Sometimes it was not a living itself for which a clerical candidate paid heavily, but merely the promise of ‘preferment’ to the next vacancy; or he would pledge himself in the case of nomination to send his ‘firstfruits’, that is, his first year’s revenue, to Rome. Those who could afford the requisite sum might be natives of the country in which the vacant bishopric or living occurred; often they were not, and the successful nominee, instead of going in person to exercise his duties, would merely send an agent to collect his dues. These dues came from many different sources, but in the case of livings principally from the ‘tithe’, a tax for the maintenance of the Church, supposed to represent one-tenth of every man’s income.
People usually grumble when they are continually asked for money, and mediaeval men and women were no exception to this rule. Thus, to take the case of England, while the wars between Emperor and Pope left her comparatively indifferent as to the issues involved, the growing exactions of the Roman curia that touched her pockets awoke a smouldering resentment that every now and then flared into hostility.
’In these times’, wrote the chronicler, Matthew Paris, ‘the small fire of faith began to grow exceeding chill, so that it was well nigh reduced to ashes ... for now was simony practised without shame.... Every day illiterate persons of the lowest class, armed with bulls from Rome, feared not to plunder the revenues which our pious forefathers had assigned for the maintenance of the Religious, the support of the poor, and the sustaining of strangers.’
At Oxford in the reign of Henry III (1216–72), the papal legate was forced to fly from the town by indignant ‘clerks’ of the university, or undergraduates as we should call them to-day. ‘Where is that usurer, that simoniac, that plunderer of revenues, that thirster for money?’ they cried, as they hunted him and his retinue through the streets, ‘it is he who perverts the King and subverts the kingdom to enrich foreigners with our spoils.’
At Lincoln Bishop Grosstete indignantly refused to invest Innocent IV’s nephew, a boy of twelve, with the next vacant prebendary of his cathedral. Other papal relatives were absorbing livings and bishoprics elsewhere in Europe, for under Innocent IV began the open practice of ‘nepotism’, that is, of Popes using their revenues and their office in order to provide for their nephews and other members of their families.
‘He laid aside all shame,’ says Matthew Paris of this Pope, ‘he extorted larger sums of money than any before him.’ The ‘sums of money’ enabled Rome to cast down her imperial foe, but the extortion was a dangerous expedient. Throughout the early Middle Ages the Pope had been accepted by Western Christendom as speaking for the Church with the voice of Christ’s authority. In his disputes with kings the latter could never be sure of the loyalty of their people, should they call on them to take up arms against the ‘Holy Father’.
With the growth of nations and of Rome as a temporal power a gradual change came over the European outlook; subjects were more inclined to obey rulers whom they knew than a distant potentate whom they did not; they were also less ready to accept papal interference without criticism. Thus a distinction was for the first time drawn between the Pope and the Church.
When King Hako of Norway was offered the imperial crown on the deposition of Frederick II by Innocent IV, he refused, saying, ‘I will gladly fight the enemies of the Church, but I will not fight against the foes of the Pope.’ His words were significant of a new spirit. In the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines that racked the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were laid the foundations of a movement to control the Popes by Universal Councils in the fifteenth, and of that still more drastic opposition to his powers in the sixteenth that we call the Reformation.