It is not our object, the reader is aware, to give here a history of Rome, or of its pontiffs, or of the tumultuous world of the Middle Ages in which a few figures of Popes and Princes stand out upon the ever-crowded, ever-changing background, helping us to hear among the wild confusion of clanging swords and shattering lances, of war cries and shouts of rage and triumph—and to see amidst the mist and smoke, the fire and flame, the dust of breached walls and falling houses. Our intention is solely to indicate those among the chiefs of the Church who are of the most importance to the great city, which, ever rebelling against them, ever carrying on a scarcely broken line of opposition and resistance, was still passive in their hands so far as posterity is concerned, dragged into light, or left lying in darkness, according as its rulers were. It is usual to say that the great time of the Church, the age of its utmost ascendency, was during the period between Gregory VII. and Innocent III., the first of whom put forth its claim as Universal Arbiter and Judge as no one had ever done before, while the second carried that claim to its climax in his remarkable reign—a reign all-influencing, almost all-potent, something more like a universal supremacy and rule over the whole earth than has ever been known either before or since. The reader has seen what was the effect upon his world of the great Hildebrand: how he laboured, how he proclaimed his great mission, with what overwhelming faith he believed in it, and, it must be added, with how little success he was permitted to carry it out. This great Pope, asserting his right as the successor of Peter to something very like a universal dominion and the power of setting down and raising up all manner of thrones, principalities, and powers, lived fighting for the very ground he stood on, in an incessant struggle not only with the empire, but with every illiterate and ignoble petty court of his neighbourhood, with the robber barons of the surrounding hills, with the citizens in his streets, with the villagers on his land—and, after having had more than once his independent realm restricted to the strong walls of St. Angelo, had at last to abandon his city for mere safety's sake, and die in exile far from the Rome he loved.
The life of the other we have now to trace, as far as it is possible to keep the thread of it amid the tremendous disorders, disastrous wars and commotions of his time, in all of which his name is so mingled that in order to distinguish his story the student must be prepared to struggle through what is really the history of the world, there being scarcely a corner of that world—none at least with which history was then acquainted—which was not pervaded by Innocent, although few we think in which his influence had any such power as is generally believed.
This Pope was not like Hildebrand a man of the people. He had a surname and already a distinguished one. Lothario Conti, son of Trasimondo, lord of Ferentino, of the family of the Dukes of Spoleto, was born in the year 1161 in the little town of Anagni, where his family resided, a place always dear to him, and to which in the days of his greatness he loved to retire, to take refuge from the summer heats of Rome or other more tangible dangers. He was thus a member of the very nobility with which afterwards he had so much trouble, the unruly neighbours who made every road to Rome dangerous, and the suzerainty of the Pope in many cases a simple fiction. The young Lothario had three uncles in the Church in high places, all of them eventually Cardinals, and was destined to the ecclesiastical profession, in which he was so certain of advancement, from his birth; he was educated partly at Rome, at the school of St. John Lateran, specially destined for the training of the clergy, and therefore spent his boyhood under the shadow of the palace which was to be his home in later years. From Rome he went to the University of Paris, one of the greatest of existing schools, and studied canon law so as to make himself an authority on that subject, then one of the most engrossing and important branches of learning. He loved the "beneficial tasks," and perhaps also the freedom and freshness of university life, where probably the bonds of the clerical condition were less felt than in other places, though Innocent never seems to have required indulgence in that respect. Besides his readings in canon law, he studied with great devotion the Scriptures, and their interpretation, after the elaborate and highly artificial fashion of the day, dividing each text into a myriad of heads, and building up the most recondite argument on a single phrase with meanings spiritual, temporal, scholastic, and imaginary. There he made several warm friends, among others Robert Curzon, an Englishman who served him afterwards in various high offices, not so much to the credit of their honour in later times as of the faithfulness of their friendship.
Young Conti proceeded afterwards to Bologna, then growing into great reputation as a centre of instruction. He had, in short, the best education that his age was acquainted with, and returned to his ecclesiastical home at Rome and the protection of his Cardinal-uncles a perfectly well-trained and able young man, learned in all the learning of his day, acquainted more or less with the world, and ready for any service which the Church to which he was wholly devoted might require of him. He was a young man certain of promotion in any case. He had no sooner taken the first orders than he was made a canon of St. Peter's, of itself an important position, and his name very soon appears as acting in various causes brought on appeal to Rome—claims of convents, complaints among others of the monks of Canterbury in some forgotten question, where he was the champion of the complainants who were afterwards to bring him into so much trouble. These appeals were constantly occurring, and occupied a great deal of the time and thoughts of that learned and busy court of Rome, the Consistory, which became afterwards, under Innocent himself, the one great court of appeal for the world.
About a hundred years had passed between the death of the great Pope Gregory, the monk Hildebrand, and the entrance of Lothario Conti upon public life; but when the reader surveys the condition of that surging sea of society—the crowded, struggling, fighting, unresting world, which gives an impression of being more crowded, more teeming with wild life and force, with constant movement and turmoil, than in our calmer days, though no doubt the facts are quite the reverse—he will find but little change apparent in the tremendous scene. As Gregory left the nations in endless war and fighting, so his great successor found them—king warring against king, prince against prince, count against count, city against city, nay, village against village, with a wide margin of personal struggle around, and a general war with the Church maintained by all. A panorama of the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, could it have been furnished to any onlooker, would have showed its minutest lines of division by illuminations of devastating fire and flame, by the clangour of armies in collision, by wild freebooters in roaming bands, and little feudal wars in every district: every man in pursuit of something that was his neighbour's, perhaps only his life, a small affair—perhaps his wife, perhaps his lands, possibly the mere satisfaction of a feud which was always on hand to fill up the crevices of more important fighting.
With more desperate hostility still the cities in pairs set themselves against each other, all flourishing, busy places, full of industry, full of invention, but fuller still of rage against the brother close by, of the same tongue and race, Milan against Parma, Pisa against Genoa, Florence against all comers. Bigger wars devastated other regions, Germany in particular in all its many subdivisions, where it seems impossible to believe there could ever be a loaf of bread or a cup of wine of native growth, so perpetually was every dukedom ravaged and every principality brought to ruin. Two Emperors claiming the allegiance of that vast impossible holy Empire which extended from the northern sea to the soft Sicilian shores, two Popes calling themselves heads of the Church, were matters of every day. The Emperors had generally each a show of right; but the anti-popes, though they had each a party, were altogether false functionaries with no show of law in their favour, generally mere creatures of the empire, though often triumphant for a moment. In Gregory's day Henry IV. and Rudolf were the contending Emperors. In those of Innocent they were Philip and Otho. There were no doubt different principles involved, but the effect was the same; in both cases the Popes were deeply concerned, each asserting a prerogative, a right to choose between the contending candidates and terminate the strife. That prerogative had been boldly claimed and asserted by Gregory; in the century that followed every Pope had reasserted and attempted with all his might to enforce it; but though Innocent is universally set forth as the greatest and most powerful of all who did so, and as in part responsible for almost every evil thing that resulted, I do not myself see that his interference was much more potential than that of Gregory, of which also so much is said, but which was so constantly baulked, thwarted, and contradicted in his day. So far as the Empire was concerned the Popes certainly possessed a right and privilege which gave a certain countenance to their claim, for until crowned by the ruling Pontiff no Emperor had full possession of his crown: but this did not affect the other Christian kingdoms over which Innocent claimed and attempted to exercise the same prerogative. The state of things, however, to the spectator is very much the same in the one century as the other. The age of storm and stress for the world of Christendom extended from one to another; no doubt progress was being made, foundations laid, and possibilities slowly coming into operation, of which the beginnings may be detected even among all the noise and dust of the wars; but outwardly the state of Europe was very much the same under Innocent as under Gregory: they had the same difficulties to encounter and the same ordeals to go through.
Several short-lived Popes succeeded each other on the papal throne after Innocent began to ascend the steps of ecclesiastical dignity, which were so easy to the nephew of three Cardinals. He became a canon of St. Peter's while little more than twenty-one. Pope Lucius III. employed him about his court, Pope Gregory VIII. made him a sub-deacon of Rome. Pope Clement III. was his uncle Octavian, and made him Cardinal of "St. Sergius and St. Bacchus," a curious combination, and one which would better have become a more jovial priest. Then there came a faint and momentary chill over the prospects of the most rising and prosperous young ecclesiastic in Rome. His uncle was succeeded in the papal chair by a certain Cardinal, old and pious but little known to history, a member of the Orsini family and hostile to the Conti, so that our young Cardinal relapsed a little into the cold shade. It is supposed to be during this period that he turned his thoughts to literature, and wrote his first book, a singular one for his age and position—and yet perhaps not so unlike the utterance of triumphant youth under its first check as might be supposed—De contemptu mundi, sive de miseriis humanæ conditionis, is its title. It was indeed the view of the world which every superior mind was supposed to take in his time, as it has again become the last juvenile fashion in our own; but the young Cardinal Conti had greater justification than our young prophets of evil. His work is full, as it always continues to be in his matured years, of the artificial constructions which Paris and Bologna taught, and which characterise the age of the schoolmen: and it is not to be supposed that he had much that was new to say of that everlasting topic which was as hackneyed in the twelfth century as it is in the nineteenth. After he has explained that "every male child on his birth cries A and every female E; and when you say A with E it makes Eva, and what is Eva if not heu! ha!—alas!"—he adds a description of the troubles of life which is not quite so fanciful.
"We enter life amid pains and cries, presenting no agreeable aspect, lower even than plants and vegetables, which give forth at least a pleasant odour. The duration of life becomes shorter every day; few men reach their fortieth year, a very small number attain the sixtieth.... And how painful is life! Death threatens us constantly, dreams frighten us, apparitions disturb us, we tremble for our friends, for our relations; before we are prepared for it misfortune has come: sickness surprises us, death cuts the thread of our life. All the centuries have not been enough to teach even to the science of medicine the different kind of sufferings to which man's fragility exposes him. Human nature is more corrupt from day to day; the world and our bodies grow old. Often the guilty is acquitted and the innocent is punished.... Every thought, every act, all the arts and devices are employed for no other end but to secure the glory and favour of men. To gain honour he uses flattery, he prays, he promises, he tries every underground way if he cannot get what he wants by direct measures; or he takes it by force if he can depend on the support of friends or of relations. And what a burden are those high dignities! When the ambitious man has attained the height of his desires his pride knows no bounds, his arrogance is without restraint; he believes himself so much a better man as he is more elevated in position; he disdains his friends, recognises no one, despises his oldest connections, walking proudly with his head high, insolent in words, the enemy of his superiors and the tyrant of his dependents."
The young Cardinal spares no class in his animadversions, but the rich are held up as warnings rather than the poor, and the vainglory of the miserable sons of Adam is what disgusts him most. Here is a passage which carries us into the inner life of that much devastated, often ruined Rome, which nevertheless at its most distracted moment was never quite devoid of the splendours and luxuries it loved.
"Has not the prophet declared his anathema against luxury in dress? Yet the face is coloured with artificial colours as if the art of man could improve the work of God. What can be more vain than to curl the hair, to paint the cheeks, to perfume the person? And what need is there for a table ornamented with a rich cover, and laid with knives mounted in ivory, and vases of gold and silver? What more vain again than to paint the rooms, to cover the doors with fine carvings, to lay down carpets in the ante-chambers, to repose one's self on a bed of down, covered with silken stuffs and surrounded with curtains?"