Instead he becomes the champion of those ideas for which during the reign of Tiberius a certain carpenter from the village of Nazareth went to his death, and behold! he stands revealed as the only true Christian!
CHAPTER VII
THE INQUISITION
In the year 1198 a certain Lotario, Count of Segni, succeeded to the high honors which his uncle Paolo had held only a few years before and as Innocent III took possession of the papal chair.
He was one of the most remarkable men who ever resided in the Lateran Palace. Thirty-seven years old at the time of his ascension. An honor-student in the universities of Paris and Boulogne. Rich, clever, full of energy and high ambition, he used his office so well that he could rightly claim to exercise the “government not of the Church alone but of the entire world.”
He set Italy free from German interference by driving the imperial governor of Rome from that city; by reconquering those parts of the peninsula which were held by imperial troops; and finally by excommunicating the candidate to the imperial throne until that poor prince found himself beset by so many difficulties that he withdrew entirely from his domains on the other side of the Alps.
He organized the famous fourth Crusade which never even came within sight of the Holy Land but sailed for Constantinople, murdered a goodly number of the inhabitants of that town, stole whatever could be carried away and generally behaved in such a way that thereafter no crusader could show himself in a Greek port without running the chance of being hanged as an outlaw. It is true that Innocent expressed his disapproval of these proceedings which shrieked to high Heaven and filled the respectable minority of Christendom with disgust and despair. But Innocent was a practical man of affairs. He soon accepted the inevitable and appointed a Venetian to the vacant post of Patriarch of Constantinople. By this clever stroke he brought the eastern Church once more under Roman jurisdiction and at the same time gained the good will of the Venetian Republic which henceforth regarded the Byzantine domains as part of her eastern colonies and treated them accordingly.
In spiritual matters too His Holiness showed himself a most accomplished and tactful person.
The Church, after almost a thousand years of hesitation, had at last begun to insist that marriage was not merely a civil contract between a man and a woman but a most holy sacrament which needed the public blessing of a priest to be truly valid. When Philip August of France and Alphonso IX of Leon undertook to regulate their domestic affairs according to their own particular preferences, they were speedily reminded of their duties and being men of great prudence they hastened to comply with the papal wishes.
Even in the high north, gained only recently for Christianity, people were shown in unmistakable manner who was their master. King Haakon IV (known familiarly among his fellow pirates as Old Haakon) who had just conquered a neat little empire including besides his own Norway, part of Scotland and all of Iceland, Greenland, the Orkneys and the Hebrides, was obliged to submit the somewhat tangled problem of his birth to a Roman tribunal before he could get himself crowned in his old cathedral of Trondhjem.