HENRY THE FOURTH—HIS SUPPLIANT VISIT TO CANOSSA.
The student of the history of the Romish church is aware that during the first five centuries after Christ the pope was vested with little, if any, other powers or dignities than those which pertained to him as Bishop of Rome. His subsequent claim to unlimited spiritual and political sway was then unthought of, much less anywhere advanced. Even for another five centuries he is only the nominal head of the church, who is subordinate to the political potentates and dependent upon them for protection and support in his office. But in the year 1073 succeeded one Gregory VII., to the tiara, who proposed to erect a spiritual empire which should be wholly absolved from dependency on kings and princes. His pontificate was one continuous struggle for the success of his undertaking. Of powerful will, great energy and shrewdness and with set purpose his administration wrought great change in the papal office and the relations of the church to European society. His chief measures by which he sought to compass his design were the celibacy of the priesthood and the suppression of the then prevalent custom of simony. The latter bore especially hard on the German Emperor, much of whose strength lay in the power to appoint the bishops and to levy assessments upon them when the royal exchequer was in need. In the year 1075 Gregory proclaimed his law against the custom, forbidding the sale of all offices of the church, and declaring that none but the pope might appoint bishops or confer the symbols of their authority. With an audacity unheard of, and a determination little anticipated, he sent word to Henry IV., of Germany, demanding the enforcement of the rule throughout his dominion under penalty of excommunication. The issue was a joint one, and a crisis inevitable. No pope had ever assumed such an attitude or used such language to a German Emperor. Henry was not disposed and resolved not to submit. So far as a formal disposition of the difficulty was concerned the case was an easy one. He called the bishops together in a synod which met at Worms. They proceeded with unanimity to declare Gregory deposed from his papal office and sent word of their action to Rome. The pope, who had used every artifice to gain popularity with the people, was prepared for the contest and answered back with the ban of excommunication. The emperor might have been able to carry on the struggle with some hope of success had he been in favor with his own subjects. But he had alienated the Saxons by his harsh treatment of them and the indignities heaped upon them; and others of his states looked upon him with suspicion. Pitted against the ablest foe in Europe, he found himself without the sympathy and aid of those to whom alone he could look for help. Meanwhile Gregory was sending his agents to all the courts of Europe and employing every intrigue to effect the emperor’s dethronement. In 1076 a convention of princes was called to meet near Mayence, Henry not being permitted to be present. So heavy had the papal excommunication fallen by this time that the emperor sent messengers to this convention offering to submit to their demands if they would only spare his crown. Gregory was inexorable, and they adjourned without any reconciliations being effected, to meet in a few months at Augsburg. Henry now realized the might of the hand that for centuries had been silently gathering the reins of spiritual power, only to grasp at last the political supremacy as well. With the burden of excommunication ready to crush out his imperial scepter he sued for pardon at any price. The pope had retired for a time to the castle of Canossa, not far from Parma. Thither went the Franconian Emperor of Germany to implore the papal forgiveness. He presented himself before the gate barefoot, clad in a shirt of sack-cloth, and prayed that he might be received and forgiven as a penitent sinner. But Gregory chose to prolong the satisfaction he had in witnessing his penitence. So throughout the whole day, without food, in snow and rain, he stood begging the pope to receive him. In the same condition and without avail, he stood the second and the third day. Not until the morning of the fourth day did the pope admit him, and then his pardon was granted on conditions which made his crown, for the time, a dependency of the Bishop of Rome.
But the struggle of the German rulers with popedom was not ended at Canossa. Henry himself renewed it a few years later with far better results to his side. The spirit of protestantism was ever alive in some form in Germany, and, as we have said, was prophetic of him who should rise in the fifteenth century and dare to protest against the claim of spiritual supremacy by the autocrat of Rome. From that time till now it has been a by-phrase with German princes in their conflicts with the church that they “will not go to Canossa.”
BEFORE THE REFORMATION.
At this time superstition and dense ignorance were widespread. Stories of magic were constantly told and believed, and the miracles with which the church offset them were hardly less absurd. Other terrors were added. Public justice was administered so imperfectly that private and arbitrary violence took its place; while the tribunals which formerly sat in the open sunlight before the people now covered themselves with night and secrecy. “The Holy Feme” sprang up in Westphalia. Originally a public tribunal of the city, such as is found in Brunswick, and in other places, it afterward spread far and wide, but in a changed form. Its members held their sessions in secret and by night. Unknown messengers of the tribunal summoned the accused. Disguised judges, volunteer officers, from among “the knowing ones,” gave judgment, often in wild, desolate places, and often in some ancient seat of justice, as at the Linden-tree at Dortmund. The sentence was executed, even if the criminal had not appeared or had made his escape. The dagger, with the mark of the Feme, found in the dead body, told how surely the avenging arm had struck in the darkness. It was a fearful time, when justice, like crime, must walk in disguise.
The habits of thought which made possible such beliefs and actions as these were part of the same movement to which the corruption of church doctrine and government must also be referred. The perverted Roman Christianity from which the Reformation was a revolt was not the Christianity of Charlemagne, nor even that of Hildebrand. Hasty readers sometimes imagine that the church, for many centuries before the Reformation, had firmly held the doctrines which Luther rejected. But, in fact, most of them were recent innovations. Peter the Lombard, Bishop of Paris in the twelfth century, was the first theologian to enumerate “the Seven Sacraments,” and Eugene IV., in 1431, was the first of the popes to proclaim them. The doctrine of transubstantiation was first embodied in the church confession by the Lateran Council of November, 1215, the same which first required auricular confession of all the laity. It was more than a century later before the celibacy of the clergy and the denial of the sacramental cup to all but priests became established law, and the idea that the pope is the vicar of Christ upon earth, and the bearer of divine honors, was accepted. All these corruptions of the earlier faith were the results of ambition in the hierarchy, and of gross and sensual modes of thought in the people; and the same causes led to the rapid development, in the fifteenth century especially, of the worship of the Virgin Mary, who was honored with ceremonies and prayers from which Christians of earlier ages would have shrunk as blasphemous. Nor can the church of the beginning of the sixteenth century be understood by studying the confession adopted by the Council of Trent a generation or more afterward. The teachings and practices which called forth Luther’s protest were far too gross, when once explained, to bear the examination of sincere friends of Romanism; who, without knowing it themselves, were greatly influenced, even in their formal statements of belief, by the controversies of the Reformation. The value of that great event to the world can not be comprehended without a knowledge of what it has done for the Catholic church within its own boundaries.[A]
PREPARING FOR THE REFORMATION.
Prior to the fourteenth century all learning was monopolized by the church. Its power was exercised to make every branch of knowledge harmonize itself with the teachings of Catholic Christianity. In revolt against these shackles arose a few independent spirits who sought to rest religious doctrine on the foundations of reason to some degree, at least. Nevertheless, superstitions still clung to and mingled with all these new studies, and the age did not witness their separation. The higher intelligence traveled gradually, but very slowly. The art of printing came to its assistance and proved to be its strongest auxiliary. To Germany belongs the glory of this invention, and she can boast no higher service rendered to mankind. The art of wood-engraving was the preliminary step which led to it. It was soon employed for pictures of sacred scenes and persons; so that the many who could neither read nor write had a sort of Bible in their picture collections. But the grand conception of making movable types, each bearing a single letter, and composing the words of them, was first formed by John Gutenberg, of the patrician family of Gänsefleisch, of Mayence. He was driven from his native city by a disturbance among the guilds, and went to Strasburg, where he invented the art of printing about the year 1450. Great trouble was experienced in discovering the proper material in which to cut the separate letters; neither wood nor lead answered well. Being short of resources, Gutenberg formed a partnership with John Faust, also of Mayence. Faust’s assistant, Peter Schöffer, afterward his son-in-law, a skillful copyist and draughtsman, discovered the proper alloy for type-metal, and invented printing-ink. In 1461 appeared the first large book printed in Germany, a handsome Bible, exhibiting the perfection that the art possessed at its very origin.
When Adolphus of Nassau captured Mayence in 1462, the workmen skilled in the art, which had been kept a secret, were scattered through the world; and by the end of the fifteenth century the principal nations of Europe, and especially Italy, France, and England, had become rivals of Germany in prosecuting it. Books had previously been transcribed, chiefly by monks, upon expensive parchment, and often beautifully ornamented with elaborate drawings and paintings. They had therefore been an article of luxury, and confined to the rich. But a book printed on paper was easily made accessible to all classes, for copies were so numerous that each could be sold at a low price. Beside books of devotion, the writings of the Greek and Latin poets, historians and philosophers, most of which had fallen into oblivion during the Middle Ages, now gradually obtained wide circulation. After the fall of Constantinople, and the subjugation of Greece by the Turks, fugitive Greeks brought the works of their forefathers’ genius to Italy, where enlightened men had already begun to study them. This branch of learning, called “the Humanities,” spread from Italy through Germany, France, England, and other countries, and contributed powerfully to produce a finer taste and more intelligent habits of thought, such as put to shame the rude ignorance of the monks. It was the art of printing that broke down the slavery in which the blind faith of the church held the human mind; and even the censorship which Rome set up to oppose it was not able to undo its work.
Just as the convents fell before the art of printing, so did the castles of the robber knights before the invention of gunpowder. Thus, at the coming of the Reformation, these degenerate remnants of the once noble institutions of knighthood were swept away. It is supposed by many that the knowledge of gunpowder was brought into Europe from China during the great Mongolian emigration of the thirteenth century, the Chinese having long possessed it. The Arabs, too, understood how to make explosive powder, by mixing saltpeter, charcoal, and sulphur. But all the Eastern makers produced only the fine powder, and the art of making it in grains seems to have been the device of Berthold Schwarz, a German monk of the Franciscan order, of Freiburg or Mayence, in 1354; and he is commonly called the inventor of gunpowder. He had a laboratory, in which he devoted himself to alchemy; and is said to have made his discovery by accident. But as early as 1346, a chronicle reports that there was at Aix “an iron barrel to shoot thunder;” and in 1356 the armory at Nuremberg contained guns of iron and copper, which threw missiles of stone and lead. One of the earliest instances in which cannon are known to have been effectively used in a great battle was at Agincourt in 1415. But gunpowder was long regarded with abhorrence by the people, and made its way into general use but slowly.[B]