[XIX.]
SPAIN.

We have already seen (p. 121) that among the Wisigoths of Spain the rule of celibacy had never been successfully enforced, and that during the later period of the Gothic dynasty the demoralization of the clergy was daily increasing. The Saracenic invasion, and the subsequent struggles of the Christians, who founded petty kingdoms among the wild mountainous regions of the North and East of the Peninsula, were not favorable to the growth of regular discipline and settled observances. The centralized sacerdotalism of Rome, which took so remarkable an extension in the ninth and tenth centuries, and which penetrated every portion of the Carlovingian empire, was powerless to intrude into the strongholds of the Jalikiah, whence the descendants of Pelayo and his companions gradually extended their frontiers from Oviedo to Toledo. Communication with the apostolic city was rare. The nominal subjection of Barcelona and Navarre to the Carlovingians, indeed, brought the eastern provinces of Spain under the domination of the Archbishops of Narbonne, and kept them, to a certain extent, under the influences which were moulding the rest of Europe; but the kingdoms of Leon and Castile grew up in complete ecclesiastical independence. Even at the close of the eleventh century a Spanish ecclesiastic describes his contemporary brethren as rude and illiterate, owning no obedience to the mother church of Rome, and governed by the discipline of Toledo.[748] Wild and insubordinate as was a large portion of the European clergy, the ecclesiastics of Spain were even wilder and more insubordinate. Another writer of the period, himself a canon of Compostella, and subsequently Bishop of Mondonego, speaking of his brother canons previous to the reforms of Diego Gelmirez, denounces them as reckless and violent men, ready for any crime, prompt in quarrel, and even occasionally indulging in mutual slaughter.[749] How little, indeed, there was to distinguish the clerk from the layman is evident from a regulation promulgated by the council of Compostella in 1113. It provides that all priests, gentlemen, and peasants shall devote themselves to wolf-hunting on every Sunday, except Easter and Pentecost, under a penalty of a fine of five sols for the priest and gentleman, and one sol, or a sheep, for the peasant—visitation of the sick being the only excuse exempting the priest from the performance of this duty. Every church, moreover, was bound to furnish for the hunt seven iron-tipped reeds.[750] A similar condition of society is indicated at the other end of Spain, where, in 1027, the Synod of Elna, in Roussillon, had forbidden, under pain of excommunication, any one to attack a monk or a clerk who was without arms.[751]

In such lack of social organization it is easy to imagine that the rule of celibacy received little attention. According to Mariana, the clergy of the period were, for the most part, publicly married;[752] and when, in 1056, the council of Compostella specifically forbade to bishops and monks all intercourse with women, except with mothers, aunts, and sisters wearing the monastic habit,[753] the inference is fair that even so elementary a prohibition was an innovation, and that the secular clergy, below the episcopate, were not regarded as subject to any restriction.

In the comprehensive efforts, however, made during the later half of the eleventh century by the Roman church to bring all Christendom under its domination, the rising states of Spain were not likely to remain undisturbed in their independent isolation; nor was it to be expected that so complete a defiance of the canons would be passed unobserved by the pontiffs who were convulsing the rest of Europe in their efforts to reform the church. Accordingly, in 1068, we find the Cardinal Hugo of Silva Candida, as legate of Alexander II., assembling a council at Girona, and procuring the adoption of a regulation reducing to the condition of laymanship all who, in holy orders, either entered into matrimony or kept concubines; while those who should dismiss their wives were promised immunity for the past and security for the future.[754] In 1077, Gregory VII. sent a certain Bishop Amandus as his legate, with an epistle addressed to the Spaniards, in which he told them that Spain had anciently belonged to St. Peter and the Roman church; that the carelessness of his predecessors, and the Saracenic conquest, had caused the papal rights to be forgotten, but that the time had come for them to be revendicated, and that he consequently claimed implicit obedience.[755] Accordingly, in 1078, we find the legate presiding over another council at Girona, which confirmed the canons of the previous one, and added several others to prevent the ordination of sons of priests, and the hereditary transmission of benefices.[756] Such slender reforms as may have resulted from these efforts were probably confined to Catalonia and Aragon; but not long afterwards influences were brought to bear upon the rest of Spain, which had a powerful effect in extending the authority of Rome over the Peninsula. Constance of Burgundy, Queen of Alfonso VI. of Castile and Leon, prevailed upon her husband to ask of Gregory a legate to reform the church, and to condemn the Gothic or Mozarabic ritual, which was jealously preserved by the people as a symbol of their independent nationality. The prayer, of course, was granted. Richard, Abbot of Marseilles, was sent, and in 1080 he held a council at Burgos, where he commanded the ordained clergy to put away their wives. The novelty and hardship of this order created great excitement. The pope, who was rightly regarded as its author, became the object of no little abuse and insult, and was held up to popular derision in innumerable lampoons.[757]

All of these efforts were nugatory. The Spaniards, engaged in an interminable and often doubtful struggle with the Infidel, might well claim consideration from the Holy Father, while the independent spirit which they manifested in their resistance to the introduction of the Roman ritual was a warning that it would be prudent not to proceed too abruptly in the process of bringing them within the fold of St. Peter. Whatever be the motives, indeed, which induced such strenuous apostles of celibacy as Gregory, Urban, Paschal, and Calixtus to abstain from urging upon them the reform which was so earnestly enforced elsewhere, certain it is that little effort was made to deprive the Spanish clergy of their wives. In all the epistles of the popes up to 1130 I can find but one allusion to the subject, though communication between Spain and Italy became daily more frequent, and the papal authority was constantly exercised with greater decisiveness in the internal affairs of the Spanish church.

When, in 1101, Diego Gelmirez succeeded in obtaining the see of Compostella, Paschal II. addressed him an epistle, reproaching him with the utter contempt of discipline in his diocese, and commanding a reform. He chiefly complained of the incongruous common residence of monks and nuns, which he severely condemned and peremptorily prohibited, but he made some concession to the necessities of the time in permitting the ordination of the sons of those priests who had, “according to the ordinary custom of the country,” married prior to the promulgation of what the pope significantly termed the Roman law; and he carefully abstained from ordering a separation between them and their wives, or even an enforcement of the canons for the future.[758]

Diego, who possessed no common measure of vigor and ambition, and who needed the particular favor of the popes for the success of his plans in elevating and aggrandizing his see, accordingly proceeded to reform his clergy. There is extant a minute and circumstantial contemporary history of his episcopate, written by his admiring disciples, who dwell with much instance on his labors and success in reducing to discipline the refractory canons of his cathedral seat; but in the numerous allusions to these reforms there is no mention of the enforcement of celibacy, while the fact that he would not allow them to minister at the altar without canonical vestments is made the subject of repeated gratulation and praise.[759] The absolute silence of the authors with respect to the clergy at large shows that the reticence of Pope Paschal was not misunderstood, and that there was no effort made to bring the secular priesthood under subjection to the Roman discipline. In the twenty-five canons of the council of Compostella in 1113 it therefore need not surprise us that there is no reference whatever to the subject, beyond an allusion to the children of ecclesiastics, whose nurses were declared entitled to clerical privileges, thus giving them a recognized and highly prized position.[760]

That Diego’s reforms, indeed, did not extend to the abrogation of clerical marriage is evident from several incidental circumstances. Thus, in 1114, the lords of the monastery of Botoa made it over to the church of Santiago of Compostella, reserving to themselves their life interest, with a reversion to any of their descendants who should be ecclesiastics, and who might be willing to profess celibacy, showing that the matter was optional with the secular clergy.[761] That even the canons were bound by no absolute rules on the subject is manifested by a very curious transaction which may be worth recounting as illustrative in several aspects of the spirit of the age. In 1127, Diego, at the head of his Gallician troops, accompanied Alfonso VIII. on an expedition into Portugal. On their return, the army halted at Compostella, where the archbishop received and entertained his sovereign. They were bound by the closest ties, for Diego had baptized, knighted, and crowned him, and had, moreover, constantly stood his friend throughout his stormy youth, in the endless civil wars which marked the disastrous reign of his mother, Queen Urraca. Yet, prompted by evil counsellors who were jealous of Diego, the king suddenly demanded of him an enormous sum of money, to pay off the army, under threat of seizing and pillaging the city. After considerable resistance, Diego was forced to submit, and to pay a thousand marks of silver. He then sought a private interview, in which he solemnly and affectionately warned Alfonso of the ruin of his soul which would ensue if he did not undergo penance for thus impiously spoiling the Apostle Santiago. Alfonso listened humbly, and professed entire willingness to repent, but for the difficulty that he had always been taught that penitence was fruitless without restitution, and restitution he was unable and unwilling to make. Diego then suggested that he should meet the chapter and discuss the case, to which he graciously assented. In the assembly which followed, Diego proposed that the king should follow the example of his father, Raymond of Gallicia, in commending himself to the peculiar patronage of Santiago, and in bequeathing his body to be buried in their church, promising, moreover, that if he should do so they would pray specially for him, which, from the promise of his youth, bade fair to be no easy task. Alfonso was delighted to escape so easily: he eagerly accepted the proposition, and added that he would like to become a canon of their church, in order to enjoy the fullest possible share in the Masses of such holy men. To this the chapter assented at once; he was forthwith duly installed as a canon of the church which he had just despoiled, and his conscience was set at rest, while the church felt that it had acquired a moral supremacy over the spoiler.[762] In thus formally becoming a canon, there could have been no assumption of celibacy, expressed or implied. Alfonso was but twenty-one years of age, and in the following year he married Berengaria, daughter of the Count of Barcelona.[763]

In fact, in the absence of urgency on the part of Rome, the question of sacerdotal celibacy seems to have been virtually ignored in Spain. How little importance was attached to the preëminent sanctity of asceticism becomes evident when we are told that in the whole of Gallicia there was no convent of nuns until Diego, in 1129, founded the house of S. Maria of Conjo.[764] Equal indifference is manifested in the legislative assemblies of the church. The council of Leon and Compostella, in 1114, only prohibited the residence of such women as were forbidden by the canons,[765] which, in the existing discipline of the Spanish church, may safely be presumed to offer no impediment to the marriage relation; and a synod held at Palencia in 1129 is even more significant in its reticence, for it merely provides that notorious concubines of the clergy shall be ejected, without apparently venturing to threaten any punishment on the reverend offenders.[766]