Under Conrad's son Henry the Third the Empire attained the meridian of its power. At home Otto the Great's prerogative had not stood so high. The duchies, always the chief source of fear, were allowed to remain vacant or filled by the relatives of the monarch, who himself retained, contrary to usual practice, those of Franconia and (for some years) Swabia. Abbeys and His reform of the Popedom. sees lay entirely in his gift. Intestine feuds were repressed by the proclamation of a public peace. Abroad, the feudal superiority over Hungary, which Henry II had gained by conferring the title of King with the hand of his sister Gisela, was enforced by war, the country made almost a province, and compelled to pay tribute. In Rome no German sovereign had ever been so absolute. A disgraceful contest between three claimants of the papal chair had shocked even the reckless apathy of Italy. Henry deposed them all, and appointed their successor: he became hereditary patrician, and wore constantly the green mantle and circlet of gold which were the badges of that office, seeming, one might think, to find in it some further authority than that which the imperial name conferred. The synod passed a decree granting to Henry the right of nominating the supreme pontiff; and the Roman priesthood, who had forfeited the respect of the world even more by habitual simony than by the flagrant corruption of their manners, were forced to receive German after German as their bishop, at the bidding of a ruler so powerful, so severe, and so pious. But Henry's encroachments alarmed his own nobles no less than the Italians, and the reaction, which might have been dangerous to himself, was fatal to his successor. A mere chance, as some might call it, determined the course of history. The great Emperor died Henry IV, A.D. 1056-1106. suddenly in A.D. 1056, and a child was left at the helm, while storms were gathering that might have demanded the wisest hand.

CHAPTER X.
STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.

Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy had resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the schemes of polity shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest mind, Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to their completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became the centre of the subsequent history of both. While the nature of the struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their previous connection, the vastness of the subject warns one from the attempt to draw even its outlines, and restricts our view to those relations of Popedom and Empire which arise directly out of their respective positions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal Christian state.

Growth of the Papal power.

The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately following her political establishment to purchase by submission the support of the civil power, has been already remarked. The change from independence to supremacy was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine, healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Sylvester, and retired to Byzantium that no secular prince might interfere with the jurisdiction or profane the neighbourhood of Peter's chair, worked great effects through the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay more, its groundwork was true. It was the removal of the seat of government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus that made the Pope the greatest personage in the city, and in the prostration after Alaric's invasion he was seen to be so. Henceforth he alone was a permanent and effective, though still unacknowledged power, as truly superior to the revived senate and consuls of the phantom republic as Augustus and Tiberius had been to the faint continuance of their earlier prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted the universal jurisdiction of his see[171], and his persevering successors slowly enthralled Italy, Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, Africa, dexterously confounding their undoubted metropolitan and patriarchal rights with those of œcumenical bishop, in which they were finally merged. By his writings and the fame of his personal sanctity, by the conversion of England and the introduction of an impressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than any other pontiff to advance Rome's ecclesiastical authority. Yet his tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferential, to Phocas adulatory; his successors were not consecrated till confirmed by the Emperor or the Exarch; one of them was dragged in chains to the Bosphorus, and banished thence to Scythia. When the iconoclastic controversy and the intervention of Pipin broke the allegiance of the Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians and Emperors, seemed to step into the position which Byzantium had lost[172]. At Charles's coronation, says the Saxon poet,

'Et summus eundem

Præsul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim

Principibus fuit antiquis.'

Their relations Relations of the Papacy and the Empire. were, however, no longer the same. If the Frank vaunted conquest, the priest spoke only of free gift. What Christendom saw was that Charles was crowned by the Pope's hands, and undertook as his principal duty the protection and advancement of the Holy Roman Church. The circumstances of Otto the Great's coronation gave an even more favourable opening to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who summoned him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath of fidelity and aid. In the conflict of three powers, the Emperor, the pontiff, and the people—represented by their senate and consuls, or by the demagogue of the hour—the most steady, prudent, and far-sighted was sure eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no minorities, as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its own army—the host of churchmen through Europe. Boniface's conversion of Germany under its direct sanction, gave it a hold on the rising hierarchy of the greatest European state; the extension of the rule of Charles and Otto diffused in the same measure its emissaries and pretensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the prince to confirm the elected pontiff, which was afterwards supposed to have been granted by Hadrian I to Charles, in the decree quoted as 'Hadrianus Papa[173].' This 'ius eligendi et ordinandi summum pontificem,' which Lewis I appears as yielding by the 'Ego Ludovicus[174] ,' was claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt themselves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude in the troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was formally renewed to Otto the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We have seen it used, and used in the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of all, and most despotically, by Henry III. Along with it there had grown up a bold counter-assumption of the Papal chair to be itself the source of the imperial dignity. In submitting to a fresh coronation, Lewis the Pious admitted the invalidity of his former self-performed one: Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration of John VIII[175], that to him alone the Emperor owed his crown; and the council of Pavia[176], when it chose him king of Italy, repeated the assertion. Subsequent Popes knew better than to apply to the chiefs of Saxon and Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had not resented; but the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid behind the pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the moment should come. There were also two other great steps which papal power had taken. By the invention and adoption of the False Temporal power of the Popes. Decretals it had provided itself with a legal system suited to any emergency, and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical ingenuity found it easy in one way or another to make this include all causes and persons whatsoever: for crime is always and wrong is often sin, nor can aught be anywhere done which may not affect the clergy. On the gift of Pipin and Charles, repeated and confirmed by Lewis I, Charles II, Otto I and III, and now made to rest on the more venerable authority of the first Christian Emperor, it could found claims to the sovereignty of Rome, Tuscany, and all else that had belonged to the exarchate. Indefinite in their terms, these grants were never meant by the donors to convey full dominion over the districts—that belonged to the head of the Empire—but only as in the case of other church estates, a perpetual usufruct or dominium utile. They were, in fact, mere endowments. Nor had the gifts been ever actually reduced into possession: the Pope had been hitherto the victim, not the lord, of the neighbouring barons. They were not, however, denied, and might be made a formidable engine of attack: appealing to them, the Pope could brand his opponents as unjust and impious; and could summon nobles and cities to defend him as their liege lord, just as, with no better original right, he invoked the help of the Norman conquerors of Naples and Sicily.

The attitude of the Roman Church to the imperial power at Henry the Third's death was externally respectful. The right of a German king to the crown of the city was undoubted, and the Pope was his lawful subject. Hitherto the initiative in reform had come from the civil magistrate. But the secret of the pontiff's strength lay in this: he, and he alone, could confer the crown, and had therefore the right of imposing conditions on its recipient. Frequent interregna had weakened the claim of the Transalpine monarch and prevented his power from taking firm root; his title was never by law hereditary: the holy Church had before sought and might again seek a defender elsewhere. And since the need of such defence had originated this transference of the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks, since to render it was the Emperor's chief function, it was surely the Pope's duty as well as his right to see that the candidate was capable of fulfilling his task, to degrade him if he rejected or misperformed it.