A Philosophical Dictionary, Volume 05

by Voltaire

When the popes walked on the heads of kings, when they conferred crowns by a parchment bull, it appears to me, that at this extreme height of their power and grandeur they did no more than the caliphs, who were the successors of Mahomet, did in the very period of their decline. Both of them, in the character of priests, conferred the investiture of empires, in solemn ceremony, on the most powerful of contending parties.

3. Maimbourg says: "What no pope ever did before, Gregory VIII. did, depriving Henry IV. of his dignity of emperor, and of his kingdoms of Germany and Italy."

Maimbourg is mistaken. Pope Zachary had, long before that, placed a crown on the head of the Austrasian Pepin, who usurped the kingdom of the Franks; and Pope Leo III. had declared the son of that Pepin emperor of the West, and thereby deprived the empress Irene of the whole of that empire; and from that time, it must be admitted, there has not been a single priest of the Romish church who has not imagined that his bishop enjoyed the disposal of all crowns.

This maxim was always turned to account when it was possible to be so. It was considered as a consecrated weapon, deposited in the sacristy of St. John of Lateran, which might be drawn forth in solemn and impressive ceremony on every occasion that required it. This prerogative is so commanding; it raises to such a height the dignity of an exorcist born at Velletri or Cività Vecchia, that if Luther, Œcolampadius, John Calvin, and all the prophets of the Cévennes, had been natives of any miserable village near Rome, and undergone the tonsure there, they would have supported that church with the same rage which they actually manifested for its destruction.

4. Everything, then, depends on the time and place of a man's birth, and the circumstances by which he is surrounded. Gregory VII. was born in an age of barbarism, ignorance, and superstition; and he had to deal with a young, debauched, inexperienced emperor, deficient in money, and whose power was contested by all the powerful lords of Germany.

We cannot believe, that, from the time of the Austrasian Charlemagne, the Roman people ever paid very willing obedience to Franks or Teutonians: they hated them as much as the genuine old Romans would have hated the Cimbri, if the Cimbri had obtained dominion in Italy. The Othos had left behind them in Rome a memory that was execrated, because they had enjoyed great power there; and, after the time of the Othos, Europe it is well known became involved in frightful anarchy.

This anarchy was not more effectually restrained under the emperors of the house of Franconia. One-half of Germany was in insurrection against Henry IV. The countess Mathilda, grand duchess, his cousin-german, more powerful than himself in Italy, was his mortal enemy. She possessed, either as fiefs of the empire, or as allodial property, the whole duchy of Tuscany, the territory of Cremona, Ferrara, Mantua, and Parma; a part of the Marches of Ancona, Reggio, Modena, Spoleto, and Verona; and she had rights, that is to say pretensions, to the two Burgundies; for the imperial chancery claimed those territories, according to its regular practice of claiming everything.

We admit, that Gregory VII. would have been little less than an idiot had he not exerted his strongest efforts to secure a complete influence over this powerful princess; and to obtain, by her means, a point of support and protection against the Germans. He became her director, and, after being her director, her heir.

I shall not, in this place, examine whether he was really her lover, or whether he only pretended to be so; or whether his enemies merely pretended it; or whether, in his idle moments, the assuming and ardent little director did not occasionally abuse the influence he possessed with his penitent, and prevail over a feeble and capricious woman. In the course of human events nothing can be more natural or common; but as usually no registers are kept of such cases; as those interesting intimacies between the directors and directed do not take place before witnesses, and as Gregory has been reproached with this imputation only by his enemies, we ought not to confound accusation with proof. It is quite enough that Gregory claimed the whole of his penitent's property.

5. The donation which he procured to be made to himself by the countess Mathilda, in the year 1077, is more than suspected. And one proof that it is not to be relied upon is that not merely was this deed never shown, but that, in a second deed, the first is stated to have been lost. It was pretended that the donation had been made in the fortress of Canossa, and in the second act it is said to have been made at Rome. These circumstances may be considered as confirming the opinion of some antiquaries, a little too scrupulous, who maintain that out of a thousand grants made in those times—and those times were of long duration—there are more than nine hundred evidently counterfeit.