Naturally, however, the reform strengthened the papacy rather than the emperor. Pope Nicholas II, acting on the advice of his powerful secretary, the monk Hildebrand, who was to be one of his successors, decreed (1059) that the election of all bishops should lie with the local “chapters” and the pope; and that the election of the pope should in future be made by the seven cardinal bishops of the Roman district, with the assent first of the cardinal priests and deacons of the Roman churches, and next of the laity; the choice to be ratified by Henry IV, then a minor, or by such of his successors as should obtain the same privilege. Yet, on the death of Nicholas, Hildebrand procured the election and consecration of Alexander II, without waiting for any ratification; and when he himself became pope as Gregory VII (1073) he was on the alert for his famous struggle with Henry over the claim of the temporal power to appoint bishops. Standing on the forged decretals, with an almost maniacal belief in his divine rights, he claimed as pope not only the sole power to confirm bishops, but the power to take or give the possessions of all men as he would; and he threatened deposition to any king who dared to gainsay him. It was in the course of the struggle with Henry, by the use of the now common weapon of excommunication, that he reduced the emperor to his historic act of self-abasement (1077) at Canossa.
The circumstances were in the main in the pope’s favour. Henry was rebelled against in Germany, and Gregory was well able to manipulate disaffection. At the same time, Gregory’s strenuous efforts to “reform” the Church by forcing celibacy on the entire priesthood had set against him multitudes of the Italian and northern clergy, married and unmarried; and these were indignant at Henry’s surrender. Stimulated by their protests, and by the sympathy of various kings whom the pope had arrogantly menaced, he took heart, put down his rebels and rivals at home, and marched in force into Italy, where he met almost no resistance and was crowned by the antipope Clement III, whom he and his party had appointed. Gregory, besieged by his own flock in the castle of St. Angelo, called in his late-made ally the Norman Robert Guiscard, Duke of Sicily, who in releasing him burnt much of the city, and, after a sack and massacre, sold most of the remaining inhabitants as slaves. Everywhere the pope’s cause was lost, and he died defeated, in exile at Salerno under Norman protection, hated by both priests and people as the bringer of slaughter and misery on Germany and Italy alike. The “reforming” pontiff had wrought far more evil than his most sinful predecessors, and still the Church was not reformed.
Henry, rebelled against by his sons, died broken-hearted like his enemy; and for half a century the strife over “lay investitures” was carried on by popes and emperors. The papacy had thus become the evil genius at once of Italy and of Germany, entering into and intensifying every Italian feud, and giving to German feudalism a fatal ground of combat for centuries. Out of all the strife the papacy made ultimate profit. When the war of the investitures was over, it built up the Decretum of the monk Gratian, a code embodying the Isidorean frauds with others, such as the gross pretence that St. Augustine had declared the Decretals to be of the same status with the canonical scriptures. The war, meantime, had ended in a compromise from which also the papacy substantially gained. The result was to turn it ere long into a vast system of financial exploitation. Every evil in the way of simony and corruption against which Hildebrand had revolted was further developed under papal auspices. The people lost all power of electing their bishops; and the rich chapters, on whom the right devolved, became the field of simony for the nobles; while the pope drew from the sale of his ratifications an immense revenue. So rapid was the effect of the new relation that by the middle of the twelfth century the bulk of the current literature of Europe, serious and satirical, was bitterly hostile to Rome, which now impressed many instructed men chiefly as a great machine for extortion. While the Church officially denounced usury, its own usurers were everywhere drawing interest from prelates who had had to borrow money to buy their investitures. The pretence of making the clergy “unworldly” by enforced celibacy was under such circumstances not edifying. Needless to say, while clerical marriage could be officially put down, clerical concubinage was not.
The strength of the papacy as against its many enemies lay (1) in the strifes of States and nations, in which the pope could always intervene; (2) in the feeling of many serious men that a central power was needed to control strife and tyranny; (3) in the compiled system of canon law, which expanded still further the code of the Decretals and of Gratian, and constantly exalted the papal power; (4) in the orders of preaching friars, who acted as papal emissaries, and kept in partial discredit the local clergy everywhere; and (5) in the power of the pope to appeal to the worst motives of ignorant believers. Thus at the beginning of the thirteenth century Innocent III, a zealous champion of the papal power, was able in the teeth of the common hostility of educated men to evoke an immense outburst of brutal fanaticism by offering indulgences, spiritual and temporal, to all who would join in a crusade of massacre against the Albigensian and other heretics of Languedoc, where the Paulician and other anti-clerical doctrines had spread widely. Twenty years of hideous bloodshed and demoralization went far to create an atmosphere in which criticism could not breathe; and the whole evocation of the eastern Crusades, both before and after this period, was carried on by the popes with a clear perception of the gain to their authority from the armed consensus of Christendom under their appeal, on the proffer of indulgences. They had hoped to extend their rule over the East, Christian and paynim; but though this dream came to nothing they were nonetheless aggrandized by the effort. The revived pretensions to dispose of all unclaimed territory on the globe, to depose heretic princes, and to confer sovereignties, were all reinforced.
When the Crusades had ceased, the papal curia, growing ever more exacting, began to draw all manner of yearly dues from Churchmen throughout its jurisdiction, so that whereas in the thirteenth century it had only one auditor cameræ, in 1370 the pope had more than twenty, and every cardinal had a number in addition, all living like their superiors by traffic in privileges. Under Gregory XI (1370–78), seven bishops were excommunicated by one order for failure to pay their dues. Complaint was universal; but the vested interests made reform impossible. When, therefore, the Renaissance gradually gained ground against all obstacles, and masses of men became capable of judging the papacy in the light of history and reason as well as of its own code, it was inevitable that as soon as local economic interests became sufficiently marked, an institution which was everywhere an economic burden should incur an economic revolution.
In the meantime, the papacy had possessed itself of the power of life and death in the intellectual as well as in the religious sphere. The power it arrogated to itself under the false Isidorean Decretals carried implicitly if not explicitly the attribute of infallibility. To pronounce doctrines true or false had anciently been the function of councils; it now became the function of the pope, who thus treated councils exactly as kings later treated parliaments. Of old, successive popes had notoriously declared for contrary dogmas; many had contradicted themselves; and down to the thirteenth century there had been a score of papal schisms, all of which were surpassed by those of the fourteenth century; but that reflection put no check on later decisions on the most momentous problems. The religion which began in private dissidence from Jewish and pagan orthodoxies had become the most iron dogmatism the world had ever seen; and the whole system of Christian credence had come to turn on the fiat of one man. At his sole veto the sciences must be dumb; and to him must come for sanction those who would found new schools. The faith that had begun as “liberty from the yoke of the law” had come to elevate the negation of mental liberty into a principle of universal polity, translating into the inner life the despotism which the older Rome had placed on the outer.
Latin Christianity had thus duplicated on the one hand the development of ancient Gaulish Druidism, wherein the priests were a sacred and ruling caste and the arch-Druid semi-divine, and on the other hand the evolution of the ancient Egyptian system, under which latterly the priesthood compelled the king to obtain the approbation of the sacred statues before taking any public step, till at length “the true master of Egypt was the Premier Prophet of the Theban Ammon,” interpreter of the God, and priest also of the mediatorial Son-God Khonsu. In all cases alike the sociological causation is transparent from first to last; and equally clear are the special conditions which prevented the Holy Roman Empire from following to the end the path trodden by ancient Egyptian and Roman imperialism.