CHAPTER VI.
THE PAPAL POLICY—DEMORALIZATION OF THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH—HILDEBRAND’S PURPOSE INHERITED BY HIS SUCCESSORS.
We shall fail to appreciate the inception of the crusades if we overlook the influence of the papal policy in the middle ages. These movements of Europe against Asia, being under the direct patronage of the popes, facilitated the plans of Rome to consolidate and universalize the ecclesiastical empire. To understand this policy we must recall the condition of the church in its relation to popular life and the secular powers.
We have referred to the fact that the year 1000 had been looked forward to as that which should mark the end of the world. So common was the expectation of this termination of human affairs that many charters, which have been preserved from this period, begin with the words, “As the world is now drawing to its close.” When, however, the fatal day passed without any perceptible shock to the universe, the popular credulity added the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord to the calculation, and prolonged the gruesome foreboding. But if the chronological interpretation of the prophecy of the Book of Revelation was a mistaken one, there was not wanting an apparent fulfilment of the descriptive prediction, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.” The falsity and viciousness of men certainly took on fiendish proportions.
The worst feature of the general demoralization was that the millennial fear had driven all sorts of men into church orders. The priesthood and monasteries were crowded with wretched characters, whose imagined immunity in their sacred refuges gave license to their carnal vices. The clergy were no longer the shepherds, but the bell-wethers of the wayward flock. Priests lived in open concubinage. When Hildebrand, previous to his elevation to the Papacy, took charge of the monastery of St. Paul in Rome, his first work was to drive out the cattle that were stabled in the basilica, and the prostitutes who served the tables of the monks. Courtesans reigned even in the palaces of the popes with more effrontery than in the courts of the secular princes. The offspring of such creatures as the infamous Theodora, and of her daughters Theodora and Marozia, had, in the tenth century, purchased the tiara with their vices. In those days the papal staff was wrenched by violence from the hands that held it with more frequency than the old Roman sceptre had been stolen in the worst days of the empire. It may well be credited that men began to pray again to pagan deities in sheer despondency under the darkness which veiled the Christian truth. The surviving religious sentiment was voiced in the solemn utterance of the Council of Rheims, which declared that the church was “ruled by monsters of iniquity, wanting in all culture, whether sacred or profane.”
If the tenth century closed with a gleam of hope in the elevation of Gregory V. (996-999) and Sylvester II. (999-1003), it was quickly remembered that the learning of the latter had been acquired among the Saracens; and his biographer attributed his attainments to magic and undue familiarity with the fiends in hell.
In the early part of the eleventh century the papal chair was filled with the nominees of politicians, and from 1033 to 1045 disgraced by Benedict IX., who at the age of twelve was selected to pose as the Vicegerent of God. The lowest vices and caprices of unconscionable youth were enthroned in the place that was most sacred in the thoughts of men. One of his successors, Victor III. (1086-87), said of Benedict that he led a life so shameful, so foul and execrable, that it made one shudder to describe it. A man of such grovelling appetites naturally wearied with even the slight usages of decency which had come to be regarded as necessary in the papal palace; and after twelve years of irksome attempt to support its lessened dignity, he sold his tiara to Gregory VI. An unknown writer, about the middle of the eleventh century, attempting a review of the passing age, exclaimed, “Everything is degenerate and all is lost. Faith has disappeared. The world has grown old and must soon cease altogether.”
As the debasement of the church could go no lower, a reaction was natural and inevitable, if virtue was not altogether decayed at the roots. The sentiment of human decency reasserted itself, and, since there was no power at Rome to inaugurate reform, an appeal was made to the German emperor. Henry III., in response to the call, deposed by force three rival claimants to the papal throne, and secured the ascendency of a line of German popes. It was not without the suspicion of poison that two of them died after brief power: Clement II. within the year, and Damasus II. in twenty-three days.
With Leo IX. (1049) came a better era. The year 1033, the ultimate date set by the prophecy-mongers for the end of the world, being clearly past, and men becoming again possessed of hope in the continuance of mundane affairs, the best spirits dared to labor for the renovation of society, that the earth thus saved as by fire might become indeed “a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
From this time the commanding genius and pure purpose of Hildebrand guided, if he did not select, the occupants of the seat of St. Peter, until, in 1073, the great counsellor himself assumed the sacred sceptre. History, while it severely condemns the methods by which Hildebrand sought to attain his ends, credits him with rigid honesty and devotion to what he believed to be the will of Heaven. While it writes into his epitaph the charge of most inordinate ambition, it does not erase from it the record of his utterance as he lay dying, a fugitive at Salerno: “I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”
The religious degradation of Christendom afflicted the soul of this truly great man; but whence could come reform? The age was too far gone in its demoralization to wait for recuperation through the slow process of education. Society could not endure another generation of its own putridity. The secular powers were utterly impotent to cope with the gigantic evils that were abroad in every land. Even had they possessed the disposition to champion the virtues, such sovereigns as the King of France, the Emperor of Germany, the new Norman King of England, were altogether engrossed in holding their precarious crowns, surrounded as they were by a multitude of feudal lords, some of whom could collect in their own names a larger force than that which would rise to defend the throne.