[4] No. 48.
[5] Pagi, ibid.
[6] Fleury, Livre 76.
VIII.
The peace, which Adrian had concluded with the king of Sicily, was soon seized by Frederic Barbarossa as the pretext for a new quarrel with the Church. The grounds on which the German despot professed to be aggrieved were as follow: a predecessor of his, Lothair II., had in his Italian war, in the foregoing century, obliged the king of Sicily to own the feudal superiority of Germany over Apulia. Pope Innocent II., who protested against this proceeding as a violation of his rights, could only so far induce Lothair to respect them, as to agree to let their lawful owner for the future jointly exercise them with their lawless usurper. So that, when the Sicilian King, as Duke of Apulia, should be presented, at the ceremony of his installation, with a flag, the Pope was to hold the pole with one hand, and the Emperor with the other.
Frederic Barbarossa renewed this right of joint lordship over Apulia by a concordat with Eugenius III., in which he expressly stipulated not to make any treaty with the king of Sicily, without the previous consent of the Pope, who, however, was not required to enter into any such obligation towards the German monarch.
And yet Frederic now put on the face of an injured man, declaring that what had not been stipulated, had yet always been taken for granted; and that Adrian, by making peace with King William, unknown to the emperor, had flagrantly violated the concordat. In the height of his ill-will, an incident fell out which gave free vent to his animosity against the pope.
To settle his power in Burgundy, he summoned a Diet of the Empire to meet at Besançon, in October, 1157. This Diet was numerously and splendidly attended, not only by German but by foreign princes and ambassadors from all parts of Europe; among the rest, by two cardinals, namely, Roland and Bernard, as legates from the pope. The emperor received their credentials in his oratory, where he gave them a special audience; at which they also presented him a letter from Adrian, who complained in it of the impunity with which Frederic had allowed certain marauding knights to detain and plunder Eskill, Archbishop of Lund, while travelling through Burgundy to his diocese. In chiding him for so faithless a discharge of his duty, as sworn champion of the Roman Church, the pope reminded the emperor of the favours he owed that Church, especially mentioning among them his imperial crown: "not that she repented of having so far obliged him, on the contrary, she would rejoice if she could confer on him still greater benefits."
As Frederic listened to this letter, which his chancellor Raynald read up to him, he reddened with anger at that part of it which spoke of his crown as a gift of the Church; but at the word "benefits" he could not control himself, for, by this word he insisted, in the blindness of passion, that the pope meant to assert that the empire was a feoff of the Holy See.
The fact was, the original word beneficium did signify, in the corrupt Latin of the middle ages, a feoff as well as a benefit in general; and this was enough for the emperor's humour, who would listen to no explanation from the legates, that the word was used, not in its technical, but its classical sense. In the heat of the dispute which ensued, Cardinal Roland,—afterwards Pope Alexander III.—exclaimed: "From whom then hath the Emperor his dignity, if not from the Pope?" Whereupon, the Count Palatine, Otho of Bavaria, one of the courtiers present, seized by a fit of fury, drew his sword, and rushed towards the cardinal; but was checked in his purpose by Frederic, who threw himself between the two; and then closed the audience by ordering the legates to be escorted back to Rome, with injunctions not to deviate from the directest line of route, nor to tarry in any ecclesiastical domain through which they might pass.