded as his adviser. Another bishop, Theodosius, son of Apsimarus, metropolitan of Ephesus, is named as entering into the war against images. But almost for the first time the bishops of the two Romes, Germanus of Constantinople and Pope Gregory II, were united in one common cause. Leo attempted to win Germanus to his views, but the aged patriarch (he was now ninety-five years old) calmly but resolutely resisted the arguments, the promises, the menaces of the emperor.

But the conduct of Gregory II, as leading to more important results, demands more rigid scrutiny. The Byzantine historians represent him as proceeding, at the first intimation of the hostility of the emperor to image-worship, to an act of direct revolt, as prohibiting the payment of tribute by the Italian province. This was beyond the power, probably beyond the courage, of Gregory. The great results of the final separation of the West from the inefficient and inglorious sovereignty of the East might excuse or palliate, if he had foreseen them, the disloyalty of Pope Gregory to Leo. But it would be to estimate his political and religious sagacity too highly to endow him with this gift of ambitious prophecy, to suppose him anticipating the full development of Latin Christianity when it should become independent of the East.

Mosaic, Representing the Temporal and Spiritual Power of Jesus Christ

Like most ordinary minds, and if we are to judge by his letters Gregory’s was a very ordinary mind, he was merely governed by the circumstances and passions of his time without the least foreknowledge of the result of his actions. The letter of Pope Gregory to the emperor (729 A.D.) is arrogant without dignity, dogmatic without persuasiveness; in the stronger part of the argument far inferior, both in skill and ingenuity, to that of the aged Germanus, or the writer who guided his pen. The strange mistakes in the history of the Old Testament, the still stranger interpretations of the New, the loose legends which are advanced as history, give a very low opinion of the knowledge of the times.

[731-742 A.D.]

When Gregory addressed this and a second letter to the emperor Leo, the tumult in Constantinople, the first public act of rebellion against iconoclasm, had taken place; but the aged bishop Germanus was not yet degraded from his see. Germanus, with better temper and more skilful argument, had defended the images of the East. Before his death (731), he was deposed or compelled to retire from his see. He died most probably in peace; his extreme age may well account for his death. His personal ill treatment by the emperor is the legend of a later age to exalt him into a martyr.

But these two powerful prelates were not the only champions of their cause whose writings made a strong impression on their age. It is singular that the most admired defender of images in the East was a subject not of the emperor but of the Mohammedan sultan. John of Damascus was famed as the most learned man in the East, and it may show either the tolerance, the ignorance, or the contempt of the Mohammedans for these Christian controversies, that writings which became celebrated all over the East should issue from one of their capital cities, Damascus.

In the West, all power, almost all pretension to power, excepting over Sicily and Calabria, expired with Leo;[90] and this independence partly arose out of and was immeasurably strengthened by the faithful adherence of the West to image-worship.

CONSTANTINE COPRONYMUS (741-775 A.D.)

Leo was succeeded by his son Constantine. The name by which this emperor was known is a perpetual testimony to the hatred of a large part of his subjects. Even in his infancy he was believed to have shown a natural aversion to holy things, and in his baptism to have defiled the font. Constantine Copronymus sounded to Greek ears as a constant taunt against his filthy and sacrilegious character.

The accession of Constantine (741), although he had already been acknowledged for twenty years with his father as joint emperor, met formidable resistance. The contest for the throne was a strife between the two religious parties which divided the empire. During the absence of Constantine, on an expedition against the Saracens, a sudden and dangerous insurrection placed his brother-in-law, Artavasdes, on the throne. Constantinople was gained to the party of the usurper by treachery. The city was induced to submit to Artavasdes only by a rumour, industriously propagated and generally believed, of the death of Constantine. The emperor on one occasion had been in danger of surprise, and escaped by the swiftness of his horses.

[742-746 A.D.]

In the capital, as throughout Greece and the European part of the empire, the triumph of Artavasdes was followed by the restoration of the images. Anastasius, the dastard patriarch of Constantinople, as he had been the slave of Leo, now became the slave of the usurper, and worshipped images with the same zeal with which he had destroyed them. He had been the principal actor in the deception of the people by the forged letters which announced the death of Constantine. He plunged with more desperate recklessness into the party of Artavasdes. The monks, and all over whom they had influence, took up the cause of the usurper; but the mass of the people, from royal respect for the memory of Leo, or from their confidence in the vigorous character of Constantine and attachment to the legitimate succession, from indifference or aversion to image-worship, still wavered, and submitted rather than clamorously rejoiced in the coronation of Artavasdes.

But Constantine Copronymus with the religious opinions inherited the courage, the military abilities, and the popularity with the army which had distinguished his father Leo. After some vicissitudes, a battle took place near Ancyra, fought with all the ferocity of civil and religious war. After an obstinate resistance, and after having suffered all the horrors of famine, Constantinople was taken. Artavasdes was punished by the loss of his eyes.

Constantine was a soldier, doubtless of a fierce temper; the blinding and mutilation of many, the beheading a few of his enemies, the abandonment of the houses of the citizens to the plunder of his troops, was the natural course of Byzantine revolution; and these cruelties have no doubt lost nothing in the dark representations of the emperor’s enemies, the only historians of the times. But they suffered as rebels in arms against their sovereign, not as image-worshippers. The fate of the patriarch Anastasius was the most extraordinary. His eyes were put out, he was led upon an ass, with his face to the tail, through the city; and after all this mutilation and insult, for which, considering his tergiversation and impudent mendacity, it is difficult to feel much compassion, he was reinstated in the patriarchal dignity. The clergy in the East had never been arrayed in the personal sanctity which, in ordinary occasions, they possessed in the West; but could Constantine have any other object in this act than the degradation of the whole order in public estimation?

THIRD COUNCIL OF CONSTANTINOPLE (746 A.D.)

[746-766 A.D.]

For ten years Constantine refrained from any stronger measures against image worship. In the tenth year of Constantine rumours spread abroad of secret councils held for the total destruction of images. Either the emperor must have prepared the public mind for this great change with consummate address, or reverence for images must have been less deeply rooted in the East than in the West, otherwise it can scarcely be supposed that so large a number of the clergy as appeared at the Third Council of Constantinople (746) would have slavishly assented to the strong measures of the emperor. Three hundred and forty-eight bishops formed this synod.

Part of the proceedings of this assembly have been preserved in the records of the rival council, the second held in Nicæa. The passages are cited in the original words, followed by a confutation, sanctioned apparently by the Nicene bishops. The Council of Constantinople proscribes the lawless and blasphemous art of painting. The fathers of Constantinople assume, as boldly as the brethren of Nicæa their sanctity, that all images are the invention of the devil; that they are idols in the same sense as those of the heathen. Nor do they hesitate to impute community of sentiment with the worst heretics to their opponents. They thought that they held the image-worshippers in an inextricable dilemma. If the painters represented only the humanity of Christ, they were Nestorians; if they attempted to mingle it with the divinity, they were Eutychians, circumscribing the infinite and confounding the two substances. It was impiety to represent Christ without his divinity, Arianism to undeify him, despoil him of his godhead.

The Council of Nicæa admits the perfect unanimity of the Council of Constantinople. These 348 bishops concurred in pronouncing their anathema against all who should represent the incarnate Word by material form or colours, who should not restrict themselves to the pure spiritual conception of the Christ, as he is seated, superior in brightness to the sun, on the right hand of the Father; against all who should confound the two natures of Christ in one human image, or who should separate the manhood from the Godhead in the second person of the indivisible Trinity; against all who should not implore the intercession of the Virgin in pure faith, as above all visible and invisible things; against all who should set up the deaf and lifeless images of saints, and who do not rather paint the living likenesses of their virtues in their own hearts. All images, whether statues or paintings, were to be forcibly removed from the churches; everyone who henceforth should set up an image, if a bishop or priest, was to be degraded; if a layman, excommunicated. They proceed to curse by name the principal asserters of image-worship. “Anathema against the double-minded Germanus, the worshipper of wood! Anathema against George (of Cyprus), the falsifier of the traditions of the fathers! Anathema against Mansar (they called by this unchristian-sounding name the famous John of Damascus), the Saracen in heart, the traitor to the empire—Mansar the teacher of impiety, the false interpreter of Holy Scripture!”

Thus was image-worship proscribed by a council, in numbers at least of weight, in the severest and most comprehensive terms. The work of demolition was committed to the imperial officers; only with strict injunctions, not perhaps always obeyed, to respect the vessels, the priestly vestments, and other furniture of the churches, and the cross, the naked cross without any image. The crucifix was of a later period.

THE WAR ON MONASTERIES

[766-775 A.D.]

But if the emperor had overawed, or bought, or compelled the seemingly willing assent of so large a body of the eastern clergy, the formidable monks were still in obstinate implacable opposition to his will. It was now fanaticism encountering fanaticism. Everywhere the monks preached resistance to the imperial decree, and enough has been seen of their turbulent and intractable conduct to make us conclude that their language at least would keep no bounds. Stephen, the great martyr of this controversy, had lived as a hermit in a cave near Sinope for thirty years.

The emperor sent the patriarch to persuade him to subscribe the decrees of the Council of Constantinople. The patriarch’s eloquence was vain. The emperor either allowed or compelled the aged monk to retire to the wild rock of Proconnesus, where, to consummate his sanctity, he took his stand upon a pillar. His followers assembled in crowds about him, and built their cells around the pillar of the saint. But the zeal of Stephen would not be confined within that narrow sphere. He returned to the city, and in bold defiance of the imperial orders denounced the iconoclasts. He was seized, cast into prison, and there treated with unusual harshness. But even there the zeal of his followers found access. Constantine exclaimed, in a paroxysm of careless anger, “Am I or this monk the emperor of the world?” The word of the emperor was enough for some of his obsequious courtiers; they rushed, broke open the prison, dragged out the old man along the streets with every wanton cruelty, and cast his body at last into the common grave of the public malefactors.

The emperor took now a sterner and more desperate resolution. He determined to root out monkery itself. The monks were driven from their cloisters, which were given up to profane and secular uses. Consecrated virgins were forced to marry; monks were compelled, each holding the hand of a woman, doubtless not of the purest character, to walk round the Hippodrome among the jeers and insults of the populace. Throughout the whole empire they were exposed to the lawless persecutions of the imperial officers. Their zeal or their obstinacy was chastised by scourgings, imprisonments, mutilations, and even death. The monasteries were plundered, and by no scrupulous or reverent hands; churches are said to have been despoiled of all their sacred treasures, the holy books burned, feasts and revels profaned the most hallowed sanctuaries.

Multitudes fled to the neighbouring kingdoms of the less merciless barbarians; many found refuge in the West, especially in Rome. The prefect of Thrace was the most obsequious agent of his master’s tyranny. The patriarch himself was accused of having used disrespectful language towards the emperor. Already he had been required to acquit himself of imputing Nestorianism to his master; now his accusers swore on the cross that they had heard him hold conference with one of the conspirators. Constantine ordered the imperial seal to be affixed on the palace of the patriarch, and sent him into banishment.

For some new offence, real or supposed, the exiled patriarch was brought back to the capital, scourged so cruelly that he could not walk, and then carried in a litter, and exposed in the great church before all the people assembled to hear the public recital of the charges made against him, and to behold his degradation. At each charge the secretary of his successor smote him on the face. He was then set up in the pulpit, and while Nicetas read the sentence of excommunication, another bishop stripped him of his metropolitan pall, and calling him by the opprobrious name Scotiopsis, “face of darkness,” led him backwards out of the church. The next day his head, beard, eyebrows were shaved; and as we have already said, he was put upon an ass, and paraded through the circus (his own nephew, a hideous, deformed youth, leading the ass), while the populace jeered, shouted, spat upon him. He was then thrown down, trodden on, and in that state lay till the games were over. Some days after the emperor sent to demand a formal declaration of the orthodoxy of his own faith and of the authority of the council. The poor wretch acknowledged both in the amplest manner; as a reward he was beheaded, while still in a state of excommunication, and his remains treated with the utmost ignominy.

This odious scene, blackened it may be by the sectarian hatred of the later annalists, all of whom abhorred iconoclasm, has been related at length, in order to contrast more fully the position of the bishop of Rome. This was the second patriarch of Constantinople who had been thus barbarously treated, and seemingly without the sympathy of the people; and now, in violation of all canonical discipline, the imperial will had raised a eunuch to the patriarchate. What wonder that pontiffs like Gregory II and Gregory III should think themselves justified in throwing off the yoke of such a government, and look with hope to the sovereignty of the less barbarous barbarians of the north—barbarians who, at least, had more reverence for the dignity of the sacerdotal character.

If the Byzantine historians, all image-worshippers, have not greatly exaggerated the cruelties of their implacable enemy Constantine Copronymus, they have assuredly not done justice to his nobler qualities, his valour, incessant activity, military skill, and general administration of the sinking empire, which he maintained unviolated by any of its formidable enemies, and with imposing armies, during a reign of thirty-five years, not including the twenty preceding during which he ruled as the colleague of his father Leo. Constantine died, during a campaign against the Bulgarians, of a fever which, in the charitable judgment of his adversaries, gave him a foretaste of the pains of hell. His dying lips ordered prayers and hymns offered to the Virgin, for whom he had always professed the most profound veneration, utterly inconsistent, his enemies supposed, with his hostility to her sacred images.

HELENA AND IRENE

[775-787 A.D.]

A female had been the principal mover in the great change of Christianity from a purely spiritual worship to that paganising form of religion which grew up with such rapidity in the succeeding centuries; a female was the restorer of images in the East, which have since, with but slight interruption, maintained their sanctity. The first, Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, was a blameless and devout woman, who used the legitimate influence of her station, munificence, and authority over her imperial son, to give that splendour which to her piety appeared becoming to the new religion; to communicate to the world all those excitements of symbols, relics, and sacred memorials which she found so powerful in kindling her own devotion. The second, the empress Irene, wife to the son and heir of Constantine Copronymus, an ambitious, intriguing, haughty princess, never lost sight of political power in the height of her religious zeal, and was at length guilty of the most atrocious crime against God and womanhood.

Irene, during the reign of her husband Leo, surnamed the Khazar, did not openly betray her inclination to the image-worship which she had solemnly forsworn under her father-in-law Constantine. On his death (780) she at once seized the government in the name of her son Constantine, who was but ten years old. Her creature, Patriarch Tarasius, summoned a council on image-worship.

The council met in Constantinople (785), but with the army and a large part of the populace of Constantinople image-worship had lost its power. The soldiery, attached to the memory and tenets of Constantine Copronymus, broke into the assembly, and dispersed the affrighted monks and bishops.

SECOND COUNCIL OF NICÆA (787 A.D.)

[787-842 A.D.]

Nicæa was chosen for the session of the council, no doubt on account of the reverence which attached to that city, hallowed by the sittings of the first great council of Christendom. Decrees issued from Nicæa would possess peculiar force and authority; this smaller city, too, could be occupied by troops on whom the empress could depend, and in the meantime Irene managed to disband the more unruly soldiery. Thus, while the Bulgarians menaced one frontier and the Saracens another, she sacrificed the safety of the empire, by the dissolution of her best army, to the success of her religious designs.

The council met at Nicæa. The number of ecclesiastics is variously stated from 330 to 387. Among these were at least 130 monks or abbots, besides many bishops, who had been expelled as monks from their sees, and were now restored. They repudiated the so-called Council of Constantinople, as a synod of fools and madmen, who had dared to violate the established discipline of the church and impiously reviled the holy images. They showered their anathemas on all the acts, on all the words, on all the persons engaged in that unhallowed assembly.

The fathers of Nicæa impaired a doubtful cause by the monstrous fables which they adduced, the preposterous arguments which they used, their unmeasured invectives against their antagonists. With one voice they broke out into a long acclamation: “We all believe, we all assent, we all subscribe. This is the faith of the apostles, this is the faith of the church, this is the faith of the orthodox, this is the faith of all the world. We, who adore the Trinity, worship images. Whoever does not the like, anathema upon him! Anathema on all who call images idols! Anathema on all who communicate with them who do not worship images!”

Among the acclamations and the anathemas which closed the Second Council of Nicæa, echoed loud salutations and prayers for the peace and blessedness of the new Constantine and the new Helena. A few years passed and that Constantine was blinded, if not put to death, by his unnatural mother, whom religious faction had raised into a model of Christian virtue and devotion.

The controversy slept during the reign of Nicephorus, and that of Michael, surnamed Rhangabé. The monks throughout this period seem to form an independent power (a power no doubt arising out of and maintained by their championship of image-worship), and to dictate to the emperor, and even to the church. On the other hand, among the soldiery are heard some deep but suppressed murmurs of attachment to the memory of Constantine Copronymus. Leo the Armenian ascended the throne.

As Irene had promoted Tarasius, so Leo raised an officer of his household, Theodotus Cassiteras, to the patriarchal throne. Image-worship was again proscribed by an imperial edict. The worshippers are said to have been ruthlessly persecuted; and Leo, according to the phraseology of the day, is accused of showing all the blood-thirstiness without the generosity of the lion. Yet no violent popular tumult took place; nor does the conspiracy which afterwards cut short the days of Leo the Armenian appear to have been connected with the strife of religious factions. Whatever hopes the clergy, at least the image-worshippers, or the monks, might have conceived at the murder of Leo, which they scrupled not to allege as a sign of the divine disfavour towards the iconoclasts, were disappointed on the accession of Michael the Stammerer. He favoured the Jews in the exaction of tribute (perhaps he was guilty of the sin of treating them with justice), he fasted on the Jewish Sabbath, he doubted the resurrection of the dead, and the personality of the devil, as unauthorised by the religion of Moses. Image-worship he treated with contemptuous impartiality. In a great public assembly (assembled for the purpose), he proclaimed the worship of images a matter altogether indifferent.

Theophilus could not but perceive the failure, and disdained to imitate his father’s temporising policy, who endeavoured to tolerate the monks, while he discouraged image-worship. He avowed his determination to extirpate both at once. Leo the Armenian and Michael the Stammerer had attempted to restrict the honours paid to images; Theophilus prohibited the making of new ones, and ordered that in every church they should be effaced, and the walls covered with pictures of birds and beasts. The sacred vessels, adorned with figures, were profaned by unhallowed hands, sold in the public markets, and melted for their metal. The prisons were full of painters, of monks and ecclesiastics of all orders. The monks, driven from their convents, fled to desert places; some perished of cold and hunger, some threw off the proscribed dress, yet retained the sacred character and habits; others seized the opportunity of returning to the pleasures as to the dress of the world.

The history of iconoclasm has a remarkable uniformity: another female in power, another restoration of images. After the death of Theophilus his widow Theodora administered the empire in the name of her youthful son Michael, called afterwards the Drunkard. Theodora, like her own mother Theoctista, had always worshipped images in private. No sooner was Theophilus dead than the monks, no doubt in the secret of Theodora’s concealed attachment to images, poured into Constantinople from all quarters. She now ventured to send an officer of the palace to command the patriarch, Joannes the Grammarian, either to recant his iconoclastic opinions, or to withdraw from Constantinople. The patriarch is accused of a paltry artifice. He opened a vein in the region of his stomach, and showed himself wounded and bleeding to the people. The rumour spread that the empress had attempted to assassinate the patriarch. But the fraud was detected, exposed, acknowledged. The abashed patriarch withdrew, unpitied and despised, into the suburbs (842). Methodius was raised to the dignity of the patriarchate. The worshippers of images were in triumph.

But Theodora, still tenderly attached to the memory of her husband, demanded, as the price of her inestimable services in the restoration of images, absolution for the sin of his iconoclasm and his persecution of the image-worshippers.

All was now easy; the fanaticism of iconoclasm was exhausted or rebuked. A solemn festival was appointed for the restoration of images. The whole clergy of Constantinople, and all who could flock in from the neighbourhood, met in and before the palace of the archbishop, and marched in procession with crosses, torches, and incense, to the church of St. Sophia. There they were met by the empress and her infant son Michael, Feb. 19th, 842. They made the circuit of the church, with their burning torches, paying homage to every image and picture, which had been carefully restored, never again to be effaced till the days of later, more terrible iconoclasts, the Ottoman Turks.

The Greek church from that time has celebrated the anniversary of this festival with loyal fidelity. The successors of Methodius, particularly the learned Photius, were only zealous to consummate the work of his predecessors, and images have formed part of the recognised religious worship of the Eastern world.[b]

FOOTNOTES

[84] Felix III, if the anti-pope Felix (356 A.D.) is reckoned as Felix II.

[85] [The office to which Gregory I was suddenly elevated in the year 590, included under it the three following distinct dignities. First, it included the actual episcopal charge of the city of Rome; the church of St. John Lateran with its haughty inscription: Omnium Urbis et Orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput—being the cathedral church; and the adjoining Lateran palace, which tradition says was given by Constantine to Silvester I, being the place of residence. Secondly, it included the metropolitan or archiepiscopal superintendence of the Roman territory, with jurisdiction over the seven suffragan bishops, afterwards called cardinal bishops; the bishops of Ostia, Portus, Silva Candida, Sabina, Præneste, Tusculum, and Albanum. Thirdly, it included the patriarchal oversight of the suburban provinces, which were under the political jurisdiction of the Vicarius Urbis, viz., Campania, Tuscany with Umbria, Picenum, Valeria, Samnium, Apulia with Calabria, Lucania with Bruttium—in short, upper Italy, together with the three islands of Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. As patriarch, the Roman bishop stood on the same footing as the four great patriarchs of the East, those of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem; he enjoyed however the primacy of honour, and standing alone in the West, whereas four patriarchs divided the primacy of the East, his jurisdiction often seemed to extend to districts where he had no jurisdiction by right. For the vicariate of Rome was only one among four vicariates, into which the great prefecture of Italy was politically divided; the other vicariates being northern Italy, with its centre at Milan; western Illyricum, with its capital at Sirmium; and western Africa, with its capital at Carthage. So far were Gaul, Spain, and Britain from belonging to the vicariate of Rome, that they constituted together a separate prefecture, known as the prefecture of Gaul. Nevertheless, all these districts were in time drawn into the patriarchate of Rome, and indeed the whole of western Europe as it gradually came under the influence of Christianity.[e]]

[86] The absurd story about Gregory’s fish-ponds paved with the skulls of the drowned infants of the Roman clergy, is only memorable as an instance of what writers of history will believe, and persuade themselves they believe, when it suits party interests. But by whom, or when, was it invented? It is much older than the Reformation.

[87] [Monothelism or one-ness of will is the opposite of “dyothelism” or duality of will, as distinguishing the divine and the human aspects of Christ. Monothelism had its origin in Sergius.]

[88] [The council held in the trullus or domed hall of the imperial palace in Constantinople. The council here referred to is the Quinisext Council of 692, called the Second Trullan Council, the first being that which condemned monothelite views (681).]

[89] [Gibbon[l] calls him the “founder of the papal monarchy.”]

[90] Leo died June, 741. Gregory III in the same year.

---

CHAPTER II. “THE NIGHT OF THE PAPACY”—CHARLEMAGNE TO OTTO THE GREAT

[740-985 A.D.]

From the East, powerless to render help, from an empire crumbling away beneath the weight of its own greatness, Gregory III therefore turned away, and fixed his gaze on the youthful greatness of a transalpine nation—the Franks—brave, adventurous, full of promise, successful in warfare, and destined to rise to future power. With Charles Martel, mayor of the palace, and virtual ruler of the Frankish realm, Gregory II had already opened communications. To Charles Martel, his successor Gregory III again appealed, when, after eight years of doubtful peace, he suddenly found himself involved in an open war with the Lombards. His appeal is truly touching: “His tears are falling night and day for the destitute state of the church; the Lombard king and his son are ravaging the last remains of the property of the church, which no longer suffices for the sustenance of the poor, or to provide lights for the daily service; they have invaded the territory of Rome and seized all his farms; his only hope is in the timely succour of the Frankish king.” The appeal was rendered still stronger by the presents that accompanied it—the mystic keys of the sepulchre of St. Peter, and filings of his chains, which no Christian could resist. The title of patrician and consul of Rome was offered; and Gregory, as might be expected after such presents, received a courteous answer and an embassy was despatched to the imperial city.

[741-754 A.D.]

It is impossible to say what might have been the result of the negotiations between the pope and the ambassadors had they been continued. They were, however, interrupted by the death of both the potentates; of Charles Martel in October, of Gregory III in November of the very same year. Nevertheless these negotiations were the prelude to subsequent negotiations which Pepin le Bref, the son of Charles Martel, carried on with Pope Zacharias (Zachary), the successor of Gregory III; and this time the negotiations led to most important results.

INDEPENDENCE OF THE ROMAN BISHOPS

At the election of Zacharias, the customary form of obtaining the consent of the exarch was discarded, and discarded to be never afterwards revived. Henceforth the popes may be considered as independent of the Eastern Empire; henceforth begins their connection with the West; henceforth they hold no longer an exclusive ecclesiastical position, but the papacy has become a political dukedom. After the Sixth General Council, they had claimed the title of “universal priest,” and vindicated that claim by soon afterwards reducing to submission the last of the great archbishops of the West. After the appeal to Charles Martel and the independent election of Zacharias, they aspired to political sovereignty.[b]

THE APPEAL TO THE FRANKS

Zacharias, convinced of the advantage which Rome might derive from intimate union with the rising power of the Franks, watched with careful attention over the interests of the mayors of the palace; and it was at his suggestion that the nation at length conferred on those powerful functionaries the titles as well as the privileges of royalty. The Lombard princes regarded him with corresponding reverence. Liutprand, whose reign lasted above thirty years, was distinguished for his devout observance of the maxims of the church. The charity of the pontiff was equal to his talents, and the slaves which Venice offered to the Moors were purchased by his agents and set free.

Stephen II,[91] who next occupied the pontifical chair, had to endure, from the very commencement of his career, the troubles and dangers of domestic wars. Aistulf, the new king of the Lombards, inherited the spirit of his earliest predecessors, and it only required the appearance of a leader like Aistulf to put an end forever to the rule of the Greeks in Italy. But the Lombard monarch was not contented with the acquisition of Ravenna. He assailed the duchy of Rome and the lands of the church, nor could Stephen, either by the most solemn expostulations, or the offers which he made of money, induce the conqueror to withdraw his troops. In this situation, and when the Lombards had demanded as the price of their safety a tribute which the citizens of Rome felt it would be impossible to pay, the pontiff sent messengers to Constantinople requesting aid of the emperor; but his entreaties were disregarded. He turned his eyes towards France, where Pepin, the father of the heroic Charlemagne, was now at the head of a nation as warlike as the Lombards, and as disposed to ally itself with Rome as the invaders were to effect its ruin.

[754-755 A.D.]

Ambassadors were sent to Rome to treat with the Lombards for Stephen’s safe passage into France, a negotiation which could scarcely fail in the hands of the powerful sovereign by whom it was undertaken. The pontiff was speedily on his way to the new protector of the church. He appeared with all his attendants before the monarch, clad in sackcloth and ashes, and falling at his knees he implored him, by the mercy of God and the merits of St. Peter and St. Paul, to deliver Rome from the devastation of the Lombards. Pepin in reply promised to grant the pontiff’s request, and speedily fulfilled his promise by compelling the enemy to retreat and shut himself up in the single town of Pavia. Aistulf, thus pressed, agreed to the terms proposed by his conqueror, and the French army was withdrawn. But scarcely had they left the district when he returned to the attack with renewed vigour, laid waste the country round Rome with fire and sword, and at length encamped before the gates of the city itself. The pontiff again sent a strong appeal to his protector. He dictated his letter in the name of the apostle Peter, closely imitating his epistles, and speaking in a language which implied that he was possessed of an authority to anoint or dethrone kings, and to perform the offices, not of a messenger, of a teacher sent from God, which is the highest characteristic of an apostle, but of a delegated minister of his power and justice.

The French monarch was moved to render the pontiff immediate succour, and Aistulf was quickly deprived of the fruits of his numerous campaigns. It now became a question to whom the district from which the Lombard was driven ought of right to belong; and, before this point could be decided, the envoy of the Greek emperor appeared, to claim for his master the restoration of the territory which he had so completely abandoned to its fate. But Pepin was both too politic and too conscious of his power to listen to such demands; and sending his chief counsellor, the abbot Fulrade (Folrad), to perform the investiture, he granted to Stephen, and to his successors forever, the undivided sovereignty of the conquered territory.

Thus commenced the temporal dominion of the bishops of Rome—an event which marks a distinct period in the history of the papacy, but the importance of which we cannot but think has been somewhat overrated. The power by which the pontiffs acquired their vast empire in the minds of men, owed little or none of its vigour to the influence they possessed as princes; it went on increasing till it reached the very boundaries of civilisation, while their little seigniory remained confined within the narrowest limits; and it declined, and became almost nominal, while their rights as sovereigns continued to be acknowledged by all the states of Europe. In point of wealth it plainly admits of being questioned whether they could gain any advantage from an acquisition which obliged them to keep an army in their pay; to support a countless train of emissaries and envoys; and to engage in all the expensive arts of diplomacy with the monarchs of countries whose treasures were perpetually supplied by the labours and the commerce of their people.

As little was their new dominion advantageous to their dignity. The pontiff was the first among the spiritual rulers of mankind, the lowest almost of temporal princes. As the head of the church, he was rendered venerable by all the associations and by many of the highest sanctions of religion; as the successor of the exarchs of Ravenna, he was the dependent of every prince who had an army at his command, and was but an item in the catalogue of petty rulers, who were counted as make-weights in the balance of power. In whatever designs he undertook as the supremely endowed minister of God, he could appeal to the hearts and consciences of men; could shake the confidence of the mightiest, and bring into alliance the most contrary elements of society to effect his purpose; whatever attempts he had to make in his temporal capacity required to be supported by the pettiest inventions of secret policy, by contrivances and deceits which, in time, rendered the proceedings of the court of Rome proverbial as examples of cunning and duplicity.

[755-775 A.D.]

Stephen died, after a short but eventful pontificate of five years, and was succeeded by his brother Paul (756 A.D.). The Greeks still continued to proclaim their pretensions to the sovereignty of Italy; nor dared the Roman pontiff, vain as were their claims, at once throw off the appearance of allegiance. The Lombards, on the other hand, showed themselves little inclined to preserve the treaty which had been formed with the church. A tumult, equally dangerous to the state and to the respectability of the pontificate, followed the death of Paul. Totona, a nobleman of wealth and influence, formed the design of elevating his brother Constantine to the vacant chair, and Constantine kept possession of his usurped authority nearly a year. A strong effort was then made by the great body of the clergy and the people to recover their invaded right of election. The pontiff was seized, and deprived of his eyes. A new pope ascended the throne.

Stephen III enjoyed his honours about four years, and then left them to be possessed by Adrian I. The Lombards still pressed close upon the boundaries of Rome. It was at this period, moreover, that the controversy with the iconoclasts approached its highest degree of virulence; and Adrian had to employ all the prudence of which he was master to meet the dangers in which it involved him. The measures pursued by the empress Irene were as unfavourable to his views as they were in themselves violent and unjust. The iconoclasts were as odious to him as to her; they were as opposed to the system which it was his object to establish, as they were to her usurpations and tyranny. While he expressed his doubts, therefore, as to the propriety of the new patriarch’s consecration, and showed considerable backwardness in recognising the Second Council of Nicæa, he attempted no vigorous resistance to the invasion of those rules which were violated in her proceedings. The establishment of image-worship promised effects more favourable to his general interests than the assumption of authority by Tiresias, and his patroness was offensive to his immediate feelings. But the church was now to receive the support of a prince whose character and circumstances were equally calculated to mark him for her champion.[c]

CHARLEMAGNE AND THE POPE

[775-776 A.D.]

Einhard[l] (Eginhard), the biographer of Charlemagne, informs us that the strictest friendship subsisted between that monarch and Pope Adrian I. In the still extant correspondence between them, we find the freest communication of opinion and feeling both upon political and ecclesiastical affairs. In exact conformity with the policy of his predecessors, Adrian regarded the Frankish monarch as the covenanted protector of the holy see and its possessions, and in that capacity bound to recover for her every debt the pope might see fit to claim as her “righteous due.” Thus when Leo, archbishop of Ravenna, refused to relinquish his metropolitan rights over certain districts alleged to form part of the donation of Charlemagne, the pope expressed his anxiety for the presence and support of his friend and protector. Adrian, moreover, suspected the royal missi, or commissioners, of collusion with the vassal dukes of Benevento and Spoleto, to the injury of the holy see; and, whether from authentic information or with a view to alarm his correspondent for the safety of his Italian conquests, he magnified the transactions complained of into a criminal conspiracy against the crown. He told the king that the outbreak was actually fixed to take place in the month of March then next following (776 A.D.); that Adelchis (Adalgis), the son of Desiderius, the captive king of the Lombards, was to appear on the coast with a Greek fleet; that Rome was to be assailed both by sea and land, the churches were to be plundered, the pope was to be carried into captivity, and the Lombard dynasty to be reinstated.

Other motives were not wanting to induce Charlemagne to pay a second military visit to his newly acquired dominions in Italy. It had become necessary to take immediate steps for the dissolution of a long-suspected plot between his disaffected subject, Duke Tassilo of Bavaria, and the partisans of the late dynasty. In the winter, therefore, of the year 776, he crossed the Alps at the head of a numerous army; the duke of Friuli, who appears to have taken a principal part in the conspiracy, was expelled from his duchy; and in a short time the presence of the conqueror appears to have dispelled all apprehensions of further danger either to church or state. The pope professed himself satisfied with the result, and returned thanks for the protection afforded with great apparent warmth and cordiality.

THE DONATION FROM CONSTANTINE

[776-780 A.D.]

Yet all had not, it seems, been done for the satisfaction of the papal claims. Another and a different title to an almost imperial power is brought to light. Now, for the first time after the lapse of four centuries and a half, it is discovered that all which Pepin or Charlemagne had conferred on the church of Rome was an insignificant instalment of that more extensive dominion originally granted to the chair of Peter by “the pious emperor Constantine.”

The expressions used by the pope to denote the extent of this supposed donation are not free from uncertainty and ambiguity. The endowment of “supreme power over all the region of the West,” alleged to have been granted by Constantine the Great, must have comprehended much more than the territories conveyed by the deeds of Pepin and Charlemagne. It is therefore insinuated that, though those princes had dealt liberally by the church, they would, notwithstanding, not have done their whole duty until they should have given possession of all that had been comprised in the original deed of gift. Charlemagne, it seems, was to consider himself as the mere executor of his predecessor Constantine the Great; and in that character it is obvious he must stand in a position of far less observance than as the spontaneous patron and benefactor.

The fictitious donation was presented to him as absolute in its terms; therefore as at once discharging the estate conveyed in the execution of its provisions from all dues, duties, and conditions whatsoever, claimable by the hand through which it passed to the rightful owner. It was significantly hinted that his past services were held by the pope to merge in his obligations for the future; that he should think less of the benefits he had conferred than of the duties he might rightfully be called upon to perform; and that, as long as a single item of the infinite debt entailed upon him by his great testator remained unpaid, he must consider himself as debtor to God and St. Peter for the whole.

It would be hardly fair to presume that the impudent forgery, afterwards known by the title of the Donation of Constantine, had as yet found its appropriate niche in the archives of the Lateran, or that it was included among the documents which the pope instructed his envoys to produce to Charlemagne. But among the multitude of eager searchers, the thing wanted is generally near enough at hand for the purposes of the less scrupulous among the number. In the reign of Pope Adrian I the desire for territorial acquisition had been stimulated by success to a degree of intensity scarcely paralleled in the history of secular ambition. In such a disposition, a feather-light tradition might stand as good ground for the most extravagant claims; and the fabrication of the outward proof of what was already registered in men’s minds as accredited fact, might appear as a mere venial condescension to the natural adhesion of mankind to the usual and customary modes of proof.

Very Early Greek Manuscript of the Book of Genesis, given by Queen Elizabeth to Sir John Fortescue

The transient visit of Charlemagne to Italy in the year 776 appears for the moment to have dissipated the apprehensions of the pope. Four years later an interval of peace on his Saxon frontier and the temporary submission of his turbulent vassal Tassilo of Bavaria left Charlemagne at leisure to disentangle by his presence the ravelled state of Italian affairs. He was probably anxious to acquaint himself personally with the causes of the existing disorders, as well as to obtain an explanation of the interruption in the harmony of his correspondence with the pope, whom he sincerely honoured and was well disposed to support. The critical state, however, of the coasts and frontiers, as depicted to him by Adrian, appears to have made no serious impression. No military preparations were thought necessary; and in the winter of the year 780, Charlemagne, accompanied by his consort Hildegard, his two infant sons Carloman and Louis, and escorted by no other force than his ordinary household troops and followers, crossed the Alps into Italy. The annalists of the age describe the expedition as a visit of devotion.

CHARLEMAGNE’S THIRD AND FOURTH ENTRANCES INTO ITALY

[780-786 A.D.]

In the spring of the year 781 Charlemagne arrived for the third time in Rome, where he celebrated the great festival of Easter. Pope Adrian upon this occasion conferred the right of baptism on the two young princes, changing the name of the elder from that of Carloman to Pepin, in honour of his grandfather; and at the same moment he crowned the elder “king of the Lombards,” and the younger (Louis) king of Aquitaine. The honour was accepted, probably solicited, by the king without any misgiving as to the inferences that might thereafter be drawn from this or past condescendencies of the like character. Charlemagne never scrupled to make use of church or pontiff for the accomplishment of his political purposes; and he now called upon Adrian to support the remonstrances he thought it necessary to address to his nephew Tassilo by the aid of his spiritual authority.

Charlemagne could not but acknowledge that he had been greatly indebted to the exertions of the churchmen for the pacification of his Saxon acquisitions; and in requital of this co-operation he was not inclined to deny to his spiritual allies an important share in the profits of victory. But the consciousness of present power shut out any sinister view to the future. The church was, after all, in his hands no more than an instrument for the accomplishment of his purposes; that she should ever become his mistress was remote from his contemplation; and it is not to be wondered at that he should have identified her interests with those of his government in that spirit of gratitude which might in the sequel be made to wear an aspect of homage very conducive to the progress of hierarchical pretension.

Both parties were in the main inclined to regard each other as the means and instruments for the promotion of their separate interests. But the absence of any real reciprocity in the terms of compact could not but very soon become apparent. No temporal benefit could be conferred by the pope commensurate with the sacrifices the monarch was incessantly called upon to make to the insatiate craving of the holy see for those substantial augmentations, that costly support, that burdensome protection, to which he was held to have pledged himself. Such an understanding could last no longer than while either or both parties were actuated rather by religious than by merely selfish motives. The views of Pope Adrian had nothing of a properly religious character in them; his correspondence is but an echo of the one shrill cry for “more.” “Give, grant, endow, restore, and the blessed Peter shall surely send you victory and prosperity.” This is the burden of the papal addresses from the birth to the consummation of the alliance. A certain coincidence of interests, supported upon the religious and loyal character of Charlemagne, had hitherto cemented the union; but, though the result might be overlooked, it is clear that as soon as those interests should diverge or cease to exist, there remained nothing behind to prevent them from falling into irreconcilable opposition. Even within this period of apparent concord and cordiality some symptoms of such a divergency may be detected.

[786-795 A.D.]

In the year 786 Charlemagne paid a fourth visit to Rome; and after performing the customary devotional exercises at the principal shrines and churches, he applied himself to the task of reducing the refractory duke of Benevento to obedience. An accommodation was easily accomplished; Charlemagne accepted the renewed oaths of allegiance of the duke and his vassals, and carried away with him Grimwald (Grimoald), the second son of Arichis (Arighis), as a pledge for the future obedience of the duke and his subjects. No notice was taken of the papal claim upon the territory of Benevento; and Pope Adrian once more saw his royal patron depart without obtaining the object nearest to his heart. During the remainder of his pontificate we trace no further attempt on the part of the pope to realise his favourite project of aggrandisement. The momentary coolness which had followed the defeat of the Calabrian Greeks produced no real estrangement between him and his great patron; and Adrian died (795) in the full enjoyment of the confidence and esteem of Charlemagne.

THE REALM OF THE POPES

At the close of the reign of Charlemagne the possessions of the church of Rome may thus be identified with existing geographical divisions: (1) In virtue of right, or pretension of right, originating prior to the donation of Pepin, the pontiffs exercised temporal jurisdiction over the city and duchy of Rome as it had existed under the Byzantine supremacy, comprehending, as nearly as may now be ascertained, the modern district emphatically known by the name of the “Patrimony Proper,” together with the greatest portion if not the whole of the Campagna di Roma as far south as Terracina. (2) By the donations of Pepin and Charlemagne the church of Rome had reduced into possession the city and exarchate of Ravenna, comprising the modern legations of Bologna, Romagna, Urbino, and Ferrara, with the duchies of Parma and Modena and a portion of the Venetian terra-firma on the mouths of the Po.

But these extensive tracts of country were regarded by the popes as but a portion of their claim under the treaties of Pontyon and Quierzy and the donation of Charlemagne. That claim extended over the islands of Corsica and Sardinia, the entire duchies of Benevento and Spoleto, and all the remaining dependencies of the Byzantines in southern Italy, including both Calabrias and the adjacent island of Sicily; thus constituting in the aggregate nearly the whole of Italy south of the river Po, ranging thence along the eastern declivity of the Apennines as far as the southernmost confine of the modern grand duchy of Tuscany, and thence expanding over the breadth of the peninsula to the extreme coasts, embracing all the greater adjoining islands and the territory of Istria on the northeastern shores of the Adriatic Sea. Pope Adrian I died on the 26th of December in the year 795, after the unusually long pontificate of twenty-three years and upwards. When Charlemagne heard of his demise, we are told that he wept for him as for a brother.

[795-800 A.D.]

On the occasion of Charlemagne’s first visit to Rome (774), Pope Adrian conferred upon him the title and dignity of patrician, or official advocate and protector of the holy see. When shortly after the death of that pontiff in the year 795, Leo, archpriest of the church of St. Susanna, was elected to the vacant chair by the title of Leo III, the new pope hastened to renew the patent of the patriciate, as if it were an office expiring with the life of the grantor. As matters stood at this moment between him and the king, it is safest to conclude that the pope desired that the royal patrician should regard himself as captain-general of the church, and that he should in that capacity be entitled to the military services of its subjects, when called on by the church to interfere for the protection of her temporal rights. But the act of Pope Leo III, which placed his subjects under military obligation to a stranger, was calculated to engender grave misunderstandings. The feudal principle, now rapidly unfolding itself in the European polity, drew no distinction between civil and military subjection; and the oath of the Romans to the protector might be easily confounded with that of subject to sovereign.

The constitutional or political powers exercised at this period by the pontiffs within the city and territory of the church are very obscurely indicated in the documents of the age. From what we discern on the surface of history, no very well-defined relation subsisted between the so-called “republic of Rome” and the spiritual ruler. The bond which connected them, as far as, at this distance of time and with such defective information, we can discern, was the recognised participation of the richer and more powerful families in all the offices of government and the dignities and emoluments of ecclesiastical promotion. But by such an arrangement it is obvious that every just limit between spiritual and temporal interests must be speedily obliterated; the result was verified in the unutterable corruptions of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Even at this point of time, and for a long series of years past, many symptoms of a vicious and demoralising relation between the constituents of the Roman state are apparent.

In the fifth year of the pontificate of Leo III two relatives of Pope Adrian I, Paschal the primicerius and Campulus the sacellarius of the holy see, conspired to depose the reigning pontiff. After suffering some personal injuries at the hands of his rebellious subjects, Leo was expelled from the city; and he resolved to solicit redress in person at the court of Charlemagne, who was at that moment sojourning at Paderborn, within the confines of the vanquished Saxons. The king received the suppliant pontiff with the highest honours, and listened to his complaints with the profoundest attention. Of the special subjects of the conference we are not informed; but in the autumn of the year 799 Leo returned to Rome under an escort sufficiently strong to insure his personal safety. In the interim, the faction opposed to him had lost ground, and he was received by the citizens with unusual tokens of joy and affection.

Pope Leo was, as it appears, accompanied to Rome by two German prelates, Hildebrand archbishop of Cologne, and Arno archbishop of Salzburg, as missi dominici, or royal commissioners, charged to make due inquisition into the offences imputed to the pope by his adversaries. The prelates are said to have examined the evidence on both sides with great care and minuteness, and at the close of it to have come to the conclusion that nothing criminal had been established against the pope; upon which decision his rebellious accusers were taken into custody and carried away to France.

THE TRIAL OF THE POPE AND THE CROWNING OF CHARLEMAGNE

[800 A.D.]

Within the twelvemonth of the reinstatement of the pope, Charlemagne held a great diet of the realm at Mainz. “There,” says the annalist,[m] “he assembled his great nobles, his bishops, and his abbots all; and having reported to them that there was now peace in all his borders, he called to their minds the evils which the Romans had done to the apostolic Leo; and he set his face to go into the parts of Rome, and thither he accordingly proceeded.” This simple notice of the annalist of Moissac is the only passage in any original chronicle in which a motive for this fifth expedition of Charlemagne to Rome is assigned. The king arrived at the gates of the city on the 24th of November, 800, and was received by the pontiff under the porch of St. Peter’s church, outside the walls, with all due devotion and honour. Seven days afterwards a solemn assembly of the citizens was convoked, at which the king acquainted them with the cause of his visit.

His next proceeding is not very intelligible. He assembled, we are told, a solemn synod, still in the basilica of St. Peter, to inquire into the crimes imputed to the pope; but whether the old or fresh inculpations is not said. On this occasion the king and the pope sat beside each other, surrounded by the nobility, the bishops, and the abbots of France and Italy. The spiritual lords alone were seated; the inferior priests and the laity of all ranks remained standing. Proclamation was then made for the accusers to come forward and make their complaint; but no one answered to the call. It is not apparent why this formality should have been observed at all, inasmuch as the clergy had unanimously declared themselves incompetent to sit in judgment upon a pontiff of the holy see. The pope, however, intimated his intention to purge himself of all the offences laid to his charge in the form established in like cases by his predecessors. On the following day, therefore, he in full synod took the books of the Gospels in his hands, and upon them he solemnly protested his innocence; whereupon “the prelates and all the clergy burst simultaneously into a hymn of thanksgiving, devoutly praising God, the holy Virgin, St. Peter, and all the saints.”

Within the first month of the residence of Charlemagne in Rome nothing took place indicative of any ulterior purpose. During all that time the king had appeared to be absorbed in regulating the political affairs of the church and city. But on Christmas Day of the year 800, while he and the pope devoutly knelt together at the altar of St. Peter’s church, engaged in the preliminary prayer before mass, the pontiff, as if moved by a sudden impulse of inspiration, placed upon his head an elaborately wrought and very costly imperial crown. At the same time the people, as if prepared for the incident, simultaneously and as with one voice exclaimed, “Long life to Charles, augustus, the great and peace-giving emperor of the Romans, whom the hand of God hath crowned!” The salutation was twice repeated; after which, according to imperial custom, he was enthroned and anointed with holy oil, and worshipped by the pope. “Whereby,” says the annalist,[m] “he was unanimously constituted emperor; and dropping the title of patrician, he was thenceforth called ‘imperator augustus.’”

Whether the crown was placed on his head with or without his consent, the mode of conferring it was intended to imply that the king was a passive party, that he accepted it as a boon or gift at the hands of the pope without claim or pretence of right on his own part. The material crown itself was of papal procurement and fabrication; the act of coronation was that of the pontiff; he gave the crown, the Roman people ratified the act and proclaimed the emperor. The transaction bears the character of a joint act, in which Leo and the Romans performed the part of spontaneous electors and sovereign depositaries of imperial power. The adoration was a simple ceremony of recognition; it was unaccompanied with any new oath of allegiance; the rights of the new emperor still resting upon the oath of obedience to him as patrician. Ultimately the participation of the people was no doubt considered as wholly accessory to the papal decision; and the pope might well hold himself out to the world as the sole depositary and dispenser of imperial authority. Upon this ground, indeed, the papacy cast anchor, and for all future ages held on with amazing pertinacity and success.

[800-824 A.D.]

On the other hand, Charlemagne and his subjects did not concern themselves with any curious inquiry into the origin of the powers which the imperial crown brought along with it. Yet, in conformity with their general notion of government, they believed that Rome and her pontiff had taken upon them the relation of subjects to the emperor whom they had crowned and anointed. It is certain that Charlemagne regarded himself as the sovereign of Rome, if not of the pope; he was emperor in his own right as fully as if he had placed the crown upon his own head. In conformity with the opinion and practice of his age, he grounded that right upon possession. In the mind of the warrior there was no place for any other derivation of title; and Charlemagne and his successors took as little distinction between the possession and the sovereignty of Rome and its appurtenant territories as they did in the case of his newly acquired dominions in Germany, Lombardy, or Spain.

A few days after the coronation of Charlemagne, he directed the persons implicated in the plot of the preceding year against the life and government of the pope to be brought before him for judgment; and, as supreme judge, he condemned them to the death of traitors. This exercise of supreme criminal judicature indicates at least the assumption of a power understood in that age to be a distinguishing attribute of sovereign authority. The condemned criminals were indeed respited at the intercession of the pope, and their punishment was commuted for exile; but nothing occurred to indicate any jealous feeling on the part of the pontiff; and throughout the winter of the year 801 Charlemagne continued to exercise every prerogative of imperial power in Rome with as free a hand as when he set up his migratory throne upon the banks of the Seine, the Rhine, or the Elbe.

In the year 806 he executed a provisional settlement of the succession to his vast dominions among his then surviving sons. During the whole course of his life Charlemagne was anxious to invest his more important acts with the sanction of religion. The settlement of 806, though provisional only, was solemnly enacted and sworn to by his sons and the estates of the realm assembled in diet at Thionville; and was soon afterwards sent by the hand of the emperor’s secretary to Rome for the approval and signature of the pope—a step which lay open to a construction probably far beyond the intent of Charlemagne.[d]

PAPAL AMBITION AFTER CHARLEMAGNE

Almost immediately after Charlemagne’s death, Leo assumed to himself a degree of authority which could not be exercised without equal injury to the state and to the sacerdotal character. Stephen IV, his successor, took the oath of allegiance, together with the whole of the people, as soon as he ascended the pontifical throne; and announced to the monarch, Louis the Pious, that he would attend him at whatever place he should appoint. But the Christian meekness of the pontiff was exceeded by that of the sovereign, who, on receiving his visit at Rheims, prostrated himself three times at his feet. There is evidence, however, to prove that it still required a man of equally powerful and ambitious mind to take full advantage of the means of aggrandisement afforded by the present position of the church. During the short reigns of several successive popes, we see the power of the emperor distinctly at work, and his right acknowledged, in the management of ecclesiastical affairs.

[824-847 A.D.]

In the year 824, and under the pontificate of Eugenius I, Louis sent his son Lothair to Rome, to inquire into the truth of the complaints made by the citizens against their sacerdotal chiefs; and when Gregory IV visited France, for the purpose of effecting a reconciliation between Louis and his son, the bishops of France, whom he appears to have threatened with his censures, proudly dared him to a trial of his power, by informing him that if he did aught against the canons, he should himself be excommunicated or deposed. The pernicious counsel of one of his advisers taught him to answer this intimation by fresh assertions of authority, and he dared to commence the practice, which subsequently proved such a fruitful source of disorder and scandal in Christendom, of declaring the sovereign deposed because of his quarrel with the ruler of the Roman church. The emperor Lothair was sufficiently tenacious of his authority to issue especial orders, on the election of Sergius II without his being consulted, that for the future no candidate for the papal throne should be consecrated till he had given his assent to the election.

An Extract from Beza’s Testament of The Gospel of St. Luke

In the midst of these events, the victorious Saracens were pursuing their conquests over the most fertile provinces of Europe, Asia, and Africa. While Calabria was overrun by one division of the Saracens, Rome itself was threatened by another. In vain did the terrified Romans look to the descendants of Charlemagne for help; in vain did they proffer again their broken allegiance to the emperor of the East. Neither the one nor the other was in a condition to render the required assistance, and the city appeared doomed to destruction. The venerable churches of St. Peter and St. Paul, which inspired a feeling of devotion by their antiquity, and of wonder by the magnificence of their shrines, were situated a short distance from the walls; and the unfortunate citizens witnessed from the ramparts the spoliation of these, the most sacred of their temples, without the means of making a single effort for their defence. But the rage produced by this spectacle, combined with the terror with which the entrance of the enemy into the city was contemplated, roused them to attempt some measure of resistance. The death of Sergius just at this juncture greatly contributed to promote their success. In electing Leo IV to the vacant office, they provided themselves with a skilful counsellor and an energetic leader. The invader, after various assaults, was obliged to retreat, in order to make the conquest of places less skilfully defended.

The death of Leo was succeeded by much confusion, and in this period of excitement and difficulty, the vacant chair was said to have been ascended by a woman, the celebrated papess Joan.[c]

THE MYTH OF THE WOMAN POPE

[847-855 A.D.]

Joan was the name given to a female pope, now regarded as a fictitious personage, who under the title of John VII or VIII was said, according to the most general accounts, to have occupied the papal chair between the pontificate of Leo IV and Benedict III, although various other dates are given. Tradition represents her as of English descent, but born in Ingelheim or Mainz. By some her original name is given as Gilberta, by others as Agnes. She was credited with having fallen in love with a young Benedictine monk, and with having on that account assumed the male monastic habit and lived for some time in the monastery of Fulda. Her lover, it is affirmed, died while they were pursuing their studies together at Athens, and after his death she went to Rome, where, according to the most approved version of the story, she became a very successful professor. So high indeed became her reputation for piety and learning that the cardinals with one consent elected the supposed young monk the successor of Pope Leo IV. In this position she comported herself so as to entirely justify their choice, until the catastrophe of giving birth to a male child during a procession to the Lateran palace suddenly and irrevocably blasted her reputation. She is said to have died in childbirth or to have been stoned to death.

The story of the pontificate of Joan was received as fact from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, but it has been discredited by later researches. The circumstantial evidence around which it clung, and which may have aided in suggesting it, was the observance of a circuit by the papal processions so as to avoid passing through a certain street (a statue at one time standing in that street, said to represent a woman and child, with a monumental stone near it having a peculiar inscription), and the use of a pierced seat at the enthronement of the popes. Of these facts other and more credible explanations have, however, been given, although there is no sufficient evidence to demonstrate beyond dispute the manner in which the story originated. According to Dr. Döllinger,[e] the tradition finds no support in the original text either of Marianus Scotus,[n] Sigebert of Gemblours,[o] or Otto of Freysing.[p] She is first mentioned by Stephen de Bourbon,[q] who died in 1261, and who took his information probably from the chronicle of the Dominican Jean de Mailly, no copy of which is now known to be in existence. The story is not found in any of the original manuscripts of Martinus Polus,[r] and according to Döllinger was interpolated in that chronicle some time between 1278 and 1312. He attributes the propagation of the myth chiefly to its insertion in Martinus Polus, from which it was copied into the Flores Temporum, a chronicle founded on Martinus, and its real originators he supposes to have been the Dominicans and Minorites, who had a grudge against the papacy on account of the persecutions they were experiencing at the hands of Benedict VIII. So rapidly did the tradition spread that in 1400 a bust of the papess was placed in the cathedral of Siena along with other popes, having the inscription, “John VIII, a woman from England.” The statue occupied this position till the beginning of the seventeenth century.[f]

[847-867 A.D.]

The eight years of Leo’s papacy were chiefly occupied in strengthening, in restoring the plundered and desecrated churches of the two apostles, and adorning Rome. The succession to Leo IV was contested between Benedict III, who commanded the suffrages of the clergy and people, and Anastasius, who, at the head of an armed faction, seized the Lateran, stripped Benedict of his pontifical robes, and awaited the confirmation of his violent usurpation by the imperial legates, whose influence he thought that he had secured. But these commissioners, after strict investigation, decided in favour of Benedict. Anastasius was expelled with disgrace from the Lateran, his rival consecrated in the presence of the emperor’s representatives. Anastasius, with unwonted mercy, was only degraded to lay communion. The pontificate of Benedict III is memorable chiefly for the commencement of the long strife between Ignatius and Photius for the see of Constantinople. This strife ended in the permanent schism between the Eastern and Western churches.

Nicholas I, the successor of Benedict, was chosen rather by the favour of the emperor Louis and his nobles than that of the clergy (858). He has been thought worthy to share the appellation of the Great with Leo I, with Gregory I, with Hildebrand, and with Innocent III. At least three great events signalised the pontificate of Nicholas I—the strife of Photius with Ignatius for the archiepiscopal throne of Constantinople; the prohibition of the divorce of King Lothair from his queen Theutberga; and the humiliation of the great prelates on the Rhine, the successful assertion of the papal supremacy even over Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims. In the first two of these momentous questions, the contest about the see of Constantinople, and that of Lothair, king of Lorraine, with his wife Theutberga, Nicholas took his stand on the great eternal principles of justice, humanity, and sound morals. These were no questions of abstruse and subtle theology nor the assertion of dubious rights. In both cases the pope was the protector of the feeble and the oppressed, the victims of calumny and of cruelty. The bishop of Constantinople, unjustly deposed, persecuted, exiled, treated with the worst inhumanity, implored the judgment of the head of western Christendom. A queen, not only deserted by a weak and cruel husband, but wickedly and falsely criminated by a council of bishops, obtained a hearing at the court of Rome; her innocence was vindicated, her accusers punished, the king himself compelled to bow before the majesty of justice, made more venerable by religion. If in both cases the language of Nicholas was haughty and imperious, it was justified to the ears of men by the goodness of his cause. The lofty supremacy which he asserted over the see of Byzantium awoke no jealousy, being exerted in behalf of a blameless and injured prelate. If he treated the royal dignity of France with contempt, it had already become contemptible in the eyes of mankind; if he annulled by his own authority the decree of a national council, composed of the most distinguished prelates of Gaul, that council had already been condemned by all who had natural sympathies with justice and with innocence. Yet, though in both cases Nicholas displayed equal ability and resolution in the cause of right, the event of the two affairs was very different. The dispute concerning the patriarchate of Constantinople ended in the estrangement, the alienation, the final schism between the East and West. It was the last time that the pope was permitted authoritatively to interfere in the ecclesiastical affairs of the East. The excommunication of the Greek by the Latin church was the final act of separation. In the West Nicholas established a precedent for control even over the private morals of princes. The vices of kings, especially those of France, became the stronghold of papal influence; injured queens and subjects knew to what quarter they might recur for justice or for revenge. And on this occasion the pope brought not only the impotent king, but the powerful clergy of Lorraine, beneath his feet. The great bishops of Cologne and of Trèves were reduced to abject humiliation.

RIVALRY OF NICHOLAS AND PHOTIUS

[860-867 A.D.]

The contention for the patriarchate of Constantinople was, strictly speaking, no religious controversy—it was the result of political intrigue and personal animosity. Ignatius, who became the patriarch, was of imperial descent. In the revolution which dethroned his father, Michael Rhangabé, he had taken refuge, under the cowl of a monk, from the jealousy of Leo the Armenian. Photius was chosen as his successor. Rival councils met, and the two patriarchs were alternately excommunicated by the adverse spiritual factions.

Photius was the first to determine on an appeal to Rome. The pope, he thought, would hardly resist the acknowledgment of his superiority, with the tempting promise of the total extirpation of the hated iconoclasts. Not merely did the pope address two lofty and condemnatory letters to the emperor and to Photius, but a third also to “the faithful in the East,” at the close of which he made known to the three Eastern patriarchs his steadfast resolution to maintain the cause of Ignatius, to refuse the recognition of the usurper Photius. The restoration of Ignatius was commanded even in more imperious language, and under more awful sanctions. “We, by the power committed to us by our Lord through St. Peter, restore our brother Ignatius to his former station, to his see, to his dignity as patriarch, and to all the honours of his office. Whoever, after the promulgation of this decree, shall presume to disturb him in the exercise of his office, separate from his communion, or dare to judge him anew, without the consent of the apostolic see, if a clerk, shall share the eternal punishment of the traitor Judas; if a layman, he has incurred the malediction of Canaan; he is excommunicate, and will suffer the same fearful sentence from the eternal Judge.”

Never had the power of the clergy or the supremacy of Rome been asserted so distinctly, so inflexibly. The privileges of Rome were eternal, immutable, anterior to, derived from no synod or council, but granted directly by God himself; they might be assailed, but not transferred; torn off for a time, but not plucked up by the roots. An appeal was open to Rome from all the world, from her authority lay no appeal. The emperor and Constantinople paid no regard to these terrible anathemas of the pope.

SYNOD AT CONSTANTINOPLE

[867 A.D.]

In the year 867 Photius had summoned a council at Constantinople; the obsequious prelates listened to the arraignment, and joined in the counter excommunication of Pope Nicholas. Photius drew up eight articles inculpating in one the faith, in the rest the departure, of the see of Rome from ancient and canonical discipline. Among the dreadful acts of heresy and schism which were to divide forever the churches of the East and West were: (1) the observance of Saturday as a fast; (2) the permission to eat milk or cheese during Lent; (4) the restriction of the chrism to the bishops; (6) the promotion of deacons at once to the episcopal dignity; (7) the consecration of a lamb, according to the hated Jewish usage; (8) the shaving of their beards by the clergy. The fifth only of the articles objected to by Photius, the procession of the Holy Ghost from the Father and the Son, was an error so awful as to deserve a thousand anathemas. The third, condemning the enforced celibacy of the clergy, was alone of high moral or religious importance. “From this usage we see in the West,” says Photius, “so many children who know not their fathers.” These, however, were but the pretexts for division. The cause lay deeper, in the total denial of the papal supremacy by the Greeks; their unequivocal assertion that with the empire that supremacy had passed to Constantinople.

The decree of the council boasted the signature of the emperor (obtained, it was said, in an hour of drunkenness); of Basil the Macedonian, averred (most improbably) to have been forged; of the three eastern patriarchs; of the senate and the great officers; of abbots and bishops to the number of nearly one thousand. But the episcopal messenger who was to bear to Rome this defiance of the church of Constantinople and the counter-excommunication of the pope, had proceeded but a short way on his journey when he was stopped by the orders of the new emperor. A revolution in the palace was a revolution in the church of Constantinople. The first act of Basil the Macedonian was to depose Photius. Photius is said to have refused the communion to the murderer Basil. From this time a succession of changes agitated the empire; Photius rose or fell at each successive change.

Leo the Philosopher, the son of Basil, once more ignominiously expelled him from his throne. Yet, though accused of treason, Photius was acquitted and withdrew into honoured retirement. He did not live to witness or profit by another revolution. Though the schism of thirty years, properly speaking, expired in his person, and again a kind of approximation to Rome took place, yet the links were broken which united the two churches. The articles of difference, from which neither would depart, had been defined and hardened into rigid dogmas. During the dark times of the papacy which followed the disruption, even the intercourse became more and more precarious. The popes of the next century were too busy in defending their territories or their lives to regard the affairs of the East. The darkness which gathered round both churches shrouded them from each other’s sight.

[860-867 A.D.]

Nicholas the Great had not lived to triumph even in the first fall of Photius. In the West his success was more complete; he had the full enjoyment of conscious power exercised in a righteous cause. Not merely did he behold one of Charlemagne’s successors prostrate at his feet, obliged to abandon to papal censure and to degradation even his high ecclesiastical partisans, but in succession the greatest prelates of the West, the archbishop of Ravenna, the archbishops of Cologne and Trèves, and even Hincmar, the archbishop of Rheims, who seemed to rule despotically over the church and kingdom of France, were forced to bow before his vigorous supremacy.

The matrimonial cause which for many years distracted part of France, on which council after council met, and on which the great prelates of Lorraine came into direct collision with the pope, and were reduced to complete and unpitied humiliation under his authority, was that of King Lothair and his queen Theutberga, as elsewhere described. He threatened the king with immediate excommunication if he did not dismiss the concubine Waldrada, and receive his repudiated queen. He then betook himself to Attigny, the residence of Charles the Bald. He peremptorily commanded the restoration of the bishop Rothrad, who had been canonically, as it was asserted, deposed by Hincmar his metropolitan, and was now irregularly, without inquiry or examination, replaced by the arbitrary mandate of the pope. Hincmar murmured and obeyed; the trembling king acquiesced in the papal decree.

But Nicholas did not live to enjoy his perfect triumph; he died in November, 867 A.D.—a pontiff who, if he advanced no absolutely unexampled pretensions to supremacy in behalf of the Roman see, yet, by the favourable juncture and auspicious circumstances which he seized to assert and maintain that authority, did more than all his predecessors to strengthen and confirm it. During all his conflicts in the West with the royal and with the episcopal power, the moral and religious sympathies of mankind could not but be on his side. If his language was occasionally more violent, even contemptuous, than became the moderation which, up to this time, had mitigated the papal decrees, he might plead lofty and righteous indignation; if he interfered with domestic relations, it was in defence of the innocent and defenceless, and in vindication of the sanctity of marriage; if he treated kings with scorn, it was because they had become contemptible for their weakness or their vices; if he interfered with episcopal or metropolitan jurisdiction, the inferior clergy, even bishops, would be pleased to have a remote, and possibly disinterested tribunal, to which they might appeal from prelates, chosen only from aristocratic connections, barbarians in occupation and in ferocity; if he was inexorable to transgressors, it was to those of the highest order, prelates who had lent themselves to injustice and iniquity, and had defied his power; if he annulled councils, those councils had already been condemned for their injustice, had deserved the reproachful appellation with which they were branded by the pope, with all who had any innate or unperverted sentiment of justice and purity. Hence the presumptuous usurpation even of divine power, so long as it was thus beneficently used, awed, confounded all, and offended few. Men took no alarm at the arrogance which befriended them against the oppressor and the tyrant.

But this vast moral advancement of the popedom was not all which the Roman see owes to Nicholas I; she owes the questionable boon of the recognition of the False Decretals as the law of the church.

THE FALSE DECRETALS

[858-869 A.D.]

Nicholas I not only saw during his pontificate the famous False Decretals take their place in the jurisprudence of Latin Christendom; if he did not promulgate, he assumed them as authentic documents; he gave them the weight of the papal sanction; and with their aid prostrated at his feet the one great transalpine prelate who could still maintain the independence of the Teutonic church, Hincmar archbishop of Rheims.

Up to this period the decretals, the letters or edicts of the bishops of Rome, according to the authorised or common collection of Dionysius, commenced with Pope Siricius, towards the close of the fourth century. To the collection of Dionysius was added that of the authentic councils, which bore the name of Isidore of Seville. On a sudden was promulgated, unannounced, without preparation, not absolutely unquestioned, but apparently overawing at once all doubt, a new code, which to the former authentic documents added fifty-nine letters and decrees of the twenty oldest popes from Clement to Melchiades (Miltiades), and the donation of Constantine; and in the third part, among the decrees of the popes and of the councils from Silvester to Gregory II, thirty-nine false decrees, and the acts of several unauthentic councils. In this vast manual of sacerdotal Christianity the popes appear from the first the parents, guardians, legislators of the faith throughout the world. The False Decretals do not merely assert the supremacy of the popes—the dignity and privileges of the bishop of Rome—they comprehend the whole dogmatic system and discipline of the church, the whole hierarchy from the highest to the lowest degree, their sanctity, and immunities, their persecutions, their disputes, their right of appeal to Rome.

But for the too manifest design, the aggrandisement of the see of Rome and the aggrandisement of the whole clergy in subordination to the see of Rome; but for the monstrous ignorance of history, which betrays itself in glaring anachronisms, and in the utter confusion of the order of events and the lives of distinguished men—the former awakening keen and jealous suspicion, the latter making the detection of the spuriousness of the whole easy, clear, irrefragable—the False Decretals might still have maintained their place in ecclesiastical history. They are now given up by all; not a voice is raised in their favour; the utmost that is done by those who cannot suppress all regret at their explosion, is to palliate the guilt of the forger, to call in question or to weaken the influence which they had in their own day, and throughout the later history of Christianity.

The author or authors of this most audacious and elaborate of pious frauds are unknown; the date and place of its compilation are driven into such narrow limits that they may be determined within a few years, and within a very circumscribed region. The False Decretals came not from Rome; the time of their arrival at Rome, after they were known beyond the Alps, appears almost certain. In one year Nicholas I is apparently ignorant of their existence, the next he speaks of them with full knowledge. They contain words manifestly used at the Council of Paris (829 A.D.), consequently are of later date; they were known to the Levite Benedict of Metz, who composed a supplement to the collection of capitularies by Adgesil, between 840-847 A.D. The city of Metz is designated with nearly equal certainty as the place in which, if not actually composed, they were first promulgated as the canon law of Christendom.

The state of affairs in the divided and distracted empire might seem almost to call for, almost to justify, this desperate effort to strengthen the ecclesiastical power. All the lower clergy, including some of the bishops, were groaning, just at this time, under heavy oppression. By the constitution of Charlemagne, which survived under Louis the Pious, and, so long as the empire maintained its unity, asserted the independence of the transalpine hierarchy of all but the temporal sovereign, the clergy were under strict subordination to the bishop, the bishop to the metropolitan, the metropolitan only to the emperor. Conflicting popes, or popes in conflict with Italian enemies, or with their own subjects, had reduced the papacy to vassalage under the empire. Conflicting kings, on the division of the realm of Charlemagne, had not yet, but were soon about to submit the empire to the Roman supremacy. All at present was anarchy. The Germans and the French were drawing asunder into separate rival nations; the sons of Louis were waging an endless, implacable strife. Almost every year, less than every decade of years, beheld a new partition of the empire; kingdoms rose and fell, took new boundaries, acknowledged new sovereigns; no government was strong enough to maintain the law; might was the only law.

The hierarchy, if not the whole clergy, had taken the lead in the disruption of the unity of the empire; they had abased the throne of Louis; they were for a short disastrous period now the victims of that abasement. Their wealth was their danger. They had become secular princes, they had become nobles, they had become vast landed proprietors. But during the civil wars it was not the persuasive voice, but the strong arm, which had authority; the mitre must bow before the helmet, the crosier before the sword. Not only the domains, the persons of the clergy had lost their sanctity. The persecution and oppression of the church and the clergy had reached a height unknown in former times.

An Extract from St. Augustine’s Psalter

It might occur to the most religious that for the sake of religion; it might occur to those to whom the dignity and interest of the sacerdotal order were their religion, that some effort must be made to reinvest the clergy in their imperilled sanctity. There must be some appeal against this secular, this ecclesiastical tyranny; and whither should appeal be? It could not be to the Scriptures, to the Gospel. It must be to ancient and venerable tradition, to the unrepealed, irrepealable law of the church; to remote and awful Rome. Rome must be proclaimed in an unusual, more emphatic manner, the eternal, immemorial court of appeal. The tradition must not rest on the comparatively recent names of Leo the Great, of Innocent the Great, of Siricius, or the right of appeal depend on the decree of the Council of Sardica. It must come down from the successors of St. Peter himself in unbroken succession. The whole clergy must have a perpetual, indefeasible sanctity of the same antiquity. So may the idea of this, to us it seems, monstrous fiction have dawned upon its author; himself may have implicitly believed that he asserted no prerogative for Rome which Rome herself had not claimed, which he did not think to be her right. It is even now asserted, perhaps can hardly be disproved, that the False Decretals advanced no pretensions in favour of the see of Rome which had not been heard before in some vague and indefinite, but not therefore less significant, language. The boldness of the act was in the new authority in which it arrayed these pretensions. The new code was enshrined, as it were, in a framework of deeply religious thought and language; it was introduced under the venerated name of Isidore of Seville; it was thus attached to the authentic work of Isidore, which had long enjoyed undisputed authority. Hincmar, archbishop of Rheims, as the most powerful, so, perhaps, the most learned transalpine ecclesiastic, who might at once have exposed the fiction, which he could hardly but know to be a fiction, co-operated more than anyone else to establish its authority. So long as he supposed it to advance or confirm his own power, he suppressed all intrusive doubts; he discovered too late that it was a trap (a mousetrap is his own undignified word) to catch unwary metropolitans. Hincmar was caught, beyond all hope of escape. In the appeal of Rothrad, bishop of Soissons, against Hincmar, metropolitan of Rheims, Pope Nicholas I at first alleges no word of the new decretals in favour of his right of appeal; he seemingly knows no older authority than that of Innocent, Leo, Siricius, and the Council of Sardica. The next year not merely is he fully master of the pseudo-Isidorian documents, but he taunts Hincmar with now calling in question, when it makes against him, authority which he was ready to acknowledge in confirmation of his own power. Hincmar is forced to the humiliation of submission. Rothrad, deposed by Hincmar, deposed by the Council of Senlis, is reinstated in his see.

This immediate, if somewhat cautious, adoption of the fiction, unquestionably not the forgery, by Pope Nicholas, appears less capable of charitable palliation than the original invention. Nor did the successors of Nicholas betray any greater scruple in strengthening themselves by this welcome, and therefore only unsuspicious aid. It is impossible to deny that, at least by citing without reserve or hesitation, the Roman pontiffs gave their deliberate sanction to this great historic fraud.

Nor must be overlooked, perhaps, the more important result of the acceptance of the pseudo-Isidorian statutes as the universal, immemorial, irrepealable law of Christendom. It established the great principle which Nicholas I had before announced, of the sole legislative power of the pope. Every one of these papal epistles was a canon of the church; every future bull therefore rested on the same irrefragable authority, commanded the same implicit obedience. The papacy became a legislative as well as an administrative authority. Infallibility was the next inevitable step, if infallibility was not already in the power asserted to have been bestowed by the Lord on St. Peter, by St. Peter handed down in unbroken descent, and in a plenitude which could not be restricted or limited, to his successors.

ADRIAN II

Nicholas was succeeded (November, 867) by Adrian II, a rigid and lofty churchman, who, though his policy at first appeared doubtful, resolutely maintained, but not with equal judgment and success, the principles of his predecessor. Adrian (he was now seventy-five years old) had been married before he became a priest. At the intercession of the emperor Louis, he took off the ban of excommunication from Waldrada, and restored her to the communion of the church. By this lenity he might seem to lure King Lothair to the last act of submission. The king of Lorraine arrived in Italy. The pope seemed to yield to the influence of Louis and the empress Ingelberga; at least he accepted the munificent presents of the king.

[869-876 A.D.]

From Monte Cassino, where they first met, Lothair followed the pope to Rome. There, instead of being received as a king, and as one reconciled with the see of Rome, when he entered the church all was silent and vacant; not one of the clergy appeared; he retired to a neighbouring chamber, which was not even swept for his reception. The next day was Sunday, and he hoped to hear the mass chanted before him. The pope refused him this honour. He dined, however, the next day with the pope, and an interchange of presents took place. At length Adrian consented to admit him to the communion.

Pope Adrian seized the occasion of the contest for the kingdom of Lothair to advance still more daring and unprecedented pretensions. But the world was not yet ripe for this broad and naked assertion of secular power by the pope, his claim to interfere in the disposal of kingdoms. Directly he left the strong ground of moral and religious authority, from which his predecessor Nicholas had commanded the world, he encountered insurmountable resistance. With all that remained of just and generous sympathy on their side popes might intermeddle in the domestic relations of kings; they were not permitted as yet to touch the question of royal succession or inheritance. The royal and the episcopal power had quailed before Nicholas; the fulminations of Adrian were treated with contempt or indifference: and Hincmar of Rheims in this quarrel with Adrian regained that independence and ascendency which had been obscured by his temporary submission to Nicholas.

Nicholas I and Adrian II thus, with different success, imperiously dictating to sovereigns, ruling or attempting to rule the higher clergy in foreign countries with a despotic sway, mingling in the political revolutions of Europe, awarding crowns, and adjudging kingly inheritances, might seem the immediate ancestors of Gregory VII, of Innocent III, of Boniface VIII. But the papacy had to undergo a period of gloom and degradation, even of guilt, before it emerged again to its height of power.

The pontificate of John VIII (872) is the turning-point in this gradual, but rapid and almost total change; among its causes were the extinction of the imperial branch of the Carlovingian race and the frequent transference of the empire from one line of sovereigns to another; with the growth of the formidable dukes and counts in Italy, which overshadowed the papal power and reduced the pope himself to the slave or the victim of one of the contending factions. The pope was elected, deposed, imprisoned, murdered. In the wild turbulence of the times not merely the reverence but the sanctity of his character disappeared. He sank to the common level of mortals; and the head of Christendom was as fierce and licentious as the petty princes who surrounded him, out of whose stock he sprang, and whose habits he did not break off when raised to the papal throne.

John VIII, however, still stood on the vantage ground occupied by Nicholas I and Adrian II. He was a Roman by birth. He signalised his pontificate by an act even more imposing than those of his predecessors, the nomination to the empire, which his language represented rather as a grant from the papal authority than as an hereditary dignity; it was a direct gift from heaven, conveyed at the will of the pope. Already there appear indications of a French and German interest contending for the papal influence which grows into more and more decided faction, till the Carlovingian empire is united, soon to be dissolved forever, in the person of Charles the Fat. John VIII adopted the dangerous policy of a partial adherence to France. But the historians are almost unanimous as to the price which Charles was compelled to pay for his imperial crown. He bought the pope, he bought the senators of Rome; he bought, if we might venture to take the words to the letter, St. Peter himself.

[876-878 A.D.]

The imperial reign of Charles the Bald was short and inglorious. The whole pontificate of John VIII was a long, if at times interrupted, agony of apprehension lest Rome should fall into the hands of the unbeliever. The reign of the late emperor Louis had been almost a continual warfare against the Mohammedans, who had now obtained a firm footing in southern Italy. He had successfully repelled their progress, but at the death of Louis Rome was again in danger of becoming a Mohammedan city. The pope wrote letter after letter in the most urgent and feeling language to Charles the Bald soon after he had invested him with the empire. “If all the trees in the forest,” such is the style of the pope, “were turned into tongues, they could not describe the ravages of these impious pagans; the devout people of God are destroyed by a continual slaughter; he who escapes the fire and the sword is carried as a captive into exile. Cities, castles, and villages are utterly wasted, and without an inhabitant. The bishops are wandering about in beggary, or fly to Rome as the only place of refuge.”

Yet, if possible, even more formidable than the infidels were the petty Christian princes of Italy. “The canker-worm eats what the locust has left.” In many parts of Italy had gradually arisen independent dukedoms; and none of these appear to have felt any religious respect for the pope, some not for Christianity. On the vacancy after the death of Pope Nicholas, Lambert of Spoleto had occupied and pillaged Rome, respecting neither monastery nor church, and carrying off a great number of young females of the highest rank. Adelchis, the duke of Benevento, had dared to seize in that city the sacred person of the emperor Louis. He was only permitted to leave the city after he had taken a solemn oath to Adelchis—an oath in which his wife, his daughter, and all his attendants were compelled to join—that he would neither in his own person nor by any other revenge this act of insolent rebellion. No sooner, however, had Louis reached Ravenna in safety than he sent to the pope to absolve him from his oath. Adrian II, then pope, began to assert that dangerous privilege of absolution from solemn and recorded oaths.

The bishop-duke of Spoleto did not scruple to return to the unhallowed policy of his brother. He entered into a new league with the Saracens, gave them quarters, and actually uniting his troops with theirs, defeated the forces of Benevento, Capua, and Salerno, and opened a free passage for their incursions to the gates of Rome.

The imperial crown was again vacant, and claimed by the conflicting houses of France and Germany. But Carloman, son of Ludwig of Germany, had been acknowledged as king of Italy. Probably as partisans of the German, and to compel the pope to abandon the interest of the French line, to which he adhered with unshaken fidelity, Lambert, duke of Spoleto, that antichrist, as the pope described him, with his adulterous sister, Richildis, and his accomplice, the treacherous Adalbert, count of Tuscany, at the head of an irresistible force, entered Rome, seized and confined the pope, and endeavoured to starve him into concession, and compelled the clergy and the Romans to take an oath of allegiance to Carloman, as king of Italy. For thirty days the religious services were interrupted; not a single lamp burned on the altars.

[878-891 A.D.]

No sooner had they retired than the pope caused all the sacred treasures to be conveyed from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, covered the altar of St. Peter with sackcloth, closed the doors, and refused to permit the pilgrims from distant lands to approach the shrine. He then fled to Ostia, and embarked for France.

When he reached the shores of Provence, John VIII felt himself in another world. Instead of turbulent and lawless enemies (such were the counts and dukes of Italy) whose rapacity or animosity paid no respect to sacred things, and treated the pope like an ordinary mortal, the whole kingdom of France might seem to throw itself humbly at his feet. No pope was more prodigal of excommunication than John VIII. Of his letters (above three hundred) it is remarkable how large a proportion threaten, inflict, or at least allude to this last exercise of sacerdotal power.

The indefatigable pope returned over the Alps by the Mont Cenis, to Turin and Pavia; but of all whom he had so commandingly exhorted, and so earnestly implored to march for his protection against the Saracens, and no doubt against his Italian enemies, none obeyed but Duke Boson of Provence. The Saracens, in the meantime, courted by all parties, impartially plundered all, made or broke alliances with the same facility with the Christians, while the poor monks, even of St. Benedict’s own foundation, lived in perpetual fear of spoliation. The last days of John VIII were occupied in writing more and more urgent letters for aid to Charles the Fat, in warfare, or providing means of war against his Saracen and Christian foes, or dealing excommunications on all sides; yet facing with gallant resolution the foes of his person and his power. This violent pope is said (but by one writer only) to have come to a violent end; his brains were beaten out with a mallet by some enemy, covetous of his wealth and ambitious of the papal crown.

The short pontificate of Marinus (Marinus I or Martin II) was followed by the still shorter rule of Adrian III, which lasted but fourteen months. That of Stephen V, though not of longer duration, witnessed events of far more importance to the papacy, to Italy, and to Christendom. On the death of Charles the Fat, the ill-cemented edifice of the Carlovingian Empire, the discordant materials of which had reunited, not by natural affinity but almost by the force of accident, dissolved again and forever. The legitimate race of Charlemagne expired in the person of his unworthy descendant, whose name, derived from mere physical bulk, contrasted with the mental greatness, the commanding qualities of military, administrative, and even intellectual superiority which had blended with the name of the first Charles the appellation of the Great.

POPE FORMOSUS

[891-897 A.D.]

The death of Stephen, September, 891, and the election of Formosus to the papacy, changed the aspect of affairs, and betrayed the hostilities still rankling at Rome. By the election of Formosus was violated the ordinary canonical rule against the translation of bishops from one see to another (Formosus was bishop of Porto), which was still held in some respect. There were yet stronger objections to the election of a bishop who had been excommunicated by a former pontiff, excommunicated as an accomplice in a conspiracy to murder the pope. The excommunicated Formosus had been compelled to take an oath never to resume his episcopal functions, never to return to Rome, and never to presume but to lay communion. The successor of John had granted absolution from these penalties, from this oath.

This election must have been a desperate measure of an unscrupulous faction. Nor was Formosus chosen without a fierce and violent struggle.

The suffrages of a party among the clergy and people had already fallen upon Sergius. He was actually at the altar preparing for the solemn ceremony of inauguration, when he was torn away by the stronger faction. Formosus, chosen, as his partisans declared, for his superior learning and knowledge of the Scripture, was then invested in the papal dignity.

When Pope Formosus died, May 23rd, 896, the election fell to Boniface VII. The new pontiff laboured under the imputation of having been twice deposed for his profligate and scandalous life, first from the subdiaconate, afterwards from the priesthood. Boniface died of the gout fifteen days after his elevation. The Italian party hastened to the election of Stephen VI.

Probably the German governor had withdrawn before Stephen and his faction proceeded to wreak their vengeance on the lifeless remains of Formosus. Fierce political animosity took the form of ecclesiastical solemnity. The body was disinterred, dressed in the papal habiliments, and, before a council assembled for the purpose, addressed in these words: “Wherefore wert thou, being bishop of Porto, tempted by ambition to usurp the Catholic see of Rome?” The deacon who had been assigned as counsel for the dead maintained a prudent silence. The sacred vestments were then stripped from the body, three of the fingers cut off, the body cast into the Tiber. All who had been ordained by Formosus were reordained by Stephen. Such, however, were the vicissitudes of popular feeling in Rome, that some years after a miracle was said to have asserted the innocence of Formosus. His body was found by fishermen in the Tiber, and carried back for burial in the church of St. Peter. As the coffin passed, all the images in the church reverentially bowed their heads.

A Monk of the Middle Ages

The pontificate of Stephen soon came to an end. A new revolution revenged the disinterment of the insulted prelate. And now the fierceness of political rather than religious faction had utterly destroyed all reverence for the sacred person of the pope. Stephen was thrown into prison by his enemies, and strangled. The convenient charge of usurpation, always brought against the popes whom their adversaries dethroned or put to death, may have reconciled their minds to the impious deed, but it is difficult to discover in what respect the title of Pope Stephen VI was defective.

[897-911 A.D.]

Pope now succeeded pope with such rapidity as to awaken the inevitable suspicion, either that those were chosen who were likely to make a speedy vacancy, or they received but a fatal gift in the pontificate of Rome. Romanus and Theodore II survived their promotion each only a few months. The latter, by his restoration of Formosus to the rights of Christian burial, and by his reversal of the acts of Stephen VI, may be presumed to have belonged to that faction. The next election was contested with all the strength and violence of the adverse parties. John IX was successful; his competitor Sergius, according to some accounts formerly the discomfited competitor of Formosus, and his bitter and implacable enemy, fled to the powerful protection of the marquis of Tuscany. Sergius was excommunicated, with several other priests and inferior clergy, as accessory to the insults against the body of Formosus. Sergius laughed to scorn the thunders of his rival, so long as he was under the protection of the powerful house of Tuscany. With John IX, who died July, 901, closed the ninth century of Christianity; the tenth, in Italy at least the iron age, had already darkened upon Rome; the pontificate had been won by crime and vacated by murder.

This iron age, as it has been called, opened with the pontificate of Benedict IV (900-903), the successor of John IX. The only act recorded of Benedict IV was the coronation of the unfortunate Louis of Provence, the competitor of Berengar for the empire. Louis, according to imperial usage, set up his tribunal and adjudged causes at Rome. On the death of Benedict, the prudent precautions established by John IX to introduce some regularity and control over the anarchy of an election by a clergy rent into factions by a lawless nobility, and still more lawless people, during this utter helplessness and the abeyance, or the strife for the empire between rival princes, fell into utter neglect or impotency. The papacy became the prize of the most active, daring, and violent. Leo V won the prize; before two months he was ejected and thrown into prison by Christopher, one of his own presbyters and chaplains. The same year, or early in the next, Christopher was in his turn ignominiously driven from Rome.

It was under the protection of the powerful Tuscan prince Berengar that the exiled Sergius, at the head of a strong force of Tuscan soldiers, appeared in Rome, deposed Christopher, who had just deposed Leo V, and took possession of the papal throne. Sergius had been seven years an exile in Tuscany; for seven years he ruled as supreme but not undisputed pontiff. This pope has been loaded with every vice and every enormity which can blacken the character of man. Yet as to his reign there is almost total obscurity. The only certain act which has transpired is his restoration of the Lateran palace, which had fallen into ruins; an act which indicates a period of comparative peace and orderly administration, with the command of a large revenue. In these violent times Sergius probably scrupled at no violence; but if he drove a pope from the throne of St. Peter, that pope had just before deposed his patron, and with great cruelty.

THEODORA IN POWER

But during the papacy of Sergius rose into power the infamous Theodora, with her daughters Marozia and Theodora, the prostitutes who, in the strong language of historians, disposed for many years the papal tiara, and not content with disgracing by their own licentious lives the chief city of Christendom, actually placed their profligate paramours or base-born sons in the chair of St. Peter. The influence obtained by Theodora and her daughters, if it shows not the criminal connivance of Pope Sergius, or a still more disgraceful connection with which he was charged by the scandal of the times, proves at least the utter degradation of the papal power in Rome. It had not only lost all commanding authority, but could not even maintain outward decency. Theodora was born of a noble and wealthy senatorial family, on whom she has entailed an infamous immortality. The women of Rome seem at successive periods seized with a kind of Roman ambition to surpass their sex by the greatness of their virtues and of their vices. These females were to the Paulas and Eustochiums of the younger and severer age of Roman Christianity, what the Julias and Messallinas of the empire were to the Volumnias and Cornelias of the republic.

[911-928 A.D.]

It must be acknowledged that if the stern language of Tacitus and Juvenal may have darkened the vices of the queens and daughters of the cæsars, the bishop of Cremona,[s] our chief authority on the enormities of Theodora and her daughters, wants the moral dignity, while he is liable to the same suspicion as those great writers. Throughout the lives of the pontiffs themselves we have to balance between the malignant license of satire and the unmeaning phrases of adulatory panegyric. On the other hand it is difficult to decide which is more utterly unchristian—the profound hatred which could invent or accredit such stories; the utter dissoluteness which made them easily believed; or the actual truth of such charges.

Liutprand[s] relates that John, afterwards the tenth pope of that name, being employed in Rome on some ecclesiastical matters by the archbishop of Ravenna, was the paramour of Theodora, who not only allowed but compelled him to her embraces. John was first appointed to the see of Bologna; but the archbishopric of Ravenna, the second ecclesiastical dignity in Italy, falling vacant before he had been consecrated, he was advanced by the same dominant influence to that see. But Theodora bore with impatience the separation of two hundred miles from her lover. Anastasius III had succeeded Sergius (911) and occupied the papacy for rather more than two years; after him Lando for six months (913). On the death of Lando (914) by a more flagrant violation of the canonical rule than that charged against the dead body of Formosus, John was translated from the archiepiscopate of Ravenna to the see of Rome. But Theodora, if she indeed possessed this dictatorial power, and the clergy and people of Rome, if they yielded to her dictation, may have been actuated by nobler and better motives than her gratification of a lustful passion, if not by motives purely Christian. For however the archbishop of Ravenna might be no example of piety or holiness as the spiritual head of Christendom, he appears to have been highly qualified for the secular part of his office. He was a man of ability and daring, eminently wanted at this juncture to save Rome from becoming the prey of Mohammedan conquest, organising a powerful confederacy of neighbouring dukes to accomplish this purpose.

He placed himself at the head of the army, and for the first time the successor of St. Peter, the vicar of the Prince of peace, rode forth in his array to battle. And if success, as it doubtless was, might be interpreted as a manifestation of divine approval, the total discomfiture of the Saracens and the destruction of the troublesome fortress on the Garigliano seemed to sanction this new and unseemly character assumed by the pope. Even the apostles sanctioned or secured by their presence the triumph of the warlike pope.

For fourteen years (914-928), obscure as regards Rome and the pontificate, this powerful prelate occupied the see of Rome. If he gained it (a doubtful charge) by the vices and influence of the mother Theodora, he lost it, together with his life, by the no less flagrant vices and more monstrous power of the daughter Marozia.

THE INFAMOUS MAROZIA

[925-931 A.D.]

Theodora disappears; and Pope John X is found engaged in a fierce contest for the mastery of Rome with Marozia and her lover or husband, the marquis Alberic, by whom she had a son of the same name, afterwards tyrant of the city. The vigorous and martial pontiff succeeds in expelling Alberic from the city; Alberic probably met his death soon after (925). It is said that he was murdered by the Romans in revenge for some secret alliance entered into with the Hungarians, who were then wasting Italy, and had reached the very frontiers of Calabria.

The death of her husband increased rather than weakened the power of Marozia. Her personal charms, and her unscrupulous use of them, are said to have multiplied to an infinite extent her adherents. Her paramours made a strong party. The empire was vacant. There was no potentate to whom the pope could appeal. Marozia seized the castle of St. Angelo, and with this precious dowry, which commanded Rome, she sought to confirm her power by some splendid alliance. Guido, the duke of Tuscany, the son of Adalbert the marquis, did not disdain the nuptials with a profligate woman who brought Rome as her marriage portion.

John X was left to contest alone the government of Rome with Marozia and her Tuscan husband. Neither Rome nor the mistress of Rome regarded the real services rendered by John X to Christendom and to Italy. The former lover, as public scandal averred, of her mother, the saviour of Rome from the Saracens, was surprised in the Lateran palace by this daring woman. His brother Peter, as it appears, his great support in the contest for the government of Rome, and therefore the object of peculiar hatred to Guido and Marozia, was killed before his face. The pope was thrown into prison, where some months after he died (929) either of anguish and despair, or by more summary means. It was rumoured that he was smothered with a pillow. No means were too violent for Marozia to employ even against a pope.

Marozia did not venture at once to place her son on the papal throne. A Leo VI was pope for some months; a Stephen VII for two years and one month. That son may as yet have been too young even for this shameless woman to advance him to the highest ecclesiastical dignity; her husband Guido may have had some lingering respect for the sacred office, some struggling feelings of decency. But at the death of Stephen, Marozia again ruled alone in Rome; her husband Guido was dead, and her son was pope. John XI (according to the rumours of the time, of which Liutprand,[s] a follower of Hugo of Provence, may be accepted as a faithful reporter) was the offspring of Marozia by the pope Sergius; more trustworthy authorities make him the lawful son of her husband Alberic. But the obsequious clergy and people acquiesced without resistance in the commands of their patrician mistress; the son of Marozia is successor of St. Peter.

But the aspiring Marozia, not content with having been the wife of a marquis, the wife of the wealthy and powerful duke of Tuscany, perhaps the mistress of one, certainly the mother of another pope, looked still higher in her lustful ambition; she must wed a monarch. She sent to offer herself and the city of Rome to the new king of Italy, Hugo of Provence, who was not scrupulous in his amours, lawful or unlawful. Through policy or through passion he was always ready to form or to break these tender connections. The cautious Marozia would not allow his army to enter the city, but received her royal bridegroom in the castle of St. Angelo. There was celebrated this unhallowed marriage.

REBELLION OF ROME

[931-953 A.D.]

A Bishop of the Tenth Century

But though the Romans would brook the dominion of a Roman woman, they would not endure that of a foreigner. The coarse vices, the gluttony of the soldiers of Hugo offended the fastidious Italians. The insolence of Hugo himself provoked a rebellion. The nobles were called upon to perform menial offices, usual probably in the half feudal transalpine courts but alien to Italian manners. Alberic, the son of Marozia, was commanded to hold the water in which King Hugo washed his hands. Performing his office awkwardly or reluctantly, he spilled the water, and received a blow on the face from the king. Already may Alberic have been jealous of the promotion of his brother to the popedom, and have resented this devotion of his mother to her new foreign connections. He was a youth of daring; he organised a conspiracy among the nobles of Rome; he appealed to the old Roman pride: “Shall these Burgundians, of old the slaves of Rome, tyrannise over Romans?” At the tolling of the bell the whole people flocked to his banner, and attacked the castle of St. Angelo before Hugo could admit his own troops. Alberic remained master of the castle, of his mother, and of the pope. These two he cast into prison, defied the king of Italy, who made an ignominious retreat, and from that time remained master of Rome.

For four years Pope John XI lingered in fact a prisoner, at least without any share in the government of Rome, only permitted to perform his spiritual functions. Alberic ruled undisturbed. King Hugo attempted to bribe him to the surrender of Rome, by the offer of his daughter in marriage; the more crafty Alberic married the daughter, and retained possession of Rome. After the death of John a succession of popes, appointed, no doubt, by the sole will of Alberic, Leo VII, Stephen IX, Marinus II (or Martin III) Agapetus II, pass over the throne of the popedom, with hardly a sign of their power in Rome, no indication of their dignity, still less of their sanctity. They are still Popes beyond the Alps. Nor was the supreme pontiff alone depressed in these turbulent times. The great ecclesiastics are mingled in most of the treacherous and bloody transactions of the period. Individual energy gave the bishops of the city great power, but as they acted with as little restraint, so these prelates were treated with as little reverence as secular princes.

During the whole reign of Hugo of Provence, notwithstanding the open or treacherous assaults of that king, Alberic, whether as an armed tyrant commanding Rome from the castle of St. Angelo, or as the head of a republic and recognised by the voice of the Roman people, had maintained his authority. He had ruled for twenty-two years; he bequeathed that authority, on his death (953), to his son Octavian.

POPE JOHN XII

[953-963 A.D.]

Octavian, though only nineteen years old, aspired to unite, in his own person, the civil and spiritual supremacy. He was already in holy orders; two years after the death of his father Alberic, the pope Agapetus II died; and Octavian, by the voluntary or enforced suffrages of the clergy and the people, was elected pope. He was the first of the Roman pontiffs who changed, or rather took a second ecclesiastical name; the civil government seems to have been conducted in that of Octavian; the church was administered under that of John XII.

In the meantime had arisen in Germany a monarch more powerful than had appeared in Europe since the death of Charlemagne, Otto (Otho) the Great. Otto made some disposition for a visit to Rome to receive the imperial crown from the hands of the pope Agapetus. All Italy looked for the coming of the new Charlemagne. On his appearance resistance vanished. Berengar and Adalbert shut themselves up in their strongest fortresses. It was a triumphal procession to Pavia—to Rome. At Pavia Otto the Great was crowned king of Italy, at Rome the pope anointed him as emperor (962). Thenceforth the king of Germany claimed to be Western emperor. Otto swore to protect the church of Rome against all her enemies, to maintain her rights and privileges, to restore her lands and possessions, when he should have recovered them, and to make no change in the government of Rome without the sanction of the pope. John XII and the Roman people took the oath of allegiance to the emperor; they swore more particularly to abandon all connection with Berengar and his son. The oath was taken on the body of St. Peter.

Yet no sooner had the emperor returned to Pavia, than the perfidious John, finding that he had unwarily introduced a master instead of an obsequious ally, began to enter into correspondence with Adalbert, who, driven from every Italian city, had found refuge with the Saracens. Rumours of this treason reached the emperor. The noble German would not believe the monstrous perfidy; he sent some trustworthy officers to inquire into the truth; they returned with a fearful list of crimes, of license, and cruelty, with which the son of Alberic, who seems entirely to have sunk the character of pope in that of the young, warlike, secular prince, was charged by the unanimous voice of Rome. In July, 963, Otto marched upon the capital; the pontiff had reckoned on the cordial support of the people; they recoiled; the pope and Adalbert fled together from Rome.

TRIAL OF THE POPE

[963-964 A.D.]

The emperor summoned an ecclesiastical council; it was attended by the archbishops of Aquileia (by deputy), of Milan, of Ravenna, and Hamburg; by two German and two French metropolitans; by a great number of bishops and presbyters from Lombardy, Tuscany, and all parts of Italy. The whole militia of Rome assembled as a guard to the council round the church of St. Peter. The proceedings of the council mark the times. Inquiry was made why the pope was not present. A general cry of astonishment broke forth from the clergy and the people: “The very Iberians, Babylonians, and Indians have heard the monstrous crimes of the pope. He is not a wolf who condescends to sheep’s clothing; his cruelty, his diabolical dealings are open, avowed, disdain concealment.” The calmer justice of the emperor demanded specific charges. The cardinal presbyter rose and declared that he had seen Pope John celebrate mass without himself communicating. Another, that he had ordained a bishop in a stable; that he had taken bribes for the consecration of bishops, and had ordained a bishop of Todi who was but ten years old. “For his sacrileges, all eyes might behold them;” they alluded, probably, to the dilapidation of the churches, which were open to the weather, and so much out of repair that the worshippers could not assemble from fear lest the roofs should fall on their heads.

Darker charges followed, mingled with less heinous, in strange confusion, charges of adultery, incest, with the names of the females, one his father’s concubines, another a widow and her niece; he had made the Lateran palace a brothel; he had been guilty of hunting; charges of cruelty, the blinding of one dignified ecclesiastic, the castrating another, both had died under the operation; he had let loose fire and sword, and appeared himself constantly armed with sword, lance, helmet, and breast-plate. Both ecclesiastics and laymen accused him of drinking wine for the love of the devil; of invoking, when gambling, heathen deities, the devils Jove and Venus. He had perpetually neglected matins and vespers, and never signed himself with the sign of the cross.

The emperor could speak only German; he commanded the bishop of Cremona to address the assembly in Latin. Liutprand warned the council, he adjured them by the blessed Virgin and by St. Peter, not to bring vague accusations, nor such as could not be supported by accredited testimony, against the holy father. Bishops, deacons, clergy, and people with one voice replied, “If we do not prove these and more crimes against the pope, may St. Peter, who holds the keys of heaven, close the gates against us; may we be stricken with anathema, and may the anathema be ratified at the day of judgment!” They appealed to the whole army of Otto, whether they had not seen the pope in full armour on the other side of the Tiber; but for the river he had been taken in that attire.

Letters were sent summoning the pope to answer to these accusations; accusations some of them so obscene that they would have been thought immodest if made against stage-players. If the pope dreaded any assault from the enraged multitude, the emperor answered for the security of his person. The pope’s reply was brief, contemptuous: “John, the servant of God, to all the bishops. We hear that you design to elect a new pope; if you do, in the name of Almighty God, I excommunicate you; and forbid you to confer orders or to celebrate mass!”

Thrice was Pope John cited before the council. Messengers were sent to Tivoli; the answer was, “The pope was gone out to shoot.” Unprecedented evils demand unprecedented remedies. The emperor was urged to expel this new Judas from the seat of the apostle, and to sanction a new election. Leo, the chief secretary of the Roman see, was unanimously chosen, though a layman, in the room of the apostate John XII.

But the army of Otto, a feudal army, and bound to do service for a limited period, began to diminish; part had been injudiciously dispersed on distant enterprises; the Romans, as usual, soon grew weary of a foreign, a German yoke. The emissaries of Pope John watched the opportunity; a furious insurrection of the people broke out against the emperor and his pope. The valour of Otto, who forced the barricades of the bridge over the Tiber, subdued the rebellion (964). He took a terrible revenge. The supplications of Leo with difficulty arrested the carnage. Otto soon after left Rome, and marched towards Camerino (Camerinum) and Spoleto in pursuit of King Adalbert. The king Berengar and his wife Willa were taken in the castle of St. Leo, and sent into Germany.

[964-966 A.D.]

Hardly, however, had Otto left the city when a new rebellion, organised by the patrician females of Rome, rose on the defenceless Leo, and opened the gates of the city to John. Leo with difficulty escaped to the camp of Otto. The remorseless John re-entered the city, resumed his pontifical state, seized and mutilated the leaders of the imperial party; of one he cut off the right hand, of another the tongue, the nose, and two fingers; in this plight they appeared in the imperial camp. An obsequious synod reversed the decrees of that which had deposed John. The Roman people had now embraced the cause of the son of Alberic with more resolute zeal; for the emperor was compelled to delay till he could reassemble a force powerful enough to undertake the siege of the city. Ere this, however, his own vices had delivered Rome from her champion or her tyrant, Christendom from her worst pontiff. While he was pursuing his amours in a distant part of the city, Pope John XII was struck dead (May 14th, 964), by the hand of God, as the more religious supposed; others, by a more natural cause, the poniard of an injured husband.

But it was a Roman or Italian, perhaps a republican feeling which had latterly attached the citizens to the son of Alberic, not personal love or respect for his pontifical character. They boldly proceeded at once, without regard to the emperor, to the election of a new pope, Benedict V. Otto soon appeared before the walls; he summoned the city, and ordered every Roman who attempted to escape to be mutilated. The republic was forced to surrender. Benedict, the new pope, was brought before the emperor. The cardinal archdeacon, who had adhered to the cause of Leo, demanded by what right he had presumed to usurp the pontifical robes during the life-time of Leo, the lawful pope. “If I have sinned,” said the humbled prelate, “have mercy upon me.” The emperor is said to have wept. Benedict threw himself before the feet of Otto, drew off the sacred pallium, and delivered up his crosier to Leo. Leo broke it, and showed it to the people. Benedict was degraded to the order of deacon and sent into banishment in Germany. He died at Hamburg.

The grateful, or vassal pope, in a council, recognises the full right of the emperor Otto and his successors in the kingdom of Italy, as Adrian that of Charlemagne, to elect his own successors to the empire and to approve the pope. This right was to belong forever to the king of the Roman Empire, and to none else.

Early in the next year the emperor Otto recrossed the Alps. Leo VIII died March, 965, and a deputation from Rome followed the emperor to Germany to solicit the reinstatement of the exiled Benedict to the popedom. But Benedict was dead also. The bishop of Narni (John XIII), with the approbation or by the command of the emperor, was elected to the papacy.

[966-974 A.D.]

Scarcely had John XIII assumed the pontificate than the barons and the people began to murmur against the haughtiness of the new pontiff. They expelled him from the city with one consent. The prefect Rotfred, not without personal insult to the pope, assumed the government of Rome; for ten months John XIII was an exile from his see, at first a prisoner, afterwards in freedom. From his retreat in Campania he wrote with urgent entreaty to the emperor. Otto made the cause of John his own; for the third time he descended the Alps; the terror of his approach appalled the popular faction. In a counter insurrection in favour of the pope, Rotfred the prefect was killed, and the gates opened to the pontiff; he was received with hymns of joy and gratulation. At Christmas Otto entered Rome; and the emperor and the pope wreaked a terrible vengeance at that holy season on the rebellious city. The proud Roman titles seemed but worthy of derision to the German emperor and his vassal pope. The body of the prefect who had expelled John from the city was dug up out of his grave and torn to pieces. The consuls escaped with banishment beyond the Alps; but the twelve tribunes were hanged; the actual prefect was set upon an ass, with a wine-bag on his head, led through the streets, scourged, and thrown into prison. All Europe, hardened as it was to acts of inhumanity, shuddered at these atrocities.

A Bishop of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

The rebellion was crushed for a time; during the five remaining years of John’s pontificate the presence of Otto overawed the refractory Romans. He ruled in peace. At his death the undisturbed vacancy of the see for three months implies the humble consultation of Otto’s wishes (he had now returned to Germany) on the appointment of his successor.

The choice fell on Benedict VI, as usual of Roman birth (January 19th, 973). The factions of Rome now utterly baffle conjecture as to their motives, as to the passions, not the principles, which actuated their leaders. Twice (the second time after an interval of ten years, during which he was absent from Rome), the same man, a cardinal deacon, seizes and murders two popes; sets himself up as supreme pontiff; but though with power to commit these enormities, he cannot maintain on either occasion his ill-won tiara.

The formidable Otto the Great died the year of the accession of Benedict VI (December 25th, 967). Otto II, whose character was as yet unknown, had succeeded to the imperial throne; he had been already the colleague of his father in the empire. He had been crowned at Rome by Pope John XIII.

[974-985 A.D.]

The year after the accession of Otto II, on a sudden, Boniface, surnamed Francone, described as the son of Ferruccio, a name doubtless well known to his contemporaries, seized the unsuspecting pope Benedict and cast him into a dungeon (July, 974), where shortly after he was strangled. Boniface assumed the papacy, but he had miscalculated the strength of his faction; in one month he was forced to fly the city. Yet he fled not with so much haste but that he carried off all the treasures, even the sacred vessels from the church of St. Peter. He found his way to Constantinople, where he might seem to have been forgotten in his retreat. The peaceful succession of Benedict VII, the nephew or grandson of the famous Alberic, may lead to the conclusion that the faction of that family still survived, and was opposed to that of Boniface. The first act of Benedict, as might be expected, was the assembling a council for the excommunication of the murderer and anti-pope Boniface. This is the first and last important act in the barren annals of Pope Benedict VII. Under the protection of the emperor Otto II, or by the strength of his Roman faction, he retained peaceful possession of the see for nine years, an unusual period of quiet. He was succeeded, no doubt through the influence of the emperor, by John XIV, who was no Roman, but bishop of Pavia. But in the year of John’s accession (983), Otto II was preparing a great armament to avenge a terrible defeat by the Saracens. He had hardly fled from the conquering Saracens, and made his escape from a Greek ship by leaping into the sea and swimming ashore. He now threatened with all the forces of the realm to bridge the Straits of Messina, and reunite Sicily to the empire of the West. In the midst of his preparations he died at Rome.

The fugitive Boniface Francone had kept up his correspondence with Rome; he might presume on the unpopularity of a pontiff, if not of German birth, imposed by foreign influence, and now deprived of his all-powerful protector. With the same suddenness as before, he reappeared in Rome, seized the pope, imprisoned him in the castle of St. Angelo, of which important fortress he had become master, and there put him to death by starvation or by poison (August 20th, 984). He exposed the body to the view of the people, who dared not murmur. He seated himself, as it seems, unresisted, in the papal chair. The holy see was speedily delivered from this murderous usurper. He died suddenly. The people revenged themselves for their own base acquiescence in his usurpation by cowardly insults on his dead body; it was dragged through the streets, and at length buried, either by the compassion or the attachment (for Boniface must have had a powerful faction in Rome) of certain ecclesiastics. These bloody revolutions could not but destroy all reverence for their ecclesiastical rulers in the people of Rome.[g]

CHARLES KINGSLEY ON TEMPORAL POWER

A united Italy suited the views of the popes then no more than it does now. Not only did they conceive of Rome as still the centre of the western world, but more, their stock in trade was at Rome. The chains of St. Peter, the sepulchres of St. Peter and St. Paul, the catacombs filled with the bones of innumerable martyrs—these were their stock in trade. By giving these, selling these, working miracles with these, calling pilgrims from all parts of Christendom to visit these in situ, they kept up their power and their wealth.

Having obtained what they wanted from Pepin and Charlemagne, it was still their interest to pursue the same policy; to compound for their own independence, as they did with Charlemagne and his successors, by defending the pretences of foreign kings to the sovereignty of the rest of Italy. This has been their policy for centuries. It is their policy still; and that policy has been the curse of Italy. This fatal gift of the patrimony of St. Peter—as Dante saw, as Machiavelli saw, as all clear-sighted Italians have seen—has kept her divided, torn by civil wars, conquered and reconquered by foreign invaders. Unable, as a celibate ecclesiastic, to form his dominions into a strong hereditary kingdom; unable as the hierophant of a priestly caste to unite his people in the bonds of national life; unable, as Borgia tried to do, to conquer the rest of Italy for himself, and form it into a kingdom large enough to have weight in the balance of power, the pope was forced, again and again, to keep himself on his throne by intriguing with foreign princes, and calling in foreign arms; and the bane of Italy, from the time of Stephen III to that of Pius IX, was the temporal power of the pope. But on the popes, also, the Nemesis came. In building their power on the Roman relics, on the fable that Rome was the patrimony of Peter, they had built on a lie; and that lie avenged itself.

Having committed themselves to the false position of being petty kings of a petty kingdom, they had to endure continual treachery and tyranny from their foreign allies—to see not merely Italy, but Rome itself, insulted and even sacked by faithful Catholics, and to become more and more, as the centuries rolled on, the tools of those very kings whom they had wished to make their tools.

True, they defended themselves long, and with astonishing skill and courage. Their sources of power were two, the moral and the thaumaturgic, and they used them both; but when the former failed, the latter became useless. As long as their moral power was real; as long as they and their clergy were on the whole, in spite of enormous faults, the best men in Europe, so long the people believed in them, and in their thaumaturgic relics likewise. But they became by no means the best men in Europe. Then they began to think that after all it was more easy to work the material than the moral power—easier to work the bones than to work righteousness. They were deceived. Behold! when the righteousness was gone, the bones refused to work. People began to question the virtue of the bones, and to ask, “We can believe that the bones may have worked miracles for good men, but for bad men? We will examine whether they work any miracles at all.” And then, behold, it came out that the bones did not work miracles, and that possibly they were not saints’ bones at all; and then the storm came; and the lie, as all lies do, punished itself. That salt had lost its savour. They who had been the light of Europe, became its darkness; they who had been first, became last; a warning to mankind until the end of time, that on truth and virtue depends the only abiding strength.[h]

FOOTNOTES

[91] Another ecclesiastic of the same name was elected by the people immediately after the death of Zacharias; but he did not live to enjoy his elevation. On the third morning after his election he was struck with apoplexy, and as he had not been consecrated, he is sometimes omitted in the pontifical calendar. See Platina,[i] p. 152, and Fleury.[j] Baronius[k] appears to say that the omission of his name is wrong.

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CHAPTER III. THE HIGH NOON OF THE PAPACY

[985-1305 A.D.]

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

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

THE DREAM OF OTTO III

[999-1046 A.D.]

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

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

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

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

[1044-1054 A.D.]

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

THE GERMAN POPES

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

[1049-1064 A.D.]

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

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

THE COLLEGE OF CARDINALS

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

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

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

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

MILMAN ON THE MISSION OF THE PAPACY

[1064-1073 A.D.]

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

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

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

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

A Pope of the Eleventh Century

(Based on an effigy)

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

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

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

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

Simony

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

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

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

Celibacy of the Clergy

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

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

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

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

GREGORY’S SYNOD AT ROME

[1073-1074 A.D.]

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

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

[1074-1076 A.D.]

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

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

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

A Bishop of the Eleventh Century

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

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

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

[1076-1077 A.D.]

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

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

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

[1077-1125 A.D.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRYCE ON THE CONSEQUENCES OF THE CONCORDAT

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

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

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

RIVAL CLAIMANTS

[1119-1155 A.D.]

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

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

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

ADRIAN IV versus BARBAROSSA

[1155-1158 A.D.]

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

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

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

Restless and ambitious minds, like those of Adrian and Frederick Barbarossa, could not remain long at peace, when the power and privileges they possessed in their dependence upon each other were so ill defined. The first cause of dispute, after the pacification above related, was a letter which Adrian wrote to the emperor, accusing him of ingratitude for the benefits he had enjoyed through his ministration.

Adrian found it necessary to appease the anger which both Frederick and his subjects expressed at these instances of assumption, and tranquillity was for a brief space restored. But scarcely had the angry feelings generated in the late dispute subsided, when the pontiff again manifested his inclination to oppose the views of the emperor by refusing to confirm the archbishop of Ravenna, whom Frederick had elevated to that station, in his appointment. The fierceness with which the pontiff spoke and wrote on this occasion, threatened Christendom with a rupture as injurious to its peace as that between the unfortunate Henry and Gregory VII. But Frederick’s firmness was unshaken; and a barrier was thus erected against the attempts of the pope, which, intended only as a protection to particular rights, did, in reality, afford support to the universal principles of civil government. To Adrian’s threat that he would deprive him of his crown, he replied that he held his crown, not from him but from his own royal predecessors. “In the days of Constantine,” he asked, “had St. Silvester anything to do with the royal dignity? Yet this was the prince to whom the church was indebted for its peace and its liberty: and all that you enjoy as pope, whence comes it but from the emperors? Render unto God that which is God’s, and to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s. Our churches and our cities are shut against your cardinals; because they are not preachers but robbers, they are not peacemakers but plunderers; we see that instead of coming to preach the Gospel and promote peace, their whole desire and endeavour is to amass gold and silver. When we find that they are what the church would have them, we will refuse them nothing good for their support. It is horrible that pride, that monster so detestable, should be able to steal even into the chair of St. Peter.”[c]

ADRIAN’S FIRMNESS

A Bishop of the Twelfth Century

[1158 A.D.]

Peace became more hopeless. As a last resource, six cardinals on the part of the pope, and six German bishops on that of the emperor, were appointed to frame a treaty. But the pope demanded the re-establishment of the compact made with his predecessor Eugenius. The imperial bishops reproached the pope with his own violation of that treaty by his alliance with the king of Sicily; the Germans unanimously rejected the demands of the pope: and now the emperor received with favour a deputation from the senate and people of Rome. These ambassadors of the republican party had watched; had been present at the rupture of the negotiations. The pope, with the embers of Arnold’s rebellions mouldering under his feet; with the emperor at the head of all Germany, the prelates as well as the princes; with no ally but the doubtful, often perfidious Norman, stood unshaken; betrayed no misgivings. He threatened the emperor with a public excommunication.

Did the bold sagacity of Adrian foresee the heroic resolution with which Milan and her confederate Lombard cities would many years afterwards, and after some dire reverses and long oppression, resist the power of Barbarossa? Did he calculate with prophetic foresight the strength of Lombard republican freedom? Did he anticipate the field of Legnano, when the whole force of the Teutonic empire was broken before the carroccio of Milan? Already was the secret treaty framed with Milan, Brescia, and Crema. These cities bound themselves not to make peace with the emperor without the consent of the pope and his Catholic successor. Adrian was preparing for the last act of defiance, the open declaration of war, the excommunication of the emperor, which he was pledged to pronounce after the signature of the treaty with the republics, when his death put an end to this strange conflict, where each antagonist was allied with a republican party in the heart of his adversary’s dominions. Adrian IV died at Anagni; his remains were brought to Rome, and interred with the highest honours, and with the general respect if not the grief of the city, in the church of St. Peter. Even the ambassadors of Frederick were present at the funeral. So ended the poor English scholar, at open war with perhaps the mightiest sovereign who had reigned in transalpine Europe since Charlemagne.[e]

TWO RIVAL POPES

[1158-1164 A.D.]

The death of Adrian saved the church from the danger which had threatened it during the government of that fierce and overbearing pontiff. But, while delivered from one set of evils, it was surrounded by others little less calculated to injure its interests. The cardinals, having assembled to elect a new pope, chose by a large majority of their body Rolando, a cardinal, and chancellor of the Roman church. Their vote, however, was opposed by Cardinal Octavian, who had expected to be nominated by his colleagues to the vacant dignity; and when Rolando, who assumed the name of Alexander III, was invested with the pontifical cope, he rudely and sacrilegiously pulled it from his shoulders, and, but for the interference of the persons present, would have put it on himself. As he was disappointed in this, he obtained, by signal, a cope of the same kind, which he suddenly threw over his shoulders, placing, in his haste, the hind part before. Loud laughter followed this mistake; but Octavian felt no shame at the mingled ridicule and rebuke with which he was assailed. Going forth from the assembly, which he awed into silence by a band of armed men, he exercised, under the name of Victor IV, the part of sovereign pontiff; and for some days kept Alexander in close confinement.

The emperor Frederick did not look with indifference on these occurrences. A division in the church was equivalent to a great increase in his own power; and he warmly espoused the cause of Octavian, chiefly, as it appears, because he was the head of a faction. He at last, however, summoned a council to consider the question between the rival popes. The council assembled at Pavia, and Octavian was declared pope by the fifty bishops, the numerous abbots, and other dignitaries, of whom the meeting was composed. But Alexander was supported by the whole of that powerful party which contended for the doctrine of papal supremacy; and despising the decree of deposition passed against him at Pavia, he excommunicated the emperor for the part he had taken, and absolved his subjects from their oath of allegiance. Victor, on the other hand, was recognised as lawful pope, not only in Germany, but in England and France; by the monarchs of which countries he was received at Couci on the Loire, with all the pomp and ceremony which had been demanded for his successors by the haughty Adrian.

[1164-1198 A.D.]

He died in the year 1164; but the schism was continued by the immediate election of Paschal III, who retained the semblance of authority about three years. Alexander, on the death of Victor, had ventured to return to Rome, which he did not dare to attempt during the life-time of that ecclesiastic. A pestilence, which swept off the flower of Frederick’s army, saved the pope from ruin; and the emperor, obliged as he was to make his escape into Germany as he best might, at length expressed his willingness to heal the schism which he had created in the church. Peace was accordingly restored, and Alexander returned.

On the death of Alexander, Ubaldo, bishop of Ostia, was elected without opposition, and assumed the name of Lucius III (1181-1185), and it has been noted, that at his election the cardinals first appropriated the right of choosing the supreme pontiff without the interference of the people, or of the other orders of the clergy. Popular indignation was loudly expressed. Obliged to seek safety by flight, he called upon the great European states to furnish him with supplies for the support of his rights against the disaffected citizens. His claims were allowed, and the riches of England and other countries were poured freely into his treasury. With these he made head against the insurgents; but such was the fierceness with which they resisted him, that they tore out the eyes of the clergy whom they met beyond the walls of the city; and obliged him to fix his residence at Verona, where he died in 1185. Urban III, Gregory VIII, and Clement III, passed their brief pontificates at a distance from Rome. The last-named pope, however, made peace with the senate and the people; and his successor, Celestine III, was enabled, by the strength of his position, to exercise the most important of his assumed privileges without interruption. Henry VI, who at one time received from his hands[98] the imperial crown, was at another punished by him with the ban of excommunication.[c] On his death he was succeeded by Innocent III.

INNOCENT III

[1198 A.D.]

Under Innocent III, the papal power rose to its utmost height.[99] The thirteenth century is nearly commensurate with this supremacy of the pope. Innocent III at its commencement calmly exercised as his right, and handed down strengthened and almost irresistible to his successors, that which, at its close, Boniface asserted with repulsive and ill-timed arrogance, endangered, undermined, and shook to its base.

The essential inherent supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, as of the soul over the body, as of eternity over time, as of Christ over Cæsar, as of God over man, was now an integral part of Christianity. Ideas obtain authority and dominion, not altogether from their intrinsic truth, but rather from their constant asseveration, especially when they fall in with the common hopes and fears, the wants and necessities of human nature. The mass of mankind have neither leisure nor ability to examine them; they fatigue, and so compel the world into their acceptance; more particularly if it is the duty, the passion, and the interest of one great associated body to perpetuate them, while it is neither the peculiar function, nor the manifest advantage of any large class or order to refute them.

The unity of the vast Christian republic was an imposing conception, which, even now that history has shown its hopeless impossibility, still infatuates lofty minds; its impossibility, since it demands for its head not merely that infallibility in doctrine so boldly claimed in later times, but absolute impeccability, in every one of its possessors; more than impeccability, an all-commanding, indefeasible, unquestionable majesty of virtue, holiness, and wisdom. Without this it is a baseless tyranny, a senseless usurpation. In those days it struck in with the whole feudal system, which was one of strict gradation and subordination; to the hierarchy of church and state was equally wanting the crown, the sovereign liege lord.

When this idea was first promulgated in all its naked sternness by Gregory VII, it had come into collision with other ideas rooted with almost equal depth in the mind of man, that especially of the illimitable Cæsarian power, which though transferred to a German emperor, was still a powerful tradition, and derived great weight from its descent from Charlemagne. The humiliation of the emperor was degradation; it brought contempt on the office, scarcely redeemed by the abilities, successes, or even virtues of new sovereigns; the humiliation of the pope was a noble suffering in the cause of God and truth, the depression of patient holiness under worldly violence. In every schism the pope who maintained the loftiest churchmanship had eventually gained the superiority which the imperialising popes had sunk into impotence, obscurity, ignominy.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE CRUSADES ON PAPAL POWER

[1198-1201 A.D.]

The Crusades, as elsewhere described, had made the pope not merely the spiritual, but in some sort the military suzerain of Europe; he had the power of summoning all Christendom to his banner; the raising the cross, the standard of the pope, was throughout Europe a general and compulsory levy, the Heerbann of all who bore arms, of all who could follow an army. That which was a noble act of devotion had become a duty; not to assume the cross was sin and impiety. The Crusades thus became a kind of forlorn hope upon which all the more dangerous and refractory of the temporal sovereigns might be employed, so as to waste their strength, if not lose their lives, by the accidents of the journey, or by the sword of the Mohammedan. If they resisted, the fearful excommunication hung over them, and was ratified by the fears and by the wavering allegiance of their subjects. If they obeyed and returned, as most of them did, with shame and defeat, they returned shorn of their power, lowered in the public estimation, and perhaps still pursued, on account of their ill success, with the inexorable interdict. It was thus by trammelling their adversaries with vows which they could not decline, and from which they could not extricate themselves; by thus consuming their wealth and resources on this wild and remote warfare, that the popes, who themselves decently eluded, or were prevented by age or alleged occupations from embarkation in these adventurous expeditions, broke and wasted away the power and influence of the emperors.

The Crusades, too, had now made the western world tributary to the popedom; the vast subventions raised for the Holy Land were to a certain extent at the disposal of the pope. The taxation of the clergy on his authority could not be refused for such an object; a tenth of all the exorbitant wealth of the hierarchy passed through his hands. An immense financial system grew up; papal collectors were in every land, papal bankers in every capital to transmit these subsidies.

But after all none of these accessory and, in some degree, fortuitous aids, could have raised the papal authority to its commanding height,[100] had it not possessed more sublime and more lawful claims to the reverence of mankind. It was still an assertion of eternal principles of justice, righteousness, and humanity. However it might trample on all justice, sacrifice righteousness to its own interests, plunge Europe in desolating wars, perpetuate strife in states, set sons in arms against their fathers, fathers against sons, it was still proclaiming a higher ultimate end. The papal language, the language of the clergy, was still ostentatiously, profoundly religious; it professed, even if itself did not always respect, even though it tampered with, the awful sense of retribution before an all-knowing, all-righteous God. In his highest pride, the pope was still the servant of the servants of God; in all his cruelty he boasted of his kindness to the transgressor; every contumacious emperor was a disobedient son; the excommunication was the voice of a parent, who affected at least reluctance to chastise.

If this great idea was ever to be realised of a Christian republic with a pope at its head—and that a pope of a high Christian character (in some respects, in all perhaps but one, in tolerance and gentleness almost impossible in his days, and the want of which, far from impairing, confirmed his strength)—none could bring more lofty, more various qualifications for its accomplishment, none could fall on more favourable times than Innocent III. Innocent was Giovanni Lothario Conti, an Italian of noble birth, but not of a family inextricably involved in the petty quarrels and interests of the princedoms of Romagna. He was of the Conti,[101] who derived their name in some remote time from their dignity. The elevation of his uncle to the pontificate as Clement III paved the way to his rapid rise. He was elevated in his twenty-ninth year to the cardinalate under the title vacated by his uncle.

Celestine on his death-bed had endeavoured to nominate his successor; he had offered to resign the papacy if the cardinals would elect John of Colonna. But, even if consistent with right and with usage, the words of dying sovereigns rarely take effect. Of twenty-eight cardinals, five only were absent; of the rest the unanimous vote fell on the youngest of their body, on the cardinal (Giovanni) Lothario. Lothario was only thirty-seven years old, almost an unprecedented age for a pope.[102] The cardinals who proclaimed him saluted him by the name of Innocent, in testimony of his blameless life. In his inauguration sermon broke forth the character of the man; the unmeasured assertion of his dignity, protestations of humility which have a sound of pride. “Ye see what manner of servant that is whom the Lord hath set over his people; no other than the vicegerent of Christ, the successor of Peter. He stands in the midst between God and man; below God, above man; less than God, more than man. He judges all, is judged by none, for it is written, ‘I will judge.’ But he whom the pre-eminence of dignity exalts is lowered by his office of a servant, that so humility may be exalted, and pride abased; for God is against the high-minded, and to the lowly he shows mercy; and he who exalteth himself shall be abased. Every valley shall be lifted up, every hill and mountain laid low!”

The letters in which he announced his election to the king of France, and to the other realms of Christendom, blend a decent but exaggerated humility with the consciousness of power; Innocent’s confidence in himself transpires through his confidence in the divine protection.

The state of Christendom might have tempted a less ambitious prelate to extend and consolidate his supremacy. Wherever Innocent cast his eyes over Christendom and beyond the limits of Christendom, appeared disorder, contested thrones, sovereigns oppressing their subjects, subjects in arms against their sovereigns, the ruin of the Christian cause. In Italy the crown of Naples on the brows of an infant; the fairest provinces under the galling yoke of fierce German adventurers; the Lombard republics, Guelf or Ghibelline, at war within their walls, at war or in implacable animosity against each other; the empire, distracted by rival claimants for the throne, one vast scene of battle, intrigue, almost of anarchy; the tyrannical and dissolute Philip Augustus king of France, before long the tyrannical and feeble John of England.

The Byzantine Empire is tottering to its fall; the kingdom of Jerusalem confined almost to the city of Acre. Every realm seems to demand, or at least to invite, the interposition, the mediation, of the head of Christendom; in every land one party at least, or one portion of society, would welcome his interference in the last resort for refuge or for protection.

Nor did Innocent shrink from that which might have crushed a less energetic spirit to despair; from the Jordan to the Atlantic, from the Mediterranean to beyond the Baltic, his influence is felt and confessed; his vast correspondence shows at once the inexhaustible activity of his mind; he is involved simultaneously or successively in the vital interests of every kingdom in the western world.[e]

THE AUTOCRACY OF INNOCENT III

In order to secure Sicily for her son, the empress Constantia, pressed hard by parties, was obliged to accept the papal investment under the new conditions prescribed by the pontiff. After Constantia’s death (the 27th of November, 1198) Innocent ruled over all Sicily in the character of guardian. Still further the disputed imperial election, by which Germany was divided between Philip, duke of Swabia, and Otto, duke of Saxony, encouraged the pope to a larger extension of his power. Immediately after his accession, Innocent had already taken the oath of fealty to the imperial præfectus urbis; now he dislodged the vassals of the empire from the territory of Matilda, and established in Tuscany a civic league.

[1201-1216 A.D.]

After he had thus consolidated his power in Italy, he commenced an energetic interference in German politics; for he forthwith claimed the right to decide on a disputed imperial election. He must naturally have been inclined rather to the Guelf than to the Hohenstaufen candidate, so maintaining his pretensions he actually decided (1201) in favour of Otto IV. However, he was resisted with great energy by Philip’s party, and the flame of discord only burned so much the brighter in Germany. As Philip continued to gain more decisive advantages over his enemy, Innocent began negotiations with him, which seemed fraught with danger to Otto. Meanwhile Philip was murdered by Otto of Wittelsbach in Bamberg (1208). Otto IV was then universally recognised as emperor, and after he had satisfied the pope’s demands in all points he was crowned by him. But so soon as Otto had reached this goal of his wishes, he began again to vindicate the imperial rights in Italy, and to overthrow the pope’s new creations, without suffering himself to be turned from his path by the sentence of excommunication and dethronement which the deluded Innocent pronounced against him in November, 1210. Now he himself encouraged the canvass of the only surviving Hohenstaufen. Frederick appeared in Germany in 1212, and, upheld as he was by the pope and the king of France, he quickly won most of all ranks to his side. On the 25th of July, 1215, he received the German king’s crown at Aachen, and Otto down to his death (1218) had to content himself with his ancestral territories in Brunswick.

UNIVERSAL SWAY OF THE POPE

On every side, the thunder of Rome broke over the heads of princes. A certain Swero is excommunicated for usurping the crown of Norway. A legate, in passing through Hungary, is detained by the king: Innocent writes in tolerably mild terms to this potentate, but fails not to intimate that he might be compelled to prevent his son’s accession to the throne. The king of Leon had married his cousin, a princess of Castile. Innocent subjects the kingdom to an interdict. When the clergy of Leon petition him to remove it, because when they ceased to perform their functions the laity paid no tithes and listened to heretical teachers when orthodox mouths were mute, he consented that divine service with closed doors, but not the rites of burial, might be performed. The king at length gave way, and sent back his wife.

But a more illustrious victory of the same kind was obtained over Philip Augustus, who, having repudiated Ingeborg of Denmark, had contracted another marriage. The conduct of the king, though not without the usual excuse of those times, nearness of blood, was justly condemned; and Innocent did not hesitate to visit his sins upon the people by a general interdict. This, after a short demur from some bishops, was enforced throughout France; the dead lay unburied, and the living were cut off from the offices of religion, till Philip, thus subdued, took back his divorced wife. The submission of such a prince, not feebly superstitious, like his predecessor Robert, nor vexed with seditions, like the emperor Henry IV, but brave, firm, and victorious, is perhaps the proudest trophy on the scutcheon of Rome.

Compared with this, the subsequent triumph of Innocent over the pusillanimous John seems cheaply gained, though the surrender of a powerful kingdom into the vassalage of the pope may strike us as a proof of stupendous baseness on one side and audacity on the other.

A disputed election furnished Innocent with an opportunity of thrusting forward the cardinal Stephen Langton into the archbishopric of Canterbury against the king’s will. When John resisted with anger, the pope laid England under an interdict, in 1208, and afterwards excommunicated the king; the latter sought by reckless cruelty to avenge himself on the clergy, and by severe oppression to make sure of his vassals. At last Innocent deposed him from his kingdom, and handed it over to the king of France. But while he was arming himself for the conquest, John, unable to trust his vassals, yielded in all points, and even received his kingdom in fee from the pope under circumstances of the greatest humiliation. Now was England yielded up to the discretion of an arbitrary pope and a contemptible king; this united the prelates and the barons to wrest Magna Charta from the king in 1215. In vain the pope with spiritual and the king with temporal weapons strove to effect its repeal; John’s death, however, in 1216, quickly put an end to internal discord.

Still greater prospects seemed to open themselves before the pope in Constantinople. Although the enthusiasm for crusades was already much diminished, nevertheless Innocent had succeeded, by unwearied efforts, in collecting a new army at Venice in 1202. The crafty doge, Enrico Dandolo, notwithstanding all papal admonitions, had first made use of the army for the reconquest of Zara (Jadera); it was then induced by the magnificent promises of a Greek prince, Alexius, to undertake an expedition against Constantinople; and when the reinstated emperor Isaac Angelus was unable to fulfil these promises, Constantinople was conquered, and a Latin empire established there, by the exaltation of Baldwin, count of Flanders, to the throne. Thus the church of Constantinople seemed now to be brought into subjection to the Roman see. However, even now, no one doubted the precariousness of this acquisition. For the new empire already contained the germ of dissolution; on the other hand it completely foiled the powerful enterprise in behalf of Palestine.

In the latter year of his life Innocent devoted especial attention to the Holy Land: King Frederick took the cross even at his coronation; and at the Lateran council of the year 1215, one of the most brilliant which had ever been held, the accomplishment of another crusade was one of the chief ends in view. The enthusiasm for the Holy Land was indeed by no means extinct; but in Germany the continuance of the twofold reign of Frederick and Otto led to many unfavourable opinions of the Roman see, which necessarily obstructed its readiness to undertake a fresh crusade.[k]

MILMAN’S ESTIMATE OF INNOCENT III

[1198-1216 A.D.]

In the full vigour of his manhood died Innocent III, 1216. He, of all the popes, had advanced the most exorbitant pretensions, and those pretensions had been received by an age most disposed to accept them with humble deference. The high and blameless, in some respects wise and gentle, character of Innocent might seem to approach more nearly than any one of the whole succession of Roman bishops to the ideal height of a supreme pontiff; in him, if ever, might appear to be realised the churchman’s highest conception of the vicar of Christ.

Gregory VII and Boniface VIII, the first and the last of the aggressive popes, and the aged Gregory IX, had no doubt more rugged warfare to encounter, fiercer and more unscrupulous enemies to subdue. But in all these there was a personal sternness, a contemptuous haughtiness; theirs was a worldly majesty. The pride of Innocent was calmer, more self-possessed; his dignity was less disturbed by degrading collisions with rude adversaries; he died on his unshaken throne, in the plenitude of his seemingly unquestioned power. Yet if we pause and contemplate, as we cannot but pause and contemplate, the issue of this highest, in a certain sense noblest and most religious contest for the papal ascendency over the world of man, there is an inevitable conviction of the unreality of that papal power. With all the grandeur of his views, with all the persevering energy of his measures, throughout Innocent’s reign, everywhere we behold failure, everywhere immediate discomfiture, or transitory success which paved the way for future disaster. The higher the throne of the pope the more manifestly were its foundations undermined, unsound, unenduring.

Even Rome does not always maintain her peaceful subservience. Her obedience is interrupted, precarious; that of transient awe, not of deep attachment, or rooted reverence. In the empire it is impossible not to burden the memory of Innocent with the miseries of the long civil war. Otto without the aid of the pope could not have maintained the contest for a year; with all the pope’s aid he had sunk into contempt, almost insignificance; he was about to be abandoned, if not actually abandoned, by the pope himself. The casual blow of the assassin alone prevented the complete triumph of Philip. Already he had extorted his absolution; Innocent was compelled to yield, and could not yield without loss of dignity. The triumph of Otto leads to as fierce, and more perilous resistance to the papal power than could have been expected from the haughtiness of the Hohenstaufen. The pope has an irresistible enemy in Italy itself. Innocent is compelled to abandon the great object of the papal policy, the breaking the line of succession in the house of Swabia, and to assist in the elevation of a Swabian emperor. He must yield to the union of the crown of Sicily with that of Germany, and so bequeath to his successors the obstinate and perilous strife with Frederick II.

A Thirteenth Century Monk

In France, Philip Augustus is forced to seem, yet only seem, to submit; the miseries of his unhappy wife are but aggravated by the papal protection. The death of Agnes of Méran, rather than Innocent’s authority, heals the strife. The sons of the proscribed concubine succeed to the throne of France.

In England the barons refuse to desert John when under the interdict of the pope; when the pope becomes the king’s ally, resenting the cession of the realm, they withdraw their allegiance. Even in Stephen Langton, who owes his promotion to the pope, the Englishman prevails over the ecclesiastic; the Great Charter is extorted from the king when under the express protection of the holy see, and maintained resolutely against the papal sentence of abrogation; and in the Great Charter is laid the first stone of the religious as well as the civil liberties of the land.

Venice, in the crusade, deludes, defies, baffles the pope. The crusaders become her army, besiege, fight, conquer for her interests. In vain the pope protests, threatens, anathematises; Venice calmly proceeds in the subjugation of Zara. To the astonishment, the indignation of the pope, the crusaders’ banners wave not over Jerusalem, but over Constantinople. But for her own wisdom, Venice might have given an emperor to the capital of the East; she secures the patriarchate almost in defiance of the pope; only when she has entirely gained her ends does she submit to the petty and unregarded vengeance of the pope.

Even in the Albigensian war the success was indeed complete; heresy was crushed, but by means of which Innocent disapproved in his heart. He had let loose a terrible force, which he could neither arrest nor control. The pope can do everything but show mercy or moderation. He could not shake off, the papacy has never shaken off, the burden of its complicity in the remorseless carnage perpetrated by the crusaders in Languedoc, in the crimes and cruelties of Simon de Montfort. A dark and ineffaceable stain of fraud and dissimulation too has gathered around the fame of Innocent himself.[103] Heresy was quenched in blood; but the earth sooner or later gives out the terrible cry of blood for vengeance against murderers and oppressors.

The great religious event of this pontificate, the foundation of the Mendicant orders, that which perhaps perpetuated, or at least immeasurably strengthened, the papal power for two centuries, was extorted from the reluctant pope. Both St. Dominic and St. Francis were coldly received, almost contemptuously repelled. It was not till either his own more mature deliberation or wiser counsel, which took the form of divine admonition, prevented this fatal error and prophetically revealed the secret of their strength and of their irresistible influence throughout Christendom, that Innocent awoke to wisdom. He then bequeathed these two great standing armies to the papacy; armies maintained without cost, sworn, more than sworn, bound by the unbroken chains of their own zeal and devotion to unquestioning, unhesitating service throughout Christendom, speaking all languages. They were colonies of religious militia, natives of every land, yet under foreign control and guidance. Their whole power, importance, perhaps possessions rested on their fidelity to the see of Rome, that fidelity guaranteed by the charter of their existence. Well might they appear so great as they are seen by the eye of Dante, like the cherubim and seraphim in paradise.[e]

FREDERICK II AT WAR WITH THE PAPACY

[1216-1244 A.D.]

Honorius III, previously called Cencio Savelli, who succeeded Innocent, 1216, and governed the Roman church more than ten years, did not perform so many deeds worthy of being recorded; yet he was very careful that the Romish power should receive no diminution. Pursuing this course, he had a grievous falling out with the emperor Frederick II, a magnanimous prince, whom he himself had crowned at Rome in the year 1220. Frederick, imitating his grandfather, laboured to establish and enlarge the authority of the emperors in Italy, to depress the minor states and republics of Lombardy, and to diminish the immense wealth and power of the pontiffs and the bishops; and to accomplish these objects, he continually deferred the crusade, which he had promised with an oath. Honorius, on the other hand, continually urged Frederick to enter on his expedition to Palestine; yet he secretly encouraged, animated, and supported the cities and republics that resisted the emperor, and raised various impediments to the latter’s increasing power. Still, this hostility did not, at present, break out in open war.

But under Gregory IX—whose former name was Ugolino, and who was elevated from the bishopric of Ostia to the pontificate, 1227, an old man, but still bold and resolute—the fire, which had been long burning in secret, burst into a flame.[104] In the year 1227 the pontiff excommunicated the emperor, who still deferred his expedition to Palestine; but without proceeding in due form of ecclesiastical law, and without regarding the emperor’s excuse of ill health. In the year 1228 the emperor sailed with his fleet to Palestine; but instead of waging war as he was bound to do, he made a truce with Saladin on recovering Jerusalem. While he was absent the pontiff raised war against him in Apulia, and endeavoured to excite all Europe to oppose him. Therefore Frederick hastened back, in the year 1229, and after vanquishing his enemies, made his peace with the pontiff in the year 1230. But this peace could not be durable, as Frederick would not submit to the control of the pontiff. Therefore, as the emperor continued to press heavily on the republics of Lombardy, which were friendly to the pontiff, and transferred Sardinia, which the pontiff claimed as part of the patrimony of the church, to his son Enzio; and wished to withdraw Rome itself from the power of the pontiff; and did other things very offensive to Gregory—the pontiff, in the year 1239, again laid him under anathemas; and accused him to all the sovereigns of Europe of many crimes and enormities, and particularly of speaking contemptuously of the Christian religion.

The emperor, on the other hand, avenged the injuries that he received, both by written publications and by his military operations in Italy, in which he was for the most part successful; and thus he defended his reputation, and also brought the pontiff into perplexity and difficulty. To rescue himself, in some measure, in the year 1240 Gregory summoned a general council to meet at Rome, intending to hurl the emperor from his throne by the united suffrages of the assembled fathers. But Frederick, in the year 1241, captured the Genoese fleet, which was carrying a great part of the fathers to the council at Rome, and seizing as well their treasures as themselves, he cast them into prison. Broken down by these calamities, and by others of no less magnitude, Gregory shortly after sank into the grave.

The successor of Gregory, Goffredo Castiglione of Milan, who assumed the name of Celestine IV, died before his consecration; and after a long interregnum, in the year 1243, Senibaldi, a Genoese, descended from the counts Fieschi, succeeded under the pontifical name of Innocent IV, a man inferior to none of his predecessors in arrogance and insolence of temper. Between him and Frederick there were at first negotiations for peace; but the terms insisted on by the pontiff were deemed too harsh by the emperor. Hence Innocent, feeling himself unsafe in any part of Italy, in 1244 removed from Genoa to Lyons in France; and the next year assembled a council there, in the presence of which, but without its approbation (whatever the Roman writers may affirm to the contrary), he declared Frederick unworthy of the imperial throne.

[1244-1274 A.D.]

This most unrighteous decision of the pontiff had such influence upon the German princes, who were infected with the superstition of the times, that they elected first Henry, landgraf of Thuringia, and on his death William, count of Holland, to the imperial throne. Frederick continued the war vigorously and courageously in Italy, and with various successes, until a dysentery terminated his life in Apulia, on the 13th of December, 1250. On the death of his foe, Innocent returned to Italy in the year 1251. From this time especially (though their origin was much earlier) the two noted factions of Guelfs and Ghibellines, of which the former sided with the pontiffs and the latter with the emperors, most unhappily rent asunder and devastated all Italy.

Alexander IV, whose name as count of Segni and bishop of Ostia was Rinaldo, became pontiff on the death of Innocent (1254) and reigned six years and six months. Excepting some efforts to put down a grandson of Frederick II, called Conradin, and to quiet the perpetual commotions of Italy, he busied himself more in regulating the internal affairs of the church than in national concerns. The mendicant friars, Dominicans and Franciscans, are under especial obligations to him. Urban IV, before his election to the pontificate in 1261, was James, patriarch of Jerusalem, a man born of obscure parentage at Troyes. He distinguished himself more by instituting the festival of the Body of Christ than by any other achievement. He indeed formed many projects: but he executed few of them, being prevented by death, in the year 1264, after a short reign of three years. Not much longer was the reign of Clement IV, a Frenchman and bishop of Sabina, under the name of Guido Fulcodi (Guy Foulques), who was created pontiff in the year 1265. Yet he is better known on several accounts, but especially for conferring the kingdom of Naples on Charles of Anjou, brother to Louis IX, the king of France. Charles is well known to have beheaded Conradin, the only surviving grandson of Frederick II, after conquering him in battle, and this, if not by the counsel, at least with the consent of the pontiff.[105]

On the death of Clement IV[106] there were vehement contests among the cardinals, respecting the election of a new pontiff; which continued till the third year, when, at last, 1271, Teobaldo of Piacenza, archdeacon of Liège, was chosen, and assumed the name of Gregory X. He had been called from Palestine, where he had resided; and having witnessed the depressed state of the Christians in the Holy Land, nothing more engaged his thoughts than sending them succour.

COUNCIL AT LYONS

[1274-1294 A.D.]

Accordingly, as soon as he was consecrated, he appointed a council to be held at Lyons in France, and attended it in person in the month of May, 1274. The principal subjects discussed were the re-establishment of the Christian dominion in the East, and the reunion of the Greek and Latin churches. This has commonly been reckoned the fourteenth general council, and is particularly noticeable for the new regulations it established for the election of Roman pontiffs, and the celebrated provision which is still in force requiring the cardinal electors to be shut up in conclave. Neither did the pontiff, though of a milder disposition than many others, hesitate to repeat and inculcate that odious maxim of Gregory VII, that the pontiff is supreme lord of the world, and especially of the Roman Empire. For in the year 1271 he sent a menacing letter to the princes of Germany, admonishing them to elect an emperor, and without regarding the wishes or the claims of Alfonso, king of Castile; otherwise he would appoint a head of the empire himself. Accordingly, the princes assembled, and elected Rudolf I, of the house of Habsburg.

Gregory X died in the year 1276, and his three immediate successors were all chosen and died in the same year. Innocent V, previously Pietro di Tarantaisia, was a Dominican monk, and bishop of Ostia. Adrian V was a Genoese, named Ottoboni, and cardinal of St. Adrian. John XXI, previously Pedro, bishop of Tusculum, was a native of Portugal. The next pontiff, who came to the chair in 1277, reigned longer. He was Giovanni Gaetano, of the family of Ursini, a Roman, and cardinal of St. Nicholas, who assumed the title of Nicholas III. He greatly enlarged what is called the patrimony of St. Peter; and, as his actions show, had formed other great projects, which he would undoubtedly have accomplished, as he was a man of energy and enterprise, had he not prematurely died in the year 1280.

His successor, Martin IV, elected by the cardinals in 1281, was a French nobleman, Simon de Brion, a man of equal boldness and energy of character with Nicholas. For he excommunicated Michael Palæologus, the Greek emperor, because he had violated the compact of union with the Latins, which was settled at the Council of Lyons. Pedro of Aragon he deprived of his kingdoms and of all his property, because he had seized upon Sicily; and he bestowed them gratuitously on Charles, son to the king of France. He was projecting many other things, consonant with the views of the pontiffs, when he was suddenly overtaken by death in 1285. His plans were prosecuted by his successor, Giacomo Savelli, who was elected in 1285 and took the name of Honorius IV. But a distressing disease in his joints, of which he died in 1287, prevented him from attempting anything further. Nicholas IV, previously Girolamo d’Ascoli, bishop of Palestrina, who attained to the pontifical chair in 1288, and died in 1292, was able to attend to the affairs both of the church and of the nations with more diligence and care. Hence he is represented in history sometimes as the arbiter in the disputes of sovereign princes, sometimes as the strenuous asserter of the rights and prerogatives of the church, and again as the assiduous promoter of missionary labours among the Tatars and other nations of the East. But nothing lay nearer his heart than the restoration of the dominion of the Christians in Palestine, where their cause was nearly ruined. In this he laboured strenuously indeed, but in vain; for death intercepted all his projects.

After his death the church was without a head till the third year, the cardinals disagreeing exceedingly among themselves. At length, on the 5th of July, 1294, they unanimously chose an aged man, greatly venerated for his sanctity—Pietro, surnamed di Murrhone, from a mountain in which he led a solitary and very austere life; he assumed the pontifical name of Celestine V. But as the austerity of his life tacitly censured the corrupt morals of the Romish court, and especially of the cardinals, and as he showed very plainly that he was more solicitous to advance the holiness of the church than its worldly grandeur, he was soon considered as unworthy of the office which he had reluctantly assumed. Hence some of the cardinals, and especially Benedict Cajetan, persuaded him very easily to abdicate the chair, in the fourth month of his pontificate. He died, 1296, in the castle of Fumone, where his successor detained him a captive, lest he should make some disturbance. But afterwards Clement V enrolled him in the calendar of the saints. To him the sect of Benedictine monks who were called, after him, Celestines, owed its origin; a sect still existing in Italy and France, though now nearly extinct, and differing from the other Benedictines by their more rigid rules of life.

ACCESSION OF BONIFACE VIII

[1294-1301 A.D.]

He was succeeded in 1294 by Benedict, Cardinal Cajetan, by whose persuasions he had been chiefly led to resign the pontificate, and who now assumed the name of Boniface VIII. This was a man formed to produce disturbance both in church and state, and eager for confirming and enlarging the power of the pontiffs, to the highest degree of rashness. From his first entrance on the office he arrogated to himself sovereign power over all things sacred and secular; overawed kings and states by his fulminations; decided important controversies at his will; enlarged the code of canon law by new accessions, namely, by the sixth book of Decretals; made war, among others, particularly on the noble family of Colonna, which had opposed his election—in a word, he seemed to be another Gregory VII at the head of the church. At the close of the century, he established the year of jubilee, which is still solemnised at Rome.

That the governors of the church, as well of highest rank as of inferior, were addicted to all those vices which are the most unbecoming to men in their stations, is testified most abundantly. As for the Greek and oriental clergy, many of whom lived under oppressive governments, we shall say nothing; although their faults are sufficiently manifest. But of the faults of the Latins silence would be the less proper, in proportion to the certainty that from this source the whole community was involved in the greatest calamities. All the honest and good men of that age ardently wished for a reformation of the church, both in its head and in its members, as they themselves expressed it. But to so desirable an event there were still many obstacles. First, the power of the pontiffs was so confirmed by its long continuance that it seemed to be immovably established. In the next place, extravagant superstition held the minds of the majority of the people in abject slavery. And lastly, the ignorance and barbarism of the times quickly extinguished the sparks of truth that appeared from time to time. Yet the dominion of the Roman pontiffs, impregnable and durable as it seemed to be, was gradually undermined and weakened in this century, partly by the rash insolence of the pontiffs themselves and partly by the occurrence of certain unexpected events.

PHILIP THE FAIR OVERPOWERS THE PAPACY

[1301-1305 A.D.]

The commencement of this important change must be referred to the contest between Boniface VIII, who governed the Latin church at the beginning of this century, and Philip the Fair, king of France. This high-minded sovereign first taught the Europeans what the emperors had in vain attempted—that the Roman bishops could be vanquished, and be laid under restraint. In a very haughty letter addressed to Philip, Boniface maintained that all kings and persons whatever, and the king of France as well as others, by divine command, owed perfect obedience to the Roman pontiff, and this not merely in religious matters, but likewise in secular and human affairs. The king replied with extreme bitterness. The pontiff repeated his former assertions with greater arrogance, and published the celebrated bull called Unam sanctam; in which he asserted that Jesus Christ had granted a twofold power or sword to his church, a spiritual and a temporal; that the whole human race was subjected to the pontiff; and that all who dissented from this doctrine were heretics, and could not expect to be saved. The king, on the contrary, in an assembly of his nobles, in 1303, through the famous lawyer, Guillaume de Nogaret, publicly accused the pontiff of heresy, simony, dishonesty, and other enormities; and urged the calling of a general council to depose from his office a pontiff so very wicked. The pontiff, in return, excommunicated the king and all his adherents the same year.

Soon after receiving this sentence, Philip again, in an assembly of the states of his kingdom, entered a formal complaint against the pontiff, by men of the highest reputation and influence; and appealed to the decision of a future general council of the church. He then despatched Guillaume de Nogaret, with some others, into Italy, to rouse the people to insurrection, and to bring the pontiff prisoner to Lyons, where he wished the council to be held. Nogaret, who was a resolute and energetic man, having drawn over to his interest the Colonna family, which was at variance with the pontiff, raised a small force, suddenly attacked Boniface, who was living securely at Anagni, made him prisoner, wounded him, and, among other severe indignities, struck him on the head with his iron gauntlet. The people of Anagni, indeed, rescued the pontiff from the hands of his furious enemy; but he died shortly after, at Rome, in the month of October, from rage and anguish of mind.

Benedict XI, previously Nicolo of Trevigio, the successor of Boniface, profiting by his example, restored the king of France and his kingdom to their former honours and privileges, without even being solicited; but he was unwilling to absolve from his crime Nogaret, who had so grievously offended against the pontifical dignity. This daring man, therefore, prosecuted strenuously the suit commenced against Boniface in the Romish court; and, in the name of the king, demanded that a mark of infamy should be set upon the deceased pontiff.

Benedict XI died in the year 1304; and Philip, by his secret machinations, caused Bertrand d’Agoust, a Frenchman, and archbishop of Bordeaux, to be created pontiff at Rome, on the 5th of June, 1305. For the contest of the king against the pontiffs was not yet wholly settled, Nogaret not being absolved, and it might easily break out again. Besides, the king thirsted for revenge, and designed to extort from the court of Rome a condemnation of Boniface; he also meditated the destruction of the Templars, and other matters of great importance which he could hardly expect from an Italian pontiff. He therefore wished to have a French pontiff, whom he could control according to his pleasure, and who would be in a degree dependent on him. The new pontiff, who took the name of Clement V, remained in France, as the king wished, and transferred the pontifical court to Avignon, where it continued for seventy years. This period the Italians call the Babylonian Captivity.[n]

HALLAM ON THE CLIMAX OF PAPAL POWER

[1198-1305 A.D.]

The noonday of papal dominion extends from the pontificate of Innocent III inclusively to that of Boniface VIII; or, in other words, through the thirteenth century. Rome inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name. She was once more the mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals. In her long contention with the house of Swabia, she finally triumphed. After his deposition by the Council of Lyons, the affairs of Frederick II went rapidly into decay. With every allowance for the enmity of the Lombards and the jealousies of Germany, it must be confessed, that his proscription by Innocent IV and Alexander IV was the main cause of the ruin of his family.

This general supremacy effected by the Roman church over mankind in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, derived material support from the promulgation of the canon law. By means of her new jurisprudence Rome acquired in every country a powerful body of advocates who, though many of them were laymen, would, with the usual bigotry of lawyers, defend every pretension or abuse, to which their received standard of authority gave sanction.

Next to the canon law, we should reckon the institution of the mendicant orders among those circumstances which principally contributed to the aggrandisement of Rome. By the acquisition, and in some respects the enjoyment, or at least ostentation of immense riches, the ancient monastic orders had forfeited much of the public esteem. No means appeared so efficacious to counteract this effect as the institution of religious societies, strictly debarred from the insidious temptations of wealth. These new preachers were received with astonishing approbation by the laity, whose religious zeal usually depends a good deal upon their opinion of sincerity and disinterestedness in their pastors. And the progress of the Dominican and Franciscan friars in the thirteenth century bears a remarkable analogy to that of the English Methodists. Aware of the powerful support they might receive in turn, the pontiffs of the thirteenth century accumulated benefits upon the disciples of Francis and Dominic. They were exempted from episcopal authority; they were permitted to preach or hear confessions without leave of the ordinary, to accept of legacies, and to inter in their churches. It was naturally to be expected that the objects of such extensive favours would repay their benefactors by a more than usual obsequiousness and alacrity in their service. Accordingly, the Dominicans and Franciscans vied with each other in magnifying the papal supremacy.

We should not overlook, among the causes that contributed to the dominion of the popes, their prerogative of dispensing with ecclesiastical ordinances. The most remarkable exercise of this was as to the canonical impediments of matrimony. Such strictness as is prescribed by the Christian religion with respect to divorce was very unpalatable to the barbarous nations. They in fact paid it little regard; under the Merovingian dynasty, even private men put away their wives at pleasure. In many capitularies of Charlemagne, we find evidence of the prevailing license of repudiation and even polygamy. The principles which the church inculcated were in appearance the very reverse of this laxity; yet they led indirectly to the same effect. Marriages were forbidden, not merely within the limits which nature, or those inveterate associations which we call nature, have rendered sacred, but as far as the seventh degree of collateral consanguinity, computed from a common ancestor. Not only was affinity, or relationship by marriage, put upon the same footing as that by blood; but a fantastical connection, called spiritual affinity, was invented in order to prohibit marriage between a sponsor and godchild. A union, however innocently contracted, between parties thus circumstanced, might at any time be dissolved, and their subsequent cohabitation forbidden. Innocent III laid down as a maxim that out of the plenitude of his power he might lawfully dispense with the law; and accordingly granted, among other instances of this prerogative, dispensations from impediments of marriage to the emperor Otto IV. Similar indulgences were given by his successors, though they did not become usual for some ages. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 removed a great part of the restraint by permitting marriages beyond the fourth degree, or what we call third cousins; and dispensations had been made more easy when it was discovered that they might be converted into a source of profit. They served a more important purpose by rendering it necessary for the princes of Europe, who seldom could marry into one another’s houses without transgressing the canonical limits, to keep on good terms with the court of Rome, which, in several instances that have been mentioned, fulminated its censures against sovereigns who lived without permission in what was considered an incestuous union.

The dispensing power of the popes was exerted in several cases of a temporal nature, particularly in the legitimation of children for purposes even of succession. This Innocent III claimed as an indirect consequence of his right to remove the canonical impediment which bastardy offered to ordination; since it would be monstrous, he says, that one who is legitimate for spiritual functions should continue otherwise in any civil matter. But the most important and mischievous species of dispensations was from the observance of promissory oaths. Two principles are laid down in the Decretals—that an oath disadvantageous to the church is not binding; and that one extorted by force was of slight obligation, and might be annulled by ecclesiastical authority. As the first of these maxims gave the most unlimited privilege to the popes of breaking all faith of treaties which thwarted their interest or passion, a privilege which they continually exercised, so the second was equally convenient to princes, weary of observing engagements towards their subjects or their neighbours.

It must appear to every careful inquirer that the papal authority, though manifesting outwardly more show of strength every year, had been secretly undermined and lost a great deal of its hold upon public opinion, before the accession of Boniface VIII, in 1294, to the pontifical throne. The clergy were rendered sullen by demands of money, invasions of the legal right of patronage, and unreasonable partiality to the mendicant orders; a part of the mendicants themselves had begun to declaim against the corruptions of the papal court; while the laity, subjects alike and sovereigns, looked upon both the head and the members of the hierarchy with jealousy and dislike. Boniface, full of inordinate arrogance and ambition, and not sufficiently sensible of this gradual change in human opinion, endeavoured to strain to a higher pitch the despotic pretensions of former pontiffs. As Gregory VII appears the most usurping of mankind till we read the history of Innocent III, so Innocent III is thrown into shade by the superior audacity of Boniface VIII. But independently of the less favourable dispositions of the public, he wanted the most essential quality for an ambitious pope—reputation for integrity.

The sensible decline of the papacy is to be dated from the pontificate of Boniface VIII, who had strained its authority to a higher pitch than any of his predecessors. There is a spell wrought by uninterrupted good fortune, which captivates men’s understanding, and persuades them, against reasoning and analogy, that violent power is immortal and irresistible. The spell is broken by the first change of success. In tracing the papal empire over mankind, we have no marked and definite crisis of revolution. But slowly, like the retreat of waters or the stealthy pace of old age, that extraordinary power over human opinion has been subsiding for five centuries. As the retrocession of the Roman terminus under Adrian gave the first overt proof of decline in the ambitious energies of that empire, so the tacit submission of the successors of Boniface VIII to the king of France might have been hailed by Europe as a token that their influence was beginning to abate. Imprisoned, insulted, deprived eventually of life by the violence of Philip, a prince excommunicated, and who had gone all lengths in defying and despising the papal jurisdiction, Boniface had every claim to be avenged by the inheritors of the same spiritual dominion. When Benedict XI rescinded the bulls of his predecessor, and admitted Philip the Fair to communion without insisting on any concessions, he acted perhaps prudently, but gave a fatal blow to the temporal authority of Rome.[l]

FOOTNOTES

[92] [In the enforcement of celibacy, the emperors and a large part of the laity were not unwilling to join. But when Gregory declared it a sin for the ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions from a layman, he aimed a deadly blow at all secular authority.[g]]

[93] Floto (II, pp. 45 et seqq.) has well shown the terrible workings of this appeal to the populace. The peasants held that an accusation of simony or marriage exempted them from the payment of tithe.

[94] [“Calixtus,” says Milman,[e] “though by no means the first Frenchman, was the first French pontiff who established that close connection between France and the papacy which had such important influence on the affairs of the church and of Europe.”]

[95] [He was tied backwards on a camel and carried in the triumphal procession of Calixtus, who had just previously excommunicated the emperor. It was in his pontificate that the Concordat of Worms took place as described previously.]

[96] [His name was Nicholas Breakspeare, and he was the only Englishman who ever filled the papal chair.]

[97] [Under him Arnold of Brescia was robbed of his popularity and forced into exile. He was captured by officers of Barbarossa and turned over to the pope, who had him executed and his ashes cast into the Tiber. Of him Milman[e] says: “Arnold of Brescia had struck boldly at both powers; he utterly annulled the temporal supremacy of the pope; and if he acknowledged, reduced the sovereignty of the emperor to a barren title.”]

[98] [Or rather, from his feet, according to Roger of Hoveden’s[h] doubtful chronicle, which represents the pope as seated with his feet on the crown and spurning it with a kick toward the kneeling emperor.]

[99] [Reichel[b] calls him “Greatest without exception among the great popes of the Middle Ages.”]

[100] It may be well to state the chief points which the pope claimed as his exclusive prerogative: (1) General supremacy of jurisdiction, a claim, it is obvious, absolutely illimitable; (2) Right of legislation, including the summoning and presiding in councils; (3) Judgment in all ecclesiastic causes arduous and difficult. This included the power of judging on contested elections, and degrading bishops, a super-metropolitan power; (4) Right of confirmation of bishops and metropolitans, the gift of the pallium. Hence, by degrees, rights of appointment to devolved sees, reservations, etc.; (5) Dispensations; (6) The foundation of new orders; (7) Canonisation. Compare Eichhorn, II, p. 500.

[101] The Conti family boasted of nine popes—among them Innocent III, Gregory IX, Alexander IV, Innocent XIII; of thirteen cardinals, according to Ciacconius.[j]

[102] Walter von der Vogelweide, who attributes all the misery of the civil war in Germany to Innocent, closes his poem with these words (modernised by K. Simrock):

“Ich hörte fern in einer Klaus

Ein Jammern ohne Ende:

Ein Klausner rang die Hände;

Er klagte Gott sein bittres Leid;

O weh, der Papst ist allzu jung, Herr Gott, hilf deiner Christenheit.”

[103] It is remarkable that Innocent III was never canonised. There were popular rumours that the soul of Innocent, escaping from the fires of purgatory, appeared on earth, scourged by pursuing devils, taking refuge at the foot of the cross, and imploring the prayers of the faithful.

[104] Milman[e] says: “The empire and the papacy were now to meet in their last mortal and implacable strife. Cæsar would bear no superior, the successor of St. Peter no equal.”

[105] [“With Conradin’s death,” says Mullinger,[d] “the long contest of the empire with the popedom came to an end.”]

[106] [Of Clement IV, Milman[e] says: “It is his praise that he did not exalt his kindred, that he left in obscurity the husbands of his daughters. But the wonder betrayed by this praise shows at once how Christendom had been offended; it was prophetic of the stronger offence which nepotism would hereafter entail upon the papal see.”]

---

CHAPTER IV. FROM EXILE TO SUPREMACY

[1305-1513 A.D.]

The period in the papal history has arrived which in the Italian writers is called the Babylonish Captivity; it lasted more than seventy years (from 1305 to 1376). Rome is no longer the metropolis of Christendom; the pope is a French prelate. The successor of St. Peter is not on St. Peter’s throne; he is environed with none of the traditionary majesty or traditionary sanctity of the Eternal City; he has abandoned the holy bodies of the apostles, the churches of the apostles. It is perhaps the most marvellous part of its history that the papacy, having sunk so low, sank no lower; that it recovered from its degradation; that, from a satellite, almost a slave of the king of France, the pontiff ever emerged again to be an independent potentate; and, although the great line of mediæval popes, of Gregory, of Alexander III, and the Innocents, expired in Boniface VIII, he could resume even his modified supremacy. There is no proof so strong of the vitality of the papacy as that it could establish the law that wherever the pope is, there is the throne of St. Peter; that he could cease to be bishop of Rome in all but in name, and then take back again the abdicated bishopric.

Never was revolution more sudden, more total, it might seem more enduring in its consequences. The close of the last century had seen Boniface VIII advancing higher pretensions, if not wielding more actual power than any former pontiff; the acknowledged pacificator of the world, the arbiter between the kings of France and England, claiming and exercising feudal as well as spiritual supremacy over many kingdoms, bestowing crowns as in Hungary, awarding the empire; with millions of pilgrims at the jubilee in Rome, still the centre of Christendom, paying him homage which bordered on adulation and pouring the riches of the world at his feet. The first decade of the new century is not more than half passed; Pope Clement V is a voluntary prisoner, but not the less a prisoner in the realm, or almost within the precincts of France; struggling in vain to escape from the tyranny of his inexorable master, and to break or elude the fetters wound around him by his own solemn engagements. He is almost forced to condemn his predecessor for crimes of which he could hardly believe him guilty; to accept a niggardly, and perhaps never-fulfilled penance from men almost murderers of a pope; to sacrifice, on evidence which he himself manifestly mistrusted, the Templars, one of the great military orders of Christendom, to the hatred or avarice of Philip. The pope, from lord over the freedom of the world, has ceased to be a free agent.[b]

CLEMENT V

[1305-1311 A.D.]

The pontiffs being at a distance, the Ghibelline faction in Italy, which was hostile to the pontiffs, assumed greater boldness than formerly, and not only invaded and laid waste the territories of St. Peter, but also assailed the pontifical authority by their publications. Hence a number of cities revolted from the popes; Rome itself became the parent and fomenter of tumults, cabals, and civil wars; and the laws and decrees sent thither from France were publicly treated with contempt, and not merely by the nobles but also by the common citizens. A great part of Europe followed the example of Italy; and numberless examples show that the people of Europe attributed far less power to the fulminations and decrees issued from France than to those issued from Rome. Various seditions, therefore, were raised in one place and another against the pontiffs, which they were unable to subdue and put down, notwithstanding that the inquisitors were most active in the discharge of their functions.

As the French pontiffs could derive but little revenue from Italy, which was rent into factions, seditious, and devastated, they were obliged to devise new modes of raising money. They, therefore, not only sold indulgences to the people more frequently than formerly, to the great indignation of kings and princes, but they likewise required enormous prices to be paid for their letters or bulls of every kind. In this thing John XXII showed himself peculiarly adroit and shrewd; for though he did not first invent the regulations and fees of the apostolic chancery, yet the Romish writers admit that he enlarged them and reduced them to a more convenient form. He also is said to have imposed that tribute which under the title of annates is customarily paid to the pontiffs; yet the first commencement of it was anterior to that age. Moreover, these French pontiffs, subverting the rights of election, assumed the power of conferring all sacred offices, whether high or low, according to their own pleasure; by which means they raised immense sums of money. Hence, under these pontiffs, those most odious terms reservation, provision, and expectative, rarely used before, were now everywhere heard, and they called forth the bitterest complaints from all the nations of Europe; and these complaints increased immeasurably when some of the pontiffs, John XXII, Clement VI, Gregory XI, publicly announced that they had reserved all churches to themselves, and that they would provide for all without exception, by virtue of the sovereign right which Christ had conferred on the vicars, or in the plenitude of their power. By these and other artifices for filling their treasury and amassing property these indiscreet pontiffs heaped additional odium on the apostolic see, and thus weakened very considerably the papal empire, which began to decline from the time of Boniface.

Clement V was governed all his life by the will and pleasure of Philip the Fair, king of France. Guillaume de Nogaret, the implacable foe of Boniface VIII, though excommunicated, resolutely prosecuted his own cause and that of King Philip against Boniface in the papal court; a transaction which, we believe, is without a parallel. Philip wished to have the body of Boniface disinterred and publicly burned. With great difficulty Clement averted this infamy by his entreaties and advice; but in everything else he had to obey the king. Accordingly he abrogated the laws enacted by Boniface, granted the king five years’ tithes, absolved Nogaret from all crime, after imposing on him a slight penance, which he never performed; restored the inhabitants of Anagni to their former reputable and good standing, and held a general council at Vienne, 1311, that Philip’s pleasure might be gratified in the suppression of the Templars.[c]

THE FATE OF THE TEMPLARS

[1311-1313 A.D.]

The end of Clement himself and of Clement’s master, the king of France, drew near. But the pope and the king must be preceded into the realm of darkness and to the judgment-seat of heaven by other victims. The tragedy of the Templars had not yet drawn to its close.[107] The four great dignitaries of the order, the grand-master De Molay, Guy the commander of Normandy, son of the dauphin of Auvergne, the commander of Aquitaine Godfrey de Gonaville, the great visitor of France Hugues de Peraud, were still pining in the royal dungeons. It was necessary to determine on their fate. The king and the pope were now equally interested in burying the affair forever in silence and oblivion. So long as these men lived uncondemned, undoomed, the order was not extinct. A commission was named. The grand-master and the rest were found guilty, and were to be sentenced to perpetual imprisonment.

Six years of dreary imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the most valiant had been burned alive, the recreants had purchased their lives by confession; the pope in a full council had condemned and dissolved the order. If a human mind, a mind like that of De Molay, not the most stubborn, could be broken by suffering and humiliation, it must have yielded to this long and crushing imprisonment. The cardinal-archbishop of Albi ascended a raised platform; he read the confessions of the knights, the proceedings of the court; he enlarged on the criminality of the order, on the holy justice of the pope, and the devout, self-sacrificing zeal of the king; he was proceeding to the final, the fatal sentence. At that instant the grand-master advanced; his gesture implored silence; judges and people gazed in awe-struck apprehension.

In a calm, clear voice De Molay spoke: “Before heaven and earth, on the verge of death, where the least falsehood bears like an intolerable weight upon the soul, I protest that we have richly deserved death, not on account of any heresy or sin of which ourselves or our order have been guilty, but because we have yielded, to save our lives, to the seductive words of the pope and of the king; and so by our confessions brought shame and ruin on our blameless, holy, and orthodox brotherhood.”

The cardinals stood confounded; the people could not suppress their profound sympathy. The assembly was hastily broken up; the provost was commanded to conduct the prisoners back to their dungeons: “To-morrow we will hold further council.”

But on the moment that the king heard these things, without a day’s delay, without the least consultation with the ecclesiastical authorities, he ordered them to death as relapsed heretics. On the island in the Seine, where now stands the statue of Henry IV, between the king’s garden on one side and the convent of the Augustinian monks on the other, the two pyres were raised (two out of the four had shrunk back into their ignoble confessions). It was the hour of vespers when these two aged and noble men were led out to be burned. Both, as the smoke rose to their lips, as the fire crept up to their vital parts, continued solemnly to aver the innocence, the Catholic faith of the order. The king himself beheld this hideous spectacle.

[1313-1316 A.D.]

The wonder and the pity of the times which immediately followed not only arrayed De Molay in the robes of the martyr, but gave him the terrible language of a prophet. “Clement, iniquitous and cruel judge, I summon thee within forty days to meet me before the throne of the Most High.” According to some accounts this fearful sentence included the king, by whom, if uttered, it might have been heard. The earliest allusion to this awful speech does not contain that striking particularity which, if part of it, would be fatal to its credibility—the precise date of Clement’s death. It was not till the year after that Clement and King Philip passed to their account. The poetic relation of Godfrey de Paris simply states that De Molay declared that God would revenge their death on their unrighteous judges. The rapid fate of these two men during the next year might naturally so appal the popular imagination as to approximate more closely the prophecy and its accomplishment. At all events it betrayed the deep and general feeling of the cruel wrong inflicted on the order; while the unlamented death of the pope, the disastrous close of Philip’s reign, and the crimes of his family seemed as declarations of heaven as to the innocence of their noble victims.

The health of Clement V had been failing for some time. From his court, which he held at Carpentras, he set out in hopes to gain strength from his native air at Bordeaux. He had hardly crossed the Rhone when he was seized with mortal sickness at Roquemaure. The papal treasure was seized by his followers, especially his nephew; his remains were treated with such utter neglect that the torches set fire to the catafalque under which he lay, not in state. His body, covered only with a single sheet, all that his rapacious retinue had left to shroud their forgotten master, was half burned (not, like those of the Templars, on his living body) before alarm was raised. His ashes were borne back to Carpentras and solemnly interred.

Clement left behind him evil fame. He died shamefully rich. To his nephew (nepotism had begun to prevail in its baleful influence) he bequeathed not less than 300,000 golden florins, under the pretext of succour to the Holy Land. He had died still more wealthy but that his wealth was drained by more disgraceful prodigality. It was generally believed that the beautiful Brunisand de Foix, countess of Talleyrand Périgord, was the pope’s mistress; to her he was boundlessly lavish, and her influence was irresistible even in ecclesiastical matters. Rumour ran that her petitions to the lustful pontiff were placed upon her otherwise unveiled bosom. Italian hatred of a transalpine pope, Guelfic hatred of a Ghibelline pope, may have lent a too greedy ear to these disreputable reports; but the large mass of authorities is against the pope; in his favour, hardly more than suspicious silence.[b]

JOHN XXII TO URBAN V

[1316-1333 A.D.]

On the death of Clement, 1314, there were violent contests among the cardinals respecting the election of a successor, the French demanding a French pontiff and the Italians an Italian. After two years the French gained the victory; and in 1316, Jacques d’Euse of Cahors, cardinal of Porto, was made head of the church, and assumed the pontifical name of John XXII. He was not destitute of learning, but was crafty, insolent, weak, imprudent, and avaricious, as even those who honour his memory do not positively deny. He rendered himself notorious by many imprudent and unsuccessful enterprises, but especially by his unfortunate contest with the emperor, Ludwig of Bavaria. There was a contest for the empire of Germany between Ludwig of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria, each being chosen emperor by a part of the electors in the year 1314. John declared that the decision of this controversy belonged to him. But Ludwig, having conquered his rival in battle and taken him prisoner, in the year 1322, assumed the government of the empire, without consulting the pontiff, and refused to submit a cause which had been decided by the sword to another trial before the pontiff.

John was greatly offended at this, and in the year 1324 divested the emperor of all title to the imperial crown. Ludwig, in return, accused the pontiff of corrupting the faith, or of heresy; and appealed to the decision of a council. Exasperated by this and other things, the pontiff, in the year 1327, again divested the emperor of all his authority and power, and laid him under excommunication. In revenge for this injury the emperor, in the year 1328, at Rome, publicly declared John unworthy of the pontificate; and substituted in his place Pietro di Corvara, a Franciscan monk, and one of those who disagreed with the pontiff; and he, assuming the name of Nicholas V, crowned Ludwig emperor. But in the year 1330, this imperial pontiff voluntarily abdicated his office, and surrendered himself into the hands of John, who kept him a prisoner at Avignon till his death. Thus John continued to reign in spite of the emperor, as did the emperor in spite of the pontiff.

A Priest of the Fourteenth Century

On the side of Ludwig stood the whole mass of the Fratricelli, the Beghards (or Beguins) of every description, and the Spirituals, or more rigid among the Franciscans; and these, being scattered over a large part of Europe, and supported by the protection of Ludwig, everywhere assailed John with reproaches and criminations, both orally and in books, and charged him with religious apostasy. The pontiff, however, was not greatly injured by these private attacks; but towards the close of his life he fell under the disapprobation and censure of nearly the whole church. For in the years 1331 and 1332, he taught in some public discourses that departed souls would indeed behold Christ, but would not see the face of God or the divine nature until their reunion with the body at the last day. With this doctrine, Philip VI, the king of France, was highly displeased; the theologians of Paris condemned it in 1333; and both the friends and the foes of the pontiff were opposed to it. For it appeared to them that the pontiff detracted much from the blessedness of departed spirits. To so great opposition John, though naturally pertinacious, had to give way. He therefore first apologised for the doctrine; and afterwards, when near the point of death, 1334, he did not indeed abandon it, but he qualified it by saying that he believed souls in the intermediate state saw the divine essence, as far as the state and condition of the disembodied spirit would permit. But this declaration did not satisfy his adversaries. Hence, after various disputes, his successor Benedict XII terminated the controversy, according to the decision of the Parisian doctors, by declaring the true faith to be that the souls of the blessed, when separate from the body, fully and perfectly behold the divine nature, or God himself. Benedict could do this without impeaching his predecessor; for John, when dying, submitted his opinion to the judgment of the church, lest, perhaps, he should after death be classed among heretics.

[1333-1362 A.D.]

On the death of John, 1334, new contests between the French and the Italians, respecting the choice of a pontiff, divided the college of cardinals. But near the close of the year, Jacques de Nouveau called Fournier, a Frenchman, cardinal of St. Prisca, was chosen, and assumed the name of Benedict XII. Historians allow him the praise of being an upright and honest man, no less free from avarice than from the lust of rule. During his reign the controversy with the emperor Ludwig was at rest. For although he did not restore him to church communion, being prevented, as is reported by the king of France, yet he did not attempt anything against him. He saw the existing evils in the church, and some of them, as far as he could, he removed; in particular he laboured to reform by decrees and ordinances the orders of the monks, both mendicant and opulent. But death removed him, when he was contemplating more and greater changes, in 1342. Overlook superstition, which was the common fault of his age, and we shall find nothing to prevent us from declaring this pontiff to have been a right-spirited man.

Of a different spirit was his successor, Clement VI, who was likewise a Frenchman, named Pierre Roger, and cardinal of St. Nereus and St. Achilles. To say nothing of his other deeds, that are little to be commended, he trod in the steps of John XXII by his provisions and reservations of churches, which was evidence of a shameful avarice; further, he conferred the most important spiritual offices on foreigners and Italians, which produced controversies between him and the kings of France and England; and, lastly, he demonstrated the arrogance and pride of his heart, among other things, by renewing the war with Ludwig the Bavarian. For, in the year 1343, he hurled new thunders at the emperor; and finding these to be contemned by Ludwig, in the year 1346, he devoted him again to execration; and persuaded the princes of Germany to elect Charles IV, grandson of Henry VII, for their emperor. A civil war would now have broken out in Germany, had not the death of Ludwig, in 1347, prevented it. Clement followed him to the grave, in 1352, famous for nothing but his zeal for exalting the majesty of the pontiffs, and for adding Avignon, which he bought of Joanna queen of Naples, to St. Peter’s patrimony.

[1362-1378 A.D.]

There was more moderation and probity in Innocent VI, or Etienne d’Albert, a Frenchman, previously bishop of Ostia, who governed the church ten years, and died in 1362. He favoured his own relatives too much; but in other respects encouraged the pious and the well-informed, held the monks to their duty, abstained from reserving churches, and did many things worthy of commendation. His successor, Guillaume de Grimoard, abbot of St. Victor, at Marseilles, who assumed the name of Urban V, was also free from great faults, if we except those which are almost inseparable from the office of a pope. Overcome by the entreaties of the Romans, he removed to Rome in the year 1367, but returned again to Avignon in 1370, in order to make peace between the king of England and the king of France, and died there the same year.

He was succeeded by Pierre Roger, a Frenchman of noble birth, under the pontifical name of Gregory XI. He was inferior to his predecessors in virtue, but exceeded them in energy and audacity. Under him great and dangerous commotions disturbed Italy and the city of Rome. The Florentines, especially, waged fierce war with the Romish church, and were successful in it. To restore the tranquillity of Italy, and recover the territories and cities taken from the patrimony of St. Peter, Gregory, in the year 1376, transferred his residence from Avignon to Rome. One Catherine, a virgin of Siena, whom that credulous age took to be a prophetess divinely inspired, came to Avignon, and by her exhortations greatly contributed to this measure. But Gregory soon after repented of his removal; for by their long absence from Italy the authority of the pontiffs was so fallen there that the Romans and the Florentines had no scruple to insult and abuse him in various ways. He therefore purposed to return to Avignon, but was prevented by death, which removed him from among living men in the year 1378.

After the death of Gregory XI, the cardinals being assembled to provide a successor, the Roman people, fearing lest a Frenchman should be elected who would remove to Avignon, demanded, with furious clamours and threats, that an Italian should be placed at the head of the church without delay. The terrified cardinals proclaimed Bartolommeo Prignani, who was a Neapolitan by birth, and archbishop of Bari, to be elected pontiff; and he assumed the name of Urban VI. This new pontiff, by his coarse manners, his injudicious severity, and his intolerable haughtiness, alienated the minds of all from him, but especially the cardinals. These, therefore, withdrew to Fondi, a city in the kingdom of Naples, and there created another pontiff, Robert count of Geneva, who took the name of Clement VII, alleging that Urban was elected only in pretence, in order to quiet the rage of the people of Rome. Which of these was the legitimate and true pontiff still remains uncertain, nor can it be fully ascertained from the records and documents which have been published in great abundance by both parties. Urban continued at Rome; Clement removed to Avignon in France.

Thus the unity of the Latin church, as existing under one head, came to an end at the death of Gregory XI; and that most unhappy disunion ensued, which is usually denominated “the great schism of the West.” For during fifty years the church had two or three heads; and the contemporary pontiffs assailed each other with excommunications, maledictions, and insidious measures. The calamities and distress of those times are indescribable. For besides the perpetual contentions and wars between the pontifical factions, which were ruinous to great numbers, involving them in loss of life or of property, nearly all sense of religion was in many places extinguished, and wickedness daily acquired greater impunity and boldness. The clergy, previously corrupt, now laid aside even the appearance of piety and godliness, while those who called themselves Christ’s vicegerents were at open war with each other; and the conscientious people, who believed that no one could be saved without living in subjection to Christ’s vicegerents, were thrown into the greatest perplexity and anxiety of mind. Yet both the church and the state received very considerable advantages from these great calamities. For the very sinews of pontifical power were cut by these dissensions, and no art could heal them any more; kings, too, and princes, who had before been in a sense the servants of the pontiffs, now became their judges and masters. Moreover, great numbers, possessing some measure of discernment, despising and disregarding pontiffs, fighting for dominion, committed themselves and their salvation to God alone, in full assurance that the church and religion might be safe and continue so, although without any visible head.[c]

THE GREAT SCHISM OF THE WEST (1378-1417 A.D.)

[1378-1389 A.D.]

Clement was immediately recognised as pope in Scotland, Savoy, and Lorraine, afterwards in Castile (1381), Aragon (1387), and Navarre (1390). On the other hand Germany, England, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, and Prussia remained on Urban’s side.

The war between the two popes was not only waged with sentences of excommunication, but in Italy with secular weapons also. Urban declared that Queen Joanna, by her secession from his side, had forfeited the kingdom of Naples, and granted it in fee to Charles, duke of Durazzo. On the other hand Joanna, under Clement’s influence, took Louis, duke of Anjou, at that time regent of France, for her adopted son and successor (1380). Charles meanwhile in a short time made himself master of the whole kingdom, took Joanna prisoner in 1381, and had her put to death, when Louis appeared in Italy at the head of an army (1382). Charles continued to maintain his ascendency, and Louis’ death (1384) would have been decisive as regards Naples in favour of Urban and Charles forever, had not differences forthwith arisen between the two latter, which increased to such a degree, when the headstrong pope went in person to Naples, that Urban pronounced sentence of dethronement and excommunication against Charles, and was consequently besieged by him in the castle of Lucera at Salerno (1385). He escaped to Genoa (September, 1385) without becoming wiser. By the cruel execution of five cardinals he made himself still more hateful. After Charles’ death (1386) by his impolitic refusal to invest his son Ladislaus (or Lancelot) with Naples, he exposed this kingdom afresh to the danger of falling under the dominion of France. The capital city was already conquered for the young Louis of Anjou (1387), and the whole kingdom would have fallen to him and the French pope, had not Urban’s successor, Boniface IX, at the right moment, invested Ladislaus (1390) and rendered him his powerful support. With a view to secure the states of the church against Louis, Boniface granted many towns and castles in fee to powerful nobles, and thus roused afresh in Rome a struggle for independence, which kept him long in banishment from the city. True, Louis was forced to quit Italy altogether (1400), and Ladislaus remained king of Naples. But this restless agitation in Rome increased, and was even supported by Ladislaus, who wished to make himself master of the city.

[1389-1409 A.D.]

As the schism lessened the revenues of the popes and increased their expenses, so it caused a fresh aggravation of those church oppressions which were already intolerable. The French pontiff, Clement VII, was obliged indeed to exercise the right of presentation to ecclesiastical offices, to which now also were added the gratiæ exspectativæ, according to the nod of the French court, upon which he was quite dependent; but in return for this the church of France, so long as her grievances were not too loudly expressed, was delivered over as a prey to his extortions. Tithes vacantiæ and annates were now the standing income of the papal cabinet. In addition to these Clement laid claim to the spoils of deceased prelates. His successor, Benedict XIII, wherever it was possible, surpassed him in these systems of impoverishment.

So long as Urban VI lived, the Roman curia was advantageously distinguished in this respect from that of Avignon. His successor, Boniface IX, on the contrary, imitated all the extortions of his rivals in France, but he far surpassed them in the simony which was practised quite publicly by himself and the members of his curia, and was even defended without any sense of shame. Thus at the end of this period both obediences were groaning under the weight of persecution. England alone repeatedly threw off every papal oppression, and in 1404 Hungary also followed her example.

In consequence of these church oppressions, which were the result of the schism, the religious scruples which were entertained with regard to it were strengthened, and earlier steps demanded for its settlement. The university of Paris in particular laboured with unshaken perseverance to bring the schism to a close. After she had long waited in vain for a sound agreement of the two popes betwixt themselves, she at last obtained permission from the court of France to interpose her opinion upon these events (1394). Benedict XIII, notwithstanding his promise made before his election, showed even less inclination than his predecessor to take serious steps to close the schism. To the urgent proposals of a French national synod in 1395 he returned only an evasive answer. The university nevertheless persevered in her endeavour, and at length contrived that Charles VI, king of France, should join with the emperor Wenceslaus in forcing both the popes to resign (1398).

The latter was in very truth too weak to keep his word; moreover he was himself deposed by the secret machinations of his pope Boniface IX (1400). On the other hand, by the decree of a new national synod France withdrew from the obedience of Benedict; Castile followed her example (1398), and this pope was kept a prisoner at Avignon. It was not till after the lapse of many years, and the breach of express engagements, that Benedict succeeded in regaining the church of France to his obedience (1403) by the help of the duke of Orleans, who at that time had won the ascendency at court. It was quickly manifest how little he meant to keep these promises; but as the Italian cardinals imposed similar engagements upon their new pope Innocent VII, on his election in 1404, even only with a view to save appearances, it was necessary to open negotiations. The fruitlessness of this proceeding increased the general discontent; France threatened her pope with a fresh withdrawal of allegiance (national council of January, 1407), when at length both the popes agreed upon a personal interview at Savona in September, 1407. Benedict appeared there in person; however, Gregory XII went only as far as Lucca, and opened fresh negotiations for another place of congress. This public breach of promise roused the Roman cardinals; they forsook their pope Gregory, and renounced their allegiance to him, at the same time that France withdrew from the obedience of Benedict. Benedict indeed escaped the imprisonment with which he was threatened, by flight to Perpignan; but the cardinals of both obediences united at Livorno (Leghorn) and summoned a general council at Pisa in March, 1409, with a view to the termination of the schism.

[1378-1417 A.D.]

The schism with its church oppression furnished the impulse, the weakness of the papal see gave the long desired opportunity for an unbiased trial of the existing state of the church; it led men to opinions which had hitherto only been mooted in violent struggles with the popes, and so not without an appearance of passion and party spirit; but now they struck root so deeply, even among the most faithful adherents of the church, that they could never again be entirely suppressed. Many an anxious gaze was turned backwards to the earlier and better ages of the church, in order to discover in its constitution the remedy for the scandals of the present. This was a problem of learning. Its representatives, the universities, particularly that of Paris, were listened to with eager attention, and attained an influence which was formidable even to the popes. This comparison of the present with the earlier ages of the church could not but lead to many convictions unfavourable to the papal see.

True there were but isolated individuals who advanced so far upon this line of thought as to wish the papacy quite removed from the church as the source of all her evils. But even its truest adherents now acknowledged the immoderate extension of papal power, and the monstrous exaggeration of the papal dignity. They discovered in the bent of the papacy to secular power the prime cause of all mischief, and even to the schism, and they wished the times back again when the emperors could convoke synods by their own authority to strangle a schism at its birth. No less general was the discontent expressed against the papal church oppressions, and the wish to remove them by limitations of the papal power. Hitherto only adversaries of the popes, at open war with them, had appealed to a general council as a higher authority, but during the schism circumstances led to a general acknowledgment that such a council must rank above the pope. After the Council of Pisa was summoned to terminate the contest between the two popes, and set a limit to the abuses of papal power, the canonists vied with each other in demonstrating this new opinion so injurious to the papacy, of the superiority of general councils to the pope, and thus the papal system of the last century seemed to be threatened with total overthrow.

RELATION OF THE NATIONAL CHURCHES TO THE STATE

A Bishop of the Fourteenth Century

The jealousies betwixt the ecclesiastical and secular tribunals arising from the immoderate extension of ecclesiastical jurisdiction still continued, but they began more and more to result in favour of the latter. In Germany the fundamental principle that secular causes belonged only to secular tribunals had been recognised long before, even by the prelates, who were themselves temporal lords of the land; it was, as a general rule, always maintained, though in individual cases the ecclesiastical tribunals continually overstepped their limits. But during the schism, the emperor Wenceslaus could only execute his decisions in things temporal, against the higher orders of the clergy, by deeds of violence. The cities continued to tax the excessive revenues of the ecclesiastical sovereignty. They either forbade altogether the increase of church property, or decreed that all fresh acquisitions should be alienated again in a year and a day, or required from the new revenues the customary taxes. Now that the parish priests, by their management of people’s wills, provided too well for themselves and for the church, it was determined that wills should only be made before the secular authorities. Paderborn even prohibited the multiplication of masses for souls. Still the popes wished to maintain a good understanding with the cities, and bind them to themselves by means of privileges.

During the schism many concessions were made to the nobles also; thus Boniface IX, in 1399 allowed Albert IV, duke of Austria, the jus primarum precum. The free Swiss by the priests’ law (Pfaffenbrief) in 1370 put an end to the encroachments of the ecclesiastical tribunals. In Italy the operation of the ecclesiastical tribunals, like the condition of the whole country, was very fluctuating. Under Ghibelline lords they were often quite suppressed. In France ecclesiastical jurisdiction had reached its greatest extension; the kings connived at it, because they wished to keep their bishops well inclined to themselves, and knew how to tax any irregularities of the ecclesiastical tribunals. On the other hand the barons were continually at issue with the prelates on this point, and from both sides there were unceasing complaints of usurpation. The remarkable negotiations which were instituted by command of King Philip of Valois with the prelates summoned before parliament (1329), owing to the king’s political aims, failed of their intended result. Immediately afterwards the clergy sought to establish their jurisdiction still firmer by decrees of councils. On the other hand a powerful resistance to these proceedings was being developed in parliament, which was now transforming itself into a standing corporation; this was especially manifest from the time of Charles V. Henceforth ecclesiastical jurisdiction was not only confined to its proper limits, but parliament claimed a certain degree of superintendence over it, and drew to itself the right of decision upon many points, which were at that time universally held to be ecclesiastical.

The earlier encroachments of the popes upon episcopal rights were still further increased by the fact that they now took to themselves entirely the appointment to ecclesiastical offices, and exercised the right of exemption in the highest degree, particularly during the schism. Thus the importance of the bishops in the church was small; they compensated themselves for this by secular honours and worldly enjoyment. The oppression which fell upon them from above they knew how to discharge upon those below, and so the lower orders of the clergy groaned beneath intolerable burdens.

MORAL CONDITION OF THE CLERGY

The moral condition of the clergy could not fail to degenerate still more in this period, in consequence of the manner in which ecclesiastical offices were generally bestowed, the example which the papal court gave, and the method in which the ecclesiastical jurisdiction was administered. In the chapters, where the stalls were for the most part benefices reserved for the nobles, as well as among the parochial clergy, there prevailed a depth of ignorance and an immorality which awakened indignation. The continued struggle of the synods against the dissoluteness of priests remained quite fruitless. The laity were only too glad to secure their wives and daughters from the sacerdotal ravishers, and accordingly favoured, at times even demanded, fixed alliances of their priests with concubines. Thus in many countries concubinage was publicly allowed among the priests, who were supposed to be too sacred for a matrimonial connection. The fines with which these excesses were visited by many synods were quickly changed into a welcome gratuity to the avarice of the bishops. Nevertheless, every attempt of the secular power to check these scandals was resisted by the church as an invasion of her rights.[d]

THE GREAT COUNCILS OF PISA AND CONSTANCE; JOHN HUSS

[1409-1429 A.D.]

The Council of Pisa, which was designed to heal the wounds of the divided church, unexpectedly inflicted upon her a new wound. On the 5th of June it passed a heavy sentence on each of the pontiffs; for it declared them both to be heretical, perjured, contumacious, unworthy of any honour, and no longer members of the church. As the next step, the council created Pietro Philarghi of Candia sovereign pontiff in their place, on the 26th of June; and he assumed the name of Alexander V. But the two pontiffs spurned the decrees of this council, and continued still to perform their functions. Benedict held a council at Perpignan, and Gregory assembled another at Austria, near Aquileia; but fearing the resentments of the Venetians, he went first to Gaeta, where he threw himself upon the protection of Ladislaus, king of Naples, and then fled, in 1412, to Rimini.

The church was thus divided among three pontiffs, who fiercely assailed each other with reciprocal excommunications, reproaches, and maledictions. Alexander V, who was elected in the Council of Pisa, died at Bologna in 1410. The sixteen cardinals, who were present in the city, immediately filled his place with Baltasare Cossa, a Neapolitan, who took the name of John XXIII, a man destitute of principle and of piety. From this war of the pontiffs vast evils arose which afflicted both the church and the state. Hence the emperor Sigismund, the king of France, and other kings and princes of Europe, spared no pains nor expense to restore harmony and bring the church again under one head. From the pontiffs it was found quite impossible to obtain any personal sacrifice for the peace of the church; so that no course remained but to assemble a general council of the whole church, to take cognisance of this great controversy. Such an assembly John XXIII, being prevailed on by the entreaties of Sigismund and hoping that it would favour his cause, appointed to be held at Constance in 1414. In this council were present the pontiff John, the emperor Sigismund, many princes of Germany, and ambassadors from the absent kings and princes of Europe, and from the republics.

The principal object of this great council was to extinguish the discord between the pontiffs; and this business was accomplished successfully. For having established by two solemn decrees, in the fourth and fifth sessions, that a pontiff is subject to a council of the whole church, and having most carefully substantiated the authority of councils, the fathers, on the 29th of May, 1415, removed John XXIII from the pontificate on account of various offences and crimes; for he had pledged himself to the council to resign the pontificate, and yet withdrew himself by flight. Gregory XII voluntarily resigned his pontificate on the 4th of July in the same year, through Carlo Malatesta. And Benedict XIII, on the 26th of July, 1417, was deprived of his rank as a pontiff by a solemn decree of the council. After these transactions, on the 11th of November, 1417, Otto Colonna was elected pontiff by the unanimous suffrages of the cardinals, and assumed the name of Martin V. Benedict XIII, who resided at Perpignan, resisted indeed, and claimed the rights and the dignity of a pontiff till his death, 1423; and after the death of this obstinate man, under the auspices of Alfonso, king of Sicily, Ægidius (Giles) Nuños, a Spaniard, was appointed to succeed him, by only two cardinals. He assumed the name of Clement VIII, and wished to be regarded as the legitimate pontiff; but in the year 1429 he was persuaded to resign the government of the church entirely to Martin V.

[1407-1416 A.D.]

The things done in this council for the repression and extirpation of heretics are not equally commendable; some of them, indeed, are quite inexcusable. Before the council sat, great religious commotions had arisen in several countries, but especially in Bohemia. There lived and taught at Prague, with much applause, an eloquent and learned man, by name John Huss, who acted as a professor of theology in the university and as a minister of holy things in the church. Vehemently did he declaim against priestly vices of every kind; which was generally done in that age, and no good man disapproved it. He likewise endeavoured, after the year 1408, to detach the university from acknowledging as pontiff Gregory XII, whom Bohemia had hitherto obeyed. This gave great offence to the archbishop of Prague and to the rest of the clergy, who were devoted partisans of Gregory. Hence arose great hostility between Huss and the archbishop, which the former kept up and increased by his discourses against the Romish court and the vices of the clergy.

To these first causes of hatred against Huss, which might easily have been surmounted, others were added of greater magnitude. First, he took the side of the Realists in philosophy, and, therefore, according to the usage of the age, goaded and pressed the Nominalists to the utmost of his power; yet their number was very considerable in the university of Prague, and their influence was not small. Afterwards, in the year 1408, he brought it about that, in the controversy between the Germans and the Bohemians respecting the number of votes, the decision was in favour of the Bohemians. By the laws of the university it was ordained that in academic discussions the Bohemians should have three votes, and the other three nations but one. The university was then divided into four nations, but the Bavarian, Polish, and Saxon were comprehended under the general name of the German nation. The usage had been that the Germans, who far exceeded the Bohemians in numbers, gave three votes and the Bohemians but one. Huss, therefore, either from partiality to his country or from hatred of the Nominalists, whom the greatest part of the Germans preferred to the Realists, obtained, by means of the vast influence at court which his eloquence gave him, a decree that the Germans should be deprived of the three votes and should be bidden to content themselves with one. This result of a long contest so offended the Germans that a great multitude of them, with the rector of the university, Johann Hofmann, at their head, left the university of Prague and retired to Leipzig, where Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, founded a university on their account in the year 1409. This event contributed much to increase the odium against Huss and to work his ruin. The Germans being ejected from Prague, Huss inveighed more freely than before against the vices of the clergy, and also publicly preached and recommended the opinions and the books of John Wycliffe, the Englishman. [See the history of England.] Being accused before John XXIII, in the year 1410, he was excommunicated by that pontiff. Spurning this thunderbolt, he continued, with general applause, first by word of mouth, afterwards in various writings, to lash the sores of the Roman church and of the priest of every degree.

This good man, who was in love with real piety, but perhaps had sometimes too much warmth and not sufficient prudence, being summoned to the Council of Constance, went thither on the faith of a safe-conduct given by the emperor Sigismund, with a view to demonstrate his innocence and prove them liars who talked of him as an apostate from the Roman church. And certainly he had not departed in things of any moment from the religion of his times; but had only inveighed severely against the pontiffs, the court of Rome, the more considerable clergy, and the monks; which in fact had the sanction of his times, and was daily done in the Council of Constance itself. Yet his enemies, who were numerous both in Bohemia and in the council, managed the procedure against him so artfully and successfully that, in violation of the public faith, he was cast into prison; and when he would not, according to the council’s order, confess himself guilty, he was adjudged a heretic, and burned alive, on the 6th day of July, 1415. Full of faith and the love of God, he sustained this punishment with admirable constancy. The same unhappy fate was borne with the same pious fortitude and constancy by Jerome of Prague, the companion of John Huss, who had come to Constance to support and aid his friend. He yielded at first through fear of death to the mandates of the council, and renounced those opinions which the council had condemned in him; but being retained still in prison, he resumed courage, again avowed those opinions, and was, therefore, committed to the flames on the 30th of May, 1416.

Before Huss and Jerome were condemned by the council, John Wycliffe, who was considered, and not altogether without reason, as their teacher, had been pronounced infamous, and condemned by a decree of the fathers. For on the fourth day of May, 1415, the council declared a number of opinions extracted from his writings to be abominable; and ordered all his books to be destroyed, and his bones to be burned. Not long after, on the 14th of June, they passed the famous decree that the sacred supper should be administered to the laity under one kind of bread only, forbidding communion under both kinds. For in the preceding year, 1414, Jacobellus (James) of Mies, incumbent of St. Michael’s church at Prague, by the instigation of a Parisian doctor, Peter of Dresden, had begun to celebrate the communion under both kinds, at Prague; which example many other churches followed. The subject being brought before the council by one of the Bohemian bishops, it considered a remedy to be required even for this heresy. By this decree at Constance, the communion of the laity under one kind obtained the force and authority of law in the Roman church.

[1407-1431 A.D.]

In the same year, the council placed among execrable errors, or heresies, an opinion of Jean Petit, a Parisian theologian, that tyrants might be lawfully slain by any private person. The party however, from whom this opinion came was not named, because he was supported by very powerful patrons. John duke of Burgundy employed assassins, in the year 1407, to murder Louis duke of Orleans. A great contest now arose, and Petit, an eloquent and ingenious man, pleaded the cause of John of Burgundy at Paris; and in order to justify his conduct he maintained that it is no sin to destroy a tyrant, without a trial of his cause, by force or fraud, or in any other manner, and even if the persons doing it are bound to him by an oath or covenant. By a tyrant, however, Petit did not understand the sovereign of a nation, but a powerful citizen, who abused his resources to the ruin of his king and country. The university of Paris passed a stern and severe sentence upon the author of so dangerous an opinion. The council, after several consultations, struck at the opinion, without naming its author. The new pontiff, however, Martin V, from fear of the Burgundian power, would not ratify even this mild sentence.

After these and some other transactions the council proceeded avowedly to the subject of a reformation of the church, in its “head and members,” as the language of that age was. For all Europe saw the need of such a reformation, and most ardently wished for it. Nor did the council deny that chiefly for this important object it had been called together. But the cardinals and principal men of the Romish court, for whose interest it was, especially, that the disorders of the church should remain untouched, craftily urged and brought the majority to believe that a business of such magnitude could not be managed advantageously, until after the election of a new pontiff. The new head of the church, however, Martin V, abused his power to elude the design of reformation; and manifested by his commands and edicts that he did not wish the church to be purged and restored to a sound state. The council, accordingly, after deliberating three years and six months, broke up on the 22nd of April, 1418, leaving the matter unaccomplished, and putting off that reformation, which all good men devoutly wished, to a council which should be called five years afterwards.

A Priest in his Mantle of Office, 1400

[1431-1439 A.D.]

Martin V, being admonished on the subject, after a long delay appointed this other council to be held at Pavia; and afterwards removed it to Siena, and lastly to Bâle. But at its very commencement, on the 21st February, 1431, he died; and was succeeded, in the month of March, by Gabriel Condolmieri, a Venetian, and bishop of Siena, who took the name of Eugenius IV. He sanctioned all that Martin had decreed about holding the council at Bâle; and accordingly it commenced on the 23rd of July, 1431, under the presidency of Cardinal Julian, as representative of the pontiff. Two objects especially were assigned to this celebrated council: first, a union between the Greeks and the Latins; and secondly, the reformation of the church, both in its “head and its members,” according to the resolution adopted in the Council of Constance. Now that the head, namely the sovereign pontiff, and all the members of the church, that is the bishops, priests, and monks, were in a very unsound state no one doubted. But when the fathers, by the very form of the council, by its mode and order of proceeding, and by its first decrees, showed an intention of performing in earnest what was expected of them, Eugenius IV became uneasy for a corrupt church under such physicians, and twice attempted to dissolve the council. This the fathers most firmly resisted; and they showed by the decrees of the Council of Constance, and by other arguments, that the council was superior in authority to a pontiff. This first contest between the pontiff and the council was brought to a close in the month of November, 1433; for the pontiff silently gave up the point, and in the month of December, by letters sent from Rome, gave the council his approbation.

After this the council prosecuted with energy the business upon which it had entered. The legates of the Roman pontiff were now admitted; but not until they had promised under oath to obey the decrees of the council, and particularly the decrees of the Council of Constance, asserting the dominion and jurisdiction of councils over the pontiffs. These very decrees of Constance, so odious to the pontiffs, were renewed in a public meeting of the fathers on the 26th of June, 1434. And on the 9th of June, 1435, annates, as they were called, were abolished, the pontifical legates in vain opposing it. On the 25th of March, 1436, a profession of faith was read, intended for the pope himself on the day of his election. The number of cardinals was reduced to twenty-four; and expectatives, reservations, and provisions were abolished.

Other things coming on little agreeable to the pontiff, Eugenius concluded that this very audacious and troublesome council must either be removed into Italy or be curbed by another council in opposition to it. Therefore, when these fathers decreed, on May 7th, 1437, that on account of the Greeks the council should be held either at Bâle, or Avignon, or in some city of Savoy, the pontiff, on the contrary, by his legates, decided that the council should be held in Italy. Neither party would revoke its decision. Hence a violent conflict, from this time onward, existed between the pontiff and the council. On the 26th of July, 1437, the council ordered the pontiff to appear before them at Bâle, and give account of his conduct. The pontiff, on the other hand, dissolved the council, and appointed another at Ferrara. But the fathers, with the approbation of the emperor, the king of France, and other princes, continued their deliberations at Bâle; and on the 28th of September of the same year pronounced the pontiff contumacious for not obeying the decree of a council.

On the 10th of January of the next year, 1438, Eugenius IV, in person, opened the council which he had summoned to meet at Ferrara; and in the second session of it excommunicated the fathers assembled at Bâle. The chief business of this council was to negotiate a union between the Greeks and Latins. The Greek emperor himself, Joannes Palæologus, the patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph, and the principal theologians and bishops of the nation had come personally to Italy, in order to facilitate the success of this important negotiation. For the Greeks, now reduced to extremities by the Turks, indulged the hope that if their disagreements with the Roman pontiff were removed the Latins would afford them succour. The business proceeded tardily, and with little success at Ferrara; but afterwards rather better at Florence. For Eugenius in the beginning of the year 1439, on account of the pestilence at Ferrara, had ordered the council to remove to Florence. The fathers at Bâle, provoked by these and other acts of Eugenius, proceeded on the 25th of June, 1439, to deprive him of the pontificate; but this bold procedure of theirs was not approved by the kings and princes of Europe. Eugenius, on the 4th of September, by a very severe bull anathematised the Basilian fathers and rescinded all their acts. Despising these thunders, on the 17th of September, 1439, they elected a new pontiff, Amadeus, duke of Savoy, who then led a retired life at Ripaille on the Leman Lake (Lake of Geneva). He assumed the name of Felix V.

[1439-1449 A.D.]

Thus the lamentable schism, which had been extinguished after so much labour and toil at Constance, returned with new and greater misfortunes. For there were not only two pontiffs mutually condemning each other, but likewise, what was worse, two opposing councils, that of Bâle and that of Florence. The greater part of the church, indeed, adhered to Eugenius; but most of the universities, and particularly the first among them, that of Paris, as well as some kingdoms and provinces, chose to follow Felix V. The Council of Bâle continued to deliberate and to pass laws and decrees till the year 1443, notwithstanding all the opposition of Eugenius and his adherents. And although the fathers separated in that year, they nevertheless publicly declared that the council was not at an end, but would assemble again at a proper time, either at Bâle, or Lyons, or Lausanne. The Council of Florence was chiefly occupied in settling the disputes between the Latins and the Greeks. This great business was committed to selected individuals of both parties. The principal one on the part of the Greeks was Bessarion, a very learned man, who was afterwards admitted into the order of cardinals in the Roman church. This man, being gained by the favours bestowed on him by the pontiff, exerted his influence, and the pontiff employed rewards, threats, and promises to induce the other Greeks to accede to the proposed terms of accommodation, and to acknowledge that the Holy Spirit proceeded also from the Son, that departed souls undergo a purgation by fire before they are admitted to the vision of God, that bread which is without leaven may be used in the sacred supper, and lastly, what was most important of all, that the Roman pontiff is the head and the judge of the church universal. One of the Greeks, Mark of Ephesus, could not be persuaded, by entreaties or by bribes, to give his assent. After all, this peace, which was extorted by various artifices, was not stable. For the Greeks, on returning to Constantinople, stated to their fellow-citizens that everything had been carried at Florence by fraud, and they resumed their hostility. The Council of Florence itself put an end to its deliberations on the 26th of April, 1442. There were also negotiations in this council for bringing the Armenians, and the Jacobites, but especially the Abyssinians, into union with the Romish church; which were attended with the same result as those respecting the Greeks.

[1447-1455 A.D.]

The author of this new pontifical schism, Eugenius IV, died in the month of February, 1447, and was succeeded in the month of March by Nicholas V, who was previously Tommaso Parentucelli of Sarzana, bishop of Bologna, a man of learning himself and a great patron of learning, and likewise moderate in temper and disposed for peace. Under him, by means of the persevering labours and efforts of the kings and princes of Europe, especially of the king of France, tranquillity was restored to the Latin church. For Felix V, on the 9th of April, 1449, himself resigned the supremacy of the church, and retired to his former quiet at Ripaille; and the Basilian fathers, being assembled on the 16th of April at Lausanne, ratified his voluntary abdication, and by a solemn decree directed the whole church to obey Nicholas only. On the 18th of June Nicholas promulgated this pacification; and, at the same time, confirmed by his sanction the acts and decrees of the Council of Bâle. This Nicholas was particularly distinguished for his love of literature and the arts, which he laudably exerted himself to advance and encourage in Italy, especially by means of the Greeks that came from Constantinople. He died on the 24th of March, 1455, principally from grief, occasioned by the capture of Constantinople by the Turks.[c]

At this date Milman closes his splendid work on The History of Latin Christianity. It will be profitable to quote his summing up of the point reached by Nicholas V, eight and a half centuries after Gregory the Great.[a]

MILMAN ON NICHOLAS V AND THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE

[1447-1458 A.D.]

The pontificate of Nicholas V is the culminating point of Latin Christianity. The papal power indeed had long reached its zenith. From Innocent III to Boniface VIII it had begun its decline. But Latin Christianity was alike the religion of the popes and of the councils which contested their supremacy. It was as yet no more than a sacerdotal strife whether the pope should maintain an irresponsible autocracy, or be limited and controlled by an ubiquitous, aristocratic senate. The most ardent reformers looked no further than to strengthen the hierarchy. The prelates were determined to emancipate themselves from the usurpations of the pope, as to their elections, their arbitrary taxation by Rome, the undermining of their authority by perpetual appeals; but they had no notion of relaxing in the least the ecclesiastical domination. It was not that Christendom might govern itself, but that themselves might have a more equal share in the government. They were as jealously attached as the pope to the creed of Latin Christianity. The council, not the pope, burned John Huss. Their concessions to the Bohemians were extorted from their fears, not granted by their liberality. The Vulgate was their Bible, the Latin service their exclusive liturgy, the Canon Law their code of jurisprudence.

Latin Christianity had yet to discharge some part of its mission. It had to enlighten the world with letters, to adorn it with arts. It had hospitably to receive (a gift fatal in the end to its own dominion) and to promulgate to mankind the poets, historians, philosophers of Greece. It had to break down its own idols, the schoolmen, and substitute a new idolatry, that of classical literature. It had to perfect Christian art. Already Christian architecture had achieved some of its wonders. The venerable Lateran and St. Paul’s without the Walls, the old St. Peter’s, St. Mark’s at Venice and Pisa, Strasburg and Cologne, Rheims and Bourges, York and Lincoln, stood in their majesty. Christian painting, and even Christian sculpture, were to rise to their untranscended excellence.

The choice of Nicholas V was one of such singular felicity for his time that it cannot be wondered if his admirers looked on it as overruled by the Holy Spirit. “Who would have thought in Florence,” so said Nicholas to his biographer Vespasiano,[e] “that a priest who rang the bells should become supreme pontiff?” Yet it seems to have been a happy accident. In Nicholas V, in three short years, the pope had become again a great Italian potentate. The pilgrims carried back throughout Europe accounts of the resuscitated majesty of the Roman pontificate, the unsullied personal dignity of the pope, the re-enthronement of religion in the splendid edifices, which were either building or under restoration. Nicholas V was to behold, as it were, the final act of homage to the popedom, from the majesty of the empire. He was to be the last pontiff who was to crown at Rome the successor of Charlemagne; Frederick III the last emperor who was so to receive his crown from the hands of the pope.

[1452-1455 A.D.]

Now came that event which, however foreseen by the few wiser prophetic spirits, burst on Europe and on Christendom with the stunning and appalling effect of absolute suddenness—the taking of Constantinople by the Turks. On no two European minds did this disaster work with more profound or more absorbing terror than on Pope Nicholas V and Æneas Sylvius (Enea Silvio Piccolomini); nor could anyone allege more sound reasons for that terror than the pope and the bishop of Siena. Who could estimate better than Æneas, from his intimate knowledge of all the countries of Europe, of Italy, Germany, France, England, the extent of the danger which impended over the Latin world? Never since its earlier outburst might Mohammedanism seem so likely to subjugate if not to swallow up distracted and disunited Christendom, as under the Turks. By sea and land they were equally formidable. If Christendom should resist, on what frontier? All were menaced, all in danger. What city, what kingdom, would arrest the fierce, the perpetual invasion? From this period throughout the affairs of Germany (at Frankfort he preached a crusade) to the end of his legatine power, of his cardinalate, of his papacy, of his life, this was the one absorbing thought, one passion, of Æneas Sylvius. The immediate advance of the victorious Muhammed through Hungary, Dalmatia, to the border, the centre of Italy, was stopped by a single fortress, Belgrade; by a preacher, John Capistrano; by a hero, John Hunyady. But it was not till, above a century later, when Don John of Austria, at Lepanto by sea, and John Sobieski, before Vienna, by land, broke the spell of Mohammedan conquest, that Europe or Christendom might repose in security.

The death of Nicholas V was hastened, it was said, by the taking of Constantinople. Grief, shame, fear, worked on a constitution broken by the gout. But Nicholas V foresaw not that in remote futurity the peaceful, not the warlike, consequences of the fall of Constantinople would be most fatal to the popedom—that what was the glory of Nicholas V would become among the foremost causes of the ruin of mediæval religion; that it would aid in shaking to the base and in severing forever the majestic unity of Latin Christianity.

Nicholas V aspired to make Italy the domicile, Rome the capital, of letters and arts. No sooner was Nicholas pope than he applied himself to the foundation of the Vatican library. Five thousand volumes were speedily collected. The wondering age boasted that no such library had existed since the days of the Ptolemies.

The scholars of Italy flocked to Rome, each to receive his task from the generous pope, who rewarded their labours with ample payment. He seemed determined to enrich the West with all that survived of Grecian literature. The fall of Constantinople, long threatened, had been preceded by the immigration of many learned Greeks. France, Germany, even England, the Byzantine Empire, Greece, had been ransacked by industrious agents for copies of all the Greek authors. No branch of letters was without its interpreters.

A Pope of the Fifteenth Century

To Nicholas V, Italy, or rather Latin Christianity, mainly owes her age of learning, as well as its fatal consequence to Rome and to Latin Christianity, which in his honest ardour he would be the last to foresee. It was the splendid vision of Nicholas V that this revival of letters, which in certain circles became almost a new religion, would not be the bond-slave but the handmaid or willing minister of the old. Latin Christianity was to array itself in all the spoils of the ancient world, and so maintain (there was nothing of policy in his thought) her dominion over the mind of man. But Rome under Nicholas V was not to be the centre of letters alone; she was also to resume her rank as the centre of art, more especially of architectural magnificence. Rome was to be again as of old the lawgiver of civilisation; pilgrims from all parts of the world, from curiosity, for business, or from religion, were to bow down before the confessed supremacy of her splendid works.

The pope was to be a great sovereign prince, but above the sovereign prince he was to be the successor of St. Peter. Rome was to be at once the strong citadel, and the noblest sanctuary in the world, unassailable by her enemies both without and within from her fortifications; commanding the world to awe by the unrivalled majesty of her churches. The Jubilee had poured enormous wealth into the treasury of the pope; his ordinary revenues, both from the papal territory and from Christendom at large, began to flow in with peace and with the revival of his authority. That wealth was all expended with the most liberal magnificence. Already had it dawned upon the mind of Nicholas V that the cathedral of the chief of the apostles ought to rival, or to surpass, all the churches in Christendom in vastness and majesty. It was to be entirely rebuilt from its foundations. Julius II and Leo X did but accomplish the design of Nicholas V.

Thus in Nicholas V closed one great age of the papacy. In Nicholas the sovereign Italian prince and the pontiff met in serene and amicable dignity; he had no temptation to found a princely family. But before long the pontiff was to be lost in the sovereign prince. Nor was it less evident that the exclusive dominion of Latin Christianity was drawing to a close, though nearly a century might elapse before the final secession of Teutonic Christianity, and the great permanent division of Christendom. Each successive pontificate might seem determined to advance, to hasten that still slow but inevitable revolution: the audacious nepotism of Sixtus IV, the wickednesses of Alexander VI, which defy palliation; the wars of Julius II, with the hoary pope at the head of ferocious armies; the political intrigues and disasters of Clement VII.[b]

POPES TO 1503

[1458-1503 A.D.]

Nicholas’ successor, Alfonso Borgia (Borja), a Spaniard, whose pontifical name was Calixtus III, performed nothing great or splendid, if no account be taken of his anxiety to urge Christian princes upon a war against the Turks. He died in the year 1458. Much more celebrated was his successor, Æneas Sylvius Piccolomini, bishop of Siena, who ascended the papal throne in 1458, and took the name of Pius II, a man of superior genius, and renowned both for his achievements and for his various writings and publications.

Yet posterity would have accounted him a much greater man, if he had not been guilty of gross inconsistency. For after strenuously maintaining the rights of councils against the pontiffs, and boldly defending the cause of the Council of Bâle against Eugenius IV, upon being made pontiff, he apostatised from himself; and January 18th, 1460, denied that a council is superior to a pontiff, and severely prohibited appeals to councils; and in the year 1461 obtained from Louis XI, king of France, the abrogation of the pragmatic sanction, which was favourable to councils; and finally, April 26th, 1463, he expressed a public disapproval of all that he had himself written in favour of the Council of Bâle, and decreed that Pius II was to be heard and obeyed, but that Æneas Sylvius was to be condemned. A short time after making this declaration he fell ill and died in the month of July, 1464.

Paul II, previously Pietro Barbo, a Venetian, who was raised to the chair of St. Peter in 1464, and died in 1471, performed some acts not unworthy of commendation, at least according to the views of that age; but he also did many things that are scarcely excusable, if they are so at all, among the least important of which is that he made a jubilee year come once in every twenty-five years, in 1470. Hence his reputation with posterity has remained equivocal.

The subsequent pontiffs, Sixtus IV, previously Francesco Albescola della Rovere, who died in 1484, and Innocent VIII,[108] previously Giovanni Battista Cibo, a Genoese, who died in 1492, were of the middle kind, being distinguished as popes neither for great virtues nor for great faults. Each, fearing for Italy and for all Europe, from the power of the Turks, both prepared himself for a war upon them and very earnestly urged one on the kings of Europe. But each met with such obstacles as disappointed an object so dear to his heart. Nothing else was done by them with much pretension to true greatness.

The pontifical series of this century is closed by Alexander VI, a Spaniard, whose true name was Rodrigo Borgia. He may not improperly be called the Nero of pontiffs. For the villainies, crimes, and enormities recorded of this man are so many and so great as to make it seem clear that he was destitute, we will not say of all religion, but even of decency and shame. Among the things charged upon him, though some may be false and others overstated, by his enemies, yet so many remain which are placed beyond all dispute as are sufficient to render the memory of Alexander execrable in the view of all who have even a moderate share of virtue. A large part of his crimes, however, originated from his excessive partiality for his children; for he had four sons by a concubine, among whom was the notorious Cesare Borgia, infamous for his enormous vices, and likewise one daughter named Lucrezia; and he was intent solely on bringing forward and enriching these, without regarding honesty, reason, or religion.[c]

ALEXANDER VI, THE BORGIA

[1492-1503 A.D.]

The great object of Alexander through his whole life was to gratify his inclination for pleasure, his ambition, and his love of ease. When at length he had attained to the supreme spiritual dignity, he seemed also to have reached the summit of happiness. Spite of his advanced years, the exultation he felt seemed daily to impart to him a new life. No painful thought was permitted to disturb his repose for a single night. His only care was to seize on all means that might aid him to increase his power, and advance the wealth and dignity of his sons; on no other subject did he ever seriously bestow a thought. This one consideration was at the base of all his political alliances, and of those relations by which the events of the world were at that time so powerfully influenced. How the pope would proceed, in regard to the marriages, endowments, and advance of his children, became a question affecting the politics of all Europe.

The son of Alexander, Cæsar Borgia, followed close on the footsteps of Riario. He began from the same point, and his first undertaking was to drive the widow of Riario from Imola and Forlì. He pressed forward to the completion of his designs with the most daring contempt of consequences; what Riario had only approached, or attempted, Cæsar Borgia carried forward to its utmost results. Let us take a rapid glance at the means by which his purposes were accomplished.

The ecclesiastical states had hitherto been divided by the factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the first represented in Rome by the family of Orsini, the second by the house of Colonna. The popes had usually taken part with one or the other of these factions. Sixtus IV had done so, and his example was followed by Alexander and his son, who at first attached themselves to the Guelf, or Orsini party. This alliance enabled them very soon to gain the mastery of all their enemies. They drove the house of Sforza from Pesaro, that of Malatesta from Rimini, and the family of Manfredi from Faenza. They seized on those powerful, well-fortified cities, and thus commenced the foundation of an extensive lordship. But no sooner had they attained this point, no sooner had they freed themselves from their enemies, than they turned every effort against their friends. And it was in this that the practice of the Borgias differed from that of their predecessors, who had ever remained firmly attached to the party they had chosen; Cæsar, on the contrary, attacked his own confederates, without hesitation or scruple. The duke of Urbino, from whom he had frequently received important aid, was involved, as in a network, by the machinations of Cæsar, and with difficulty saved his life, a persecuted fugitive in his own dominions. Vitelli, Baglioni, and other chiefs of the Orsini faction, resolved to show him that at least they were capable of resistance. But Cæsar Borgia, declaring that “it is permitted to betray those who are the masters of all treasons,” decoyed them into his snares with profoundly calculated cruelty, and mercilessly deprived them of life. Having thus destroyed both parties, he stepped into their place, gathered the inferior nobility, who had been their adherents, around him, and took them into his pay; the territories he had seized on were held in subjection by force of terror and cruelty.

The brightest hopes of Alexander were thus realised—the nobles of the land were annihilated, and his house about to found a great hereditary dominion in Italy. But he had already begun to acquire practical experience of the evil which passions, aroused and unbridled, are capable of producing. With no relative or favourite would Cæsar Borgia endure the participation of his power. His own brother stood in his way; Cæsar caused him to be murdered and thrown into the Tiber. His brother-in-law was assailed and stabbed, by his orders, on the steps of his palace. The wounded man was nursed by his wife and sister, the latter preparing his food with her own hands to secure him from poison; the pope set a guard upon the house to protect his son-in-law from his son. Cæsar laughed these precautions to scorn. “What cannot be done at noonday,” said he, “may be brought about in the evening.” When the prince was on the point of recovery, he burst into his chamber, drove out the wife and sister, called in the common executioner, and caused his unfortunate brother-in-law to be strangled. Towards his father, whose life and station he valued only as means to his own aggrandisement, he displayed not the slightest respect or feeling. He slew Peroto, Alexander’s favourite, while the unhappy man clung to his patron for protection, and was wrapped within the pontifical mantle. The blood of the favourite flowed over the face of the pope.

For a certain time the city of the apostles, and the whole state of the church, were in the hands of Cæsar Borgia. He is described as possessing great personal beauty, and was so strong that in a bull-fight he would strike off the head of the animal at a single blow; of liberal spirit, and not without certain features of greatness, but given up to his passions, and deeply stained with blood. How did Rome tremble at his name! Cæsar required gold, and possessed enemies; every night were the corpses of murdered men found in the streets, yet none dared move; for who but might fear that his own turn would be next? Those whom violence could not reach were taken off by poison. There was but one place on earth where such deeds were possible—that, namely, where unlimited temporal power was united to the highest spiritual authority, where the laws, civil and ecclesiastical, were held in one and the same hand. This place was occupied by Cæsar Borgia. Even depravity may have its perfection. The kindred of the popes have often distinguished themselves in the career of evil, but none attained to the eminence of Cæsar Borgia. He may be called a virtuoso in crime. Was it not in the first and most essential tendencies of Christianity to render such a power impossible? And yet, Christianity itself, and the very position of the supreme head of the church, were made subservient to its existence.

There needed, then, no advent of a Luther, to prove to the world that these things were in direct opposition to the spirit of Christianity. Even at that time men complained that the pope was preparing the way for antichrist, and labouring for the interest of Satan rather than the kingdom of God. We do not follow the history of Alexander in its minute details. He once purposed, as is but too well authenticated,[109] to destroy one of the richest cardinals by poison; but the latter contrived to win over the pope’s chief cook by means of promises, entreaties, and gifts. The confection, prepared for the cardinal, was set before the pontiff himself; and Alexander expired from the effects of that poison which he had destined for another.[f]

Estimates of Alexander VI

It is the pastime of historians to practise their technic impartially in besmirching the sanctified reputations of the saints of popular belief and in whitewashing the traditional villains. Alexander VI is too historic a monster to escape the efforts of some apologist, and in recent years Dr. Richard Garnett[g] and Frederick Baron Corvo[i] have come to his rescue. The former praises his great shrewdness, his learning and vigour, and finds him no worse than his times, which is at best damning with faint praise one who stood for St. Peter on earth. Dr. Garnett after his defence is however compelled to admit the following flaws in the pope’s character:[a]

“Cardinal Borgia had simply bought up the Sacred College. Although Alexander’s election was without question the most notorious of any for the unscrupulous employment of illegitimate influences, it is difficult to affirm that it was in principle more simoniacal than most of those which had lately preceded it or were soon to follow. Men said that Alexander had bribed the French ministers; probably he had. He had been tortuous, perfidious, temporising under stress of circumstances. Unrestrained by moral scruples, or by any spiritual conception of religion, he was betrayed into gross sensuality of one kind, though in other respects he was temperate and abstemious. In the more respectable guise of family affection it led him to outrage every principle of justice. The general tendency of investigation, which utterly shattering all idle attempts to represent him as the model pope, has been to relieve him of the most odious imputations against his character. There remains the charge of secret poisoning from motives of cupidity, which indeed appear established, or nearly so, only in a single instance, but this may imply others.”

In the same work Henry C. Lea[h] is more severe. “It is no wonder that Rome had become a centre of corruption whence infection was radiated throughout Christendom. In the middle of the fourteenth century Petrarch exhausts his rhetoric in describing the abominations of the papal city of Avignon, where everything was vile; and the return of the curia to Rome transferred to that city the supremacy in wickedness. In 1499 the Venetian ambassador describes it as the sewer of the world, and Machiavelli asserts that through its example all devotion and all religion had perished in Italy. In 1490 it numbered 6000 public women—an enormous proportion for a population not exceeding 100,000. The story is well known, how Cardinal Borgia, who, as vice-chancellor, openly sold pardons for crime, when reproved for this, replied, that God desires not the death of sinners but that they should pay and live. If the diary of Infessura[j] is suspect on account of his partisanship, that of Burchard is unimpeachable, and his placid recital of the events passing under his eyes presents to us a society too depraved to take shame at its own wickedness. The public marriage, he says, of the daughters of Innocent VIII and Alexander VI set the fashion for the clergy to have children, and they diligently followed it; for all, from the highest to the lowest, kept concubines, while the monasteries were brothels.”

And John Addington Symonds has been quite as emphatic:

“To describe him as the Genius of Evil, whose sensualities, as unrestrained as Nero’s, were relieved against the background of flames and smoke which Christianity had raised for fleshly sins, is justifiable. An epigram gained currency: ‘Alexander sells the keys, the altars, Christ. Well, he bought them; so he has a right to sell them.’ Having sold the scarlet to the highest bidder, he used to feed his prelate with rich benefices. When he had fattened him sufficiently, he poisoned him, laid hands upon his hoards, and recommenced the game. His traffic in church dignities was carried on upon a grand scale, twelve cardinals’ hats, for example, were put to auction in a single day. This was when he wished to pack the conclave with votes in favour of the cession of Romagna to Cesare Borgia. Carnal sensuality was the besetting vice of this pope throughout his life. His relations to Vanozza Catanei and to Giulia Farnese were open and acknowledged. These two sultanas ruled him during the greater portion of his career, conniving meanwhile at the harem, which, after true oriental fashion, he maintained in the Vatican.”[l]

JULIUS II

[1503-1513 A.D.]

A pope followed who made it his object to assume a position in direct contrast with that of the Borgias; but who pursued the same end, though he took different, and from that very circumstance successful, means for his purpose. Julius II (1503-1513 A.D.) enjoyed the incalculable advantage of finding opportunity for promoting the interests of his family by peaceable means; he obtained for his kindred the inheritance of Urbino. This done, he could devote himself, undisturbed by the importunities of his kindred, to the gratification of that innate love for war and conquest which was indeed the ruling passion of his life. To this he was invited by the circumstances of the times, and the consciousness of his eminent position; but his efforts were all for the church—for the benefit of the papal see. Other popes had laboured to procure principalities for their sons or their nephews; it was the ambition of Julius to extend the dominions of the church. He must, therefore, be regarded as the founder of the papal states.

A Friar of the Sixteenth Century

He found the whole territory in extreme confusion; all who had escaped by flight from the hand of Cæsar had returned—the Orsini, the Colonna, the Vitelli and Baglioni, Varani, Malatesta, and Montefeltri—everywhere throughout the whole land were the different parties in movement; murderous contests took place in the very Borgo of Rome. Pope Julius has been compared with the Neptune of Virgil, when rising from the waves, with peace-inspiring countenance he hushes their storms to repose. By prudence and good management he disembarrassed himself even of Cæsar Borgia, whose castles he seized and of whose dukedom he also gained possession. The lesser barons he kept in order with the more facility from the measures to this effect that had been taken by Cæsar, but he was careful not to give them such cardinals for leaders as might awaken the ancient spirit of insubordination by ambitious enterprise. The more powerful nobles, who refused him obedience, he attacked without further ceremony. His accession to the papal throne sufficed to reduce Baglioni (who had again made himself master of Perugia) within the limits of due subordination. Nor could Bentivoglio offer effectual resistance when required to resign that sumptuous palace which he had erected in Bologna, and whereon he had too hastily inscribed the well-known eulogy of his own good fortune; of this he saw himself deprived in his old age. The two powerful cities of Perugia and Bologna were thus subjected to the immediate authority of the pontifical throne.

But with all this, Julius was yet far from having accomplished the end he had proposed to himself. The coasts of the papal states were in great part occupied by the Venetians; they were by no means disposed to yield possession of them freely, and the pope was greatly their inferior in military power. He could not conceal from himself that his attacking them would be the signal for a commotion throughout Europe. Should he venture to risk this?

Old as Julius now was, worn by the many vicissitudes of good and evil fortune experienced through a long life; by the fatigues of war and exile, and most of all by the consequences of intemperance and licentious excess, he yet knew not what fear or irresolution meant; in the extremity of age, he still retained that grand characteristic of manhood, an indomitable spirit. He felt little respect for the princes of his time, and believed himself capable of mastering them all. He took the field in person, and having stormed Mirandola, he pressed into the city across the frozen ditches and through the breach; the most disastrous reverses could not shake his purpose, but rather seemed to waken new resources within him. He was accordingly successful; not only were his own baronies rescued from the Venetians, but in the fierce contest that ensued, he at length made himself master of Parma, Piacenza, and even Reggio, thus laying the foundation of a power such as no pope had ever possessed before him. From Piacenza to Terracina the whole fair region admitted his authority.

PREVALENCE OF SECULARISM IN THE CHURCH

[1471-1503 A.D.]

It was an inevitable consequence that the whole body of the hierarchy should be influenced by the character and tendencies of its chief, that all should lend their best aid to the promotion of his purposes, and be themselves carried forward by the impulse thus given. Not only the supreme dignity of the pontiff, but all other offices of the church, were regarded as mere secular property. The pope nominated cardinals from no better motive than personal favour, the gratification of some potentate, or even, and this was no unfrequent occurrence, for actual payment of money! Could there be any rational expectation that men so appointed would fulfil their spiritual duties? One of the most important offices of the church, the Penitenziaria, was bestowed by Sixtus IV on one of his nephews. This office held a large portion of the power of granting dispensations; its privileges were still further extended by the pope, and in a bull issued for the express purpose of confirming them, he declares all who shall presume to doubt the rectitude of such measures, to be a “stiff-necked people and children of malice.” It followed as a matter of course that the nephew considered his office as a benefice, the proceeds of which he was entitled to increase to the utmost extent possible.

A large amount of worldly power was at this time conferred in most instances, together with the bishoprics; they were held more or less as sinecures according to the degree of influence or court favour possessed by the recipient or his family. The Roman curia thought only of how it might best derive advantage from the vacancies and presentations; Alexander extorted double annates or first-fruits, and levied double, nay triple tithes; there remained few things that had not become matter of purchase. The taxes of the papal chancery rose higher from day to day, and the comptroller, whose duty it was to prevent all abuses in that department, most commonly referred the revision of the imposts to those very men who had fixed their amount. For every indulgence obtained from the datary’s office, a stipulated sum was paid; nearly all the disputes occurring at this period between the several states of Europe and the Roman court arose out of these exactions, which the curia sought by every possible means to increase, while the people of all countries as zealously strove to restrain them.

Principles such as these necessarily acted on all ranks affected by the system based on them, from the highest to the lowest. Many ecclesiastics were found ready to renounce their bishoprics; but they retained the greater part of the revenues, and not unfrequently the presentation to the benefices dependent on them also. Even the laws forbidding the son of a clergyman to procure induction to the living of his father, and enacting that no ecclesiastic should dispose of his office by will, were continually evaded; for as all could obtain permission to appoint whomsoever he might choose as his coadjutor, provided he were liberal of his money, so the benefices of the church became in a manner hereditary. It followed of necessity that the performance of ecclesiastical duties was grievously neglected. In this rapid sketch, we confine ourselves to remarks made by conscientious prelates of the Roman court itself.

In all places incompetent persons were intrusted with the performance of clerical duties; they were appointed without scrutiny or selection. The incumbents of benefices were principally interested in finding substitutes at the lowest possible cost, thus the mendicant friars were frequently chosen as particularly suitable in this respect. These men occupied the bishoprics under the title (previously unheard of in that sense) of suffragans; the cures they held in the capacity of vicars. Already were the mendicant orders in possession of extraordinary privileges, and these had been yet further extended by Sixtus IV, who was himself a Franciscan. They had the right of confessing penitents, administering the Lord’s Supper, and bestowing extreme unction, as also that of burying within the precincts, and even in the habit of the order. All these privileges conferred importance as well as profit, and the mendicant friars enjoyed them in their utmost plenitude; the pope even threatened the disobedient secular clergy, or others, who should molest the orders, more particularly as regarded bequests, with the loss of their respective offices.

The administration of parishes as well as that of bishoprics being now in the hands of the mendicant orders, it is manifest that they must have possessed enormous influence. The higher offices and more important dignities were monopolised, together with their revenues, by the great families and their dependants, shared only with the favourites of courts and of the curia; the actual discharge of the various duties was confided to the mendicant friars who were upheld by the popes. They took active part also in the sale of indulgences, to which so unusual an extension was given at that time, Alexander VI being the first to declare officially that they were capable of releasing souls from purgatory. But the orders also had fallen into the extreme of worldliness. What intrigues were set on foot among them for securing the higher appointments! what eagerness was displayed at elections to be rid of a rival, or of a voter believed unfavourable! The latter were sent out of the way as preachers or as inspectors of remote parishes; against the former, they did not scruple to employ the sword, or the dagger, and many were destroyed by poison. Meanwhile the comforts men seek from religion became mere matter of sale; the mendicant friars, employed at miserably low wages, caught eagerly at all contingent means of making profit.

While the populace had sunk into almost heathen superstition, and expected their salvation from mere ceremonial observances, but half understood, the higher classes were manifesting opinions of a tendency altogether anti-religious. How profoundly astonished must Luther have been, on visiting Italy in his youth! At the very moment when the sacrifice of the mass was completed, did the priests utter blasphemous words in denial of its reality! It was even considered characteristic of good society, in Rome, to call the principles of Christianity in question. “One passes,” says P. Ant. Bandino,[m] “no longer for a man of cultivation, unless one put forth heterodox opinions regarding the Christian faith.” At court, the ordinances of the Catholic church, and of passages from Holy Scripture, were made subjects of jest—the mysteries of the faith had become matter of derision.

We thus see how all is enchained and connected—how one event calls forth another. The pretensions of temporal princes to ecclesiastical power awaken a secular ambition in the popes, the corruption and decline of religious institutions elicit the development of a new intellectual tendency, till at length the very foundations of the faith become shaken in the public opinion.[f]

FOOTNOTES

[107] [For an account of the origin of the order of Templars and its destruction see the previous history of the Crusades.]

[108] See Muratori,[e] ad ann. 1478. Innocent VIII had lived so shamefully before he mounted the Romish throne that he had sixteen illegitimate children to make provision for. Yet on the papal throne he played the zealot against the Germans, whom he accused of magic, in his bull Summis desiderantes affectibus, etc., and also against the Hussites, whom he well-nigh exterminated.

[109] [Though Von Ranke[f] and others believe that Alexander VI was poisoned, Dr. Garnett[g] says: “His decease became the nucleus of a labyrinthine growth of legend and romance. Modern investigation has dispelled it all and left no doubt that his death was natural.”]

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