Century after century, expansion proceeded on the same lines. The Finns, conquered in the twelfth century by a Christian king of Sweden, were still persistently pagan in the thirteenth, and were bloodily coerced accordingly. In the conversion of the Slavonic Pomeranians in the twelfth century, armed force, headed by the duke, was needed to secure wholesale baptisms after the fashion of Augustine and Boniface; the people of Lübeck, on the opportunity of an emperor’s death, revolted in favour of paganism and independence; and the pagans of the Isle of Rügen were Christianized in mass by Danish conquest (1168). It is recorded by the biographer of St. Otho that the Pomeranians expressly rejected Christianity on the score of its cruelty, saying, “among the Christians are thieves and robbers [unknown among the heathen Slavs]; Christians crucify men and tear out eyes and do all manner of infamies; be such a religion far from us.” The attempt to convert Livonia by preaching was an absolute failure; two crusades had to be set on foot by the Pope and the surrounding Christians to crush its paganism (circa 1200); and finally an “Order of the Sword” had to be organized to hold the religious ground. A little later, two “Orders of Teutonic Knights” in succession were established to conquer and convert the heathen Prussians; and after sixty years of murderous and ruinous warfare, “a broken remnant, shielded in some measure by the intervention of the popes, were induced to discontinue all the heathen rites, to recognize the claims of the Teutonic Order, and to welcome the instruction of the German priests.” Another remnant, utterly unsubduable, sought refuge with the heathen of Lithuania.
The summary of seven hundred years of Christian expansion in northern Europe is that the work was in the main done by the sword, in the interests of kings and tyrants, who supported it, as against the resistance of their subjects, who saw in the Church an instrument for their subjection. Christianity, in short, was as truly a religion of the sword as Islam. When the Mongols conquered part of Russia in 1223 they not only left the Christians full religious liberty, but let the priests go untaxed; and similarly the Turks left to the Bulgarians their faith, their lands, and their local laws. Christianity gave no such toleration; the lands of the heathen Slavs and Prussians being distributed among their German conquerors. The heathen, broadly speaking, were never persuaded, never convinced, never won by the appeal of the new doctrine: they were either transferred by their kings to the Church like so many cattle, or beaten down into submission after generations of resistance and massacre. For a long time after the German conquest any Slav found away from home was liable to be executed on the spot, or killed like a wild beast by any Christian who would. And centuries after the barbarian heathenism of Europe was ostensibly drowned in blood, Christian Spain, having overthrown the Moslem Moors, proceeded in the same fashion to dragoon Moslems and Jews into the true faith, baptizing in droves those who yielded or dissembled, and driving out of the country myriads more who would not submit. The misery and the butchery wrought from first to last are unimaginable. If the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru, with their Church-blessed policy of suppressing heathenism, be added to the record, the totality of evil becomes appalling; for the Spanish priest Las Casas estimated the total destruction of native life at twelve millions. All this slaughter took place by way of “expansion,” and is exclusive of the further record of the slaughters wrought by the Church for the suppression of heresy within its established field. It is a strange prepossession that, in face of such a retrospect, habitually concentrates Christian thought on the remote and transient persecutions of Christianity by ancient paganism. If the blood shed on the score of religion by anti-Christian paganism and Christianity respectively be carefully estimated, the former might say to the latter, in the words of the latter-day heathen king of the Zulus who was crushed by an ostentatiously Christian statesmanship: “The blood shed in my reign was, to the blood shed since, as an ant in a pool of water.”
§ 3. Growth of the Papacy
One marked result of the triumph of Islam in the East and of barbarism in the West was the growth of the Roman Papacy as the supreme ecclesiastical power in Latin Christendom. So long as an emperor had his seat in Italy, the bishop or patriarch of Rome was kept in subordination to the State; and at Constantinople the subordination of the patriarch never ceased. But even in the period from the reconquest of Italy under Justinian to the final renunciation of Byzantine rule, though the Roman patriarchs depended on the emperor to ratify their election, the curtailment of the eastern empire, narrowing as it did the range of the eastern Church, weakened that relatively to the western; while the absence of local monarchy left the way open for an ecclesiastical rule, calling itself theocratic. Had the Italian kingdom of Theodoric subsisted, the development would certainly have been different. As it was, even he, an Arian, was called in to control the riotous strifes of papal factions in Rome.
It belonged to all the patriarchates, as to all bishoprics, that their tenants should magnify their office; and even in the second century we have seen signs of an ambition in the Roman bishop to rule the rest of the Church. Already, presumably, there existed the gospel text: “Thou art Petros, and upon this rock (petra) I will build my Church”—an interpolation probably made in the Roman interest, and sure to sustain a Roman ambition for general headship. But as late as the fifth century some codices seem to have read simply “Thou hast said”; (σὺ εἶπας instead of σὺ εἶ Πέτρος); and in the third we find Cyprian of Carthage insisting on the independence of his Church while admitting the ceremonial primacy of Rome—a proof that the Roman claim was being pushed. In the fourth century Pope Damasus sought to induce the eastern bishops to go to Rome for the settlement of disputes as to certain eastern bishoprics; but was sardonically admonished by a unanimous eastern council to alter his attitude. While the old empire subsisted, the Roman bishop could get no further than his old ceremonial status as holding the primary see in order of dignity. Neither the emperor nor the patriarch at Constantinople would consent to vest any supreme authority in the bishop of the ancient and relatively effete capital; and Theodosius definitely constituted the patriarch of Constantinople the equal of him of Rome (381), though ceremonially second to him. At the same time, the patriarch of Constantinople was set above those of Antioch and Alexandria, a step which promoted the worst of the later schisms and so helped to lose Egypt and Syria. On every side, the normal egoisms and racial instincts can thus be seen determining the fortunes of the faith. The fling of the Greek Basil at Rome, “I hate the pride of that Church,” is typical. Even while the Roman bishop was pushing his claims to primacy, the see of Constantinople, backed by the emperor, was taking province after province from the Roman jurisdiction; and in 451 the Council of Chalcedon, with the support of the eastern emperor, decreed that the bishop of “New Rome” should enjoy equal honour and privilege with his rival. At the same period the bishop of Jerusalem, claiming primacy in his turn, contrived to gain ground as against those of Antioch and Alexandria. Each patriarchate fought for its own hand. The use of the special title of “Papa” by him of Rome was probably an imitation of Mithraism, in the hierarchy of which the chief priest was “Father of Fathers” as the God was “Father Mithra,” and, like Attis, probably called Papa. In the Eastern Church the name became general, all priests being “popes.”
In the history of the Papacy, it is the two early bishops most distinguished for widening the power of the Church that alone have won the title of “Great”—to wit, Leo I (440–61) and Gregory I (590–604), of whom the first began to build up the Church’s local patrimony on the fall of the western empire, and the second to establish her spiritual reign in the north. It is under the latter that the destiny of the Roman see as the head of the western Churches begins clearly to reveal itself. The patriarch of Constantinople of that day took to himself the title of Œcumenical or Universal; and Gregory, whose predecessors had aimed at that very status, pronounced the claim blasphemous, antichristian, and diabolical. A few years later, he was securing through the lesser Augustine his own supremacy over the previously independent Churches of Britain. He even seems to have cringed to the usurping Byzantine emperor Phocas in order to get him to veto the claim of his rival, a concession which appears to have been granted to Boniface III in 606. Still, the papacy had to fight hard for its claims in Britain, Gaul, and Spain; and towards the end of the seventh century Bishop Julian of Toledo is found rating Benedict II for ignorance and jealousy. As Julian was nevertheless sainted, we may infer that the jealousies of rival candidates for the papacy, leading to changes of policy, often checked its political growth. But events forced a policy. In the eighth century the iconoclastic emperors quarrelled with the papacy (under Gregory II) as well as with Greek orthodoxy; whereupon the northern Lombards sought to become masters of what remained of imperial territory in Italy; and of a series of eight or nine Popes (730–72) the majority were fain to call in the help of the Franks. Charles Martel did not actively respond; but his son Pepin did twice, and as victor presented to the Pope (754) the sovereignty of the exarchate, receiving in return the pontiff’s sanction to depose the last feeble Merovingian king, in whose name the house of Pepin had ruled. The end of the new departure was the conquest of the Lombards by Charlemagne in 774, and the establishment in 800 of the new “Holy Roman Empire,” wherein the Pope was the spiritual colleague of the emperor.
Hitherto the bishop of Rome had been popularly elected like every other, and subject like every other to acceptance by the emperor. But after Pope Zacharias (741–52) the eastern emperor was ignored; and Charlemagne was crowned as the successor, by Roman decision, not of the old emperors of the West, but of the line of emperors which in the East had never ceased. Constantine VI, who had just been deposed by his mother Irene (797), was the sixty-seventh “Roman” emperor in order from Augustus, and Charlemagne was enrolled in the West as the sixty-eighth. He even received, with the diplomatic assent of the Moslem Haroun Alraschid, the keys of the Holy Sepulchre from the Patriarch of Jerusalem—an empty but suggestive honour. It was thus inevitable that the new imperial line should sooner or later seek to hold power over the papacy as the old had claimed to do; and Charlemagne made his force felt very much as Constantine had done, going even further in the way of appointing bishops, and lecturing the pope at times with the consciousness of virtual supremacy. So long as the emperor, needing and using the services of the Church to organize his administration, enriched the hierarchy on all hands, enforcing tithes and protecting the entire priesthood against lay turbulence, his pretensions were naturally allowed. Everything depended on the strength of the ruler; and already under Charlemagne’s good but weak son Louis we find many of the bishops, backed by the pope, supporting the emperor’s rebellious sons and claiming to depose him. About 875, again, we find Pope John VIII not only hectoring the weak Charles the Fat, but claiming the right to choose the emperor. Until, however, there began to rise in Italy a new and vigorous civilization, the papacy was on the whole discreetly subject to the ratification of the northern emperors; and this is perhaps the period of maximum demoralization and dishonour in its history; its economic evolution being very much on the lines of that of the original Church in the centuries from its establishment by Constantine till the humiliation of the empire by the Moslems. Intellectually, the papacy had no prestige within the Church. It was in 824 that a council of Frankish bishops at Paris, following on previous declarations, denounced as absurdity the decrees of the Pope enjoining the worship of images. Even when the Pope Gregory IV entered France to support the bishops who backed the rebellious sons of Louis, and threatened to excommunicate those on the emperor’s side, the latter treated him with indignant contempt.
It is in this period, however, that there begins the process of documentary fraud by which the Church, wielding the power of the pen, gradually circumvented that of the sword. Centuries before, the Roman see had made use of forged documents in its disputes with Constantinople; and the Greeks of the day declared such forgeries to be a special Roman industry. As a matter of fact, most of the early ecclesiastical forgeries had been of eastern origin: for instance, the so-called Apostles’ Creed and the Apostolical Constitutions. Of these the first grew up fortuitously in the third century, and received its name after it won currency. Only in the later middle ages was it adopted by the Latin Church. The Constitutions again were a deliberate compilation; and the Roman Church had invented nothing on the same scale. But in the ninth century there was trumped-up among the Frankish bishops, under the name of Isidore (ostensibly the popular encyclopedist of Seville, d. 636), a collection of professedly ancient but really spurious papal decretals, partly proceeding on previous practice, but greatly developing it as regarded the local independence of bishops and their right of appeal to Rome. The original motive of the fraud was local episcopal interest, the bishops having endless causes of grievance against their archbishops, kings, and lay lords. But Pope Nicholas I (858–67) adroitly adopted the forged decretals, professing to have had ancient copies of them, and thenceforth they were made the basis of the papal claims wherever political circumstances gave a good opportunity. The bishops, being thus delivered over to the papacy, lost much more than they gained. A common use now made of the growing papal power was to give monasteries an exemption from the local bishop’s rule; and as the monks in general at this period had a higher character for sanctity that the bishops, who were often extremely unreverend, local sympathy was apt to go with the former, and with the pope, whose distant misdeeds were little known to the laity.
As in previous ages, nevertheless, the disorders of the papacy itself greatly hampered its advance. In the period from John XVIII to Leo IX (1003–1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated; prolonged contests for the chair were frequent; and in the main it was disposed of by factions of the Roman and Italian nobility. For a time the counts of Tuscany made it hereditary in their family; and once a Roman courtesan of the higher order decided the election, by help of the general worthlessness of the Roman electoral populace, who, having neither commerce nor industry, were fed by papal doles as of old they had been by the emperors. In the tenth century, the papacy had reached its nadir. The general expectation, based on the Apocalypse and other Christian tradition, that the world would end with the year 1000, seems to have turned the thoughts of the more serious away from worldly questions; while the more reckless types, lawless at best in that age, exhibited something of the wild licence seen at times in cities stricken by pestilence, and ships about to sink. When the dreaded year was passed, riot was even quickened; but in the eleventh century a moral instinct began slowly to assert itself. The elections to the papacy had become so scandalous and ruinous—three pretenders claiming the chair at once—that the clergy themselves conceded to the emperor Henry III, in the year 1047, the right to appoint popes; and he used his power four times with judgment and success.