The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the force of religious ideas.
[Sidenote: The religious revival of the Empire under the Saxons.]
One great characteristic of the revived Empire in German hands was the important part played in its policy by missions, and, it must be added, missionary wars. It was said of Charles the Great by his eulogists that he converted Saxons and Vandals and Frisians by the Word and the sword: and this thought was embodied in a series of wars which have been somewhat fancifully compared to the Crusades of later days. Otto I. thrice invaded the land of the Slavs and made all the barbarians from the Oder to the Elbe admit his lordship. Six new bishoprics were founded as his sway spread, and the bishop of Magdeburg was raised to be "archbishop and metropolitan of the whole race of the Slavs beyond the Elbe which has {198} been, or still remains to be, converted to God." But though it was a real work of civilisation, a work which made for peace, that the German Caesars undertook, it was not a Crusade. A Crusade was a war to win back from the infidel what had once been the patrimony of the Crucified: the wars of the Ottos were directed to extend their own sway, and, as ever, the true work of the converting Church was not helped but hindered by the arms and enterprises of soldiers and statesmen. When the tribes revolted against the government of the Germans, they often disowned their Christianity and destroyed their churches. Under Otto III. the Empire did not recover what she had lost, and the province of Magdeburg remained for nearly half its extent in heathen hands. [Sidenote: Otto the Great's endowment in Germany.] The Church suffered from this association. Where the mission of S. Boniface had been purely spiritual, the work of his successors was often hampered by the ambition of the emperors. In the lands alike of Eastern and Western Franks the Church was often led to lean on the State, and the results, of slackness, corruption, weakness, were inevitable. The rich endowments which were poured upon the Church were not always wisely given or wisely used. The Caesars themselves showered gifts: Otto the Great surpassed all his predecessors in lavishness,[2] and his dynasty followed in his steps. But the honours and riches were given quite as much for political as for religious objects. In the bishops and abbats the sovereigns found the wisest servants, the most capable administrators. As among the West Franks under the {199} Merwings, so now among the East Franks, the great ecclesiastics were the supports of the monarchy, the real governors of the country. It was thus that they came to owe their position—if not their election always yet certainly their confirmation—to the imperial will. As in Rome the emperors were stretching forth a hand to control the elections to the papacy, so in Germany there was growing up at the end of the tenth century the practice of imperial control over the things of the Church. The policy of the Ottos and the reformation of the papacy were certain ultimately to lead to the contest concerning investitures. High clerical office had come too often to be bought and sold, and the churches were becoming mere appanages of the great principalities. It was wise of Otto I. to try to win from the dukes the power they had obtained: but it was not for the good of the Church that the power should be even in the imperial hands.
[Sidenote: Otto III. and the popes.]
Otto I. died in 973. He had begun the reformation of the papacy. His son and grandson succeeded him, Otto II. in 973, Otto III. in 983. In 996 died Pope John XV., a Roman whom the Frankish chronicler, Abbo of Fleury, declares to have been lustful of filthy lucre and venal in all his acts. To Otto the clergy, senate, and people of Rome submitted the election of his successor. He chose his own cousin Bruno, "a man of holiness, of wisdom, and of virtue,"—news, to quote the same saintly writer, more precious than gold and precious stones. His throne was insecure: the Roman noble Crescentius drove him from it, but he won his way back and overcame one who had been set up as an anti-pope. He died in 999.
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At the close of the tenth century a pope and an emperor of great ideas stand forth from the blackness of an age when, according to the evidence of councils and of monastic chronicles alike, vice was rampant—"the more powerful oppress the weaker, and men are like fishes in the sea, which everywhere in turn devour one another"—and the bishops and clergy alike neglected their duties. Otto III. (983-1002), the offspring of the German who sat on the imperial throne and the daughter of the Caesars of the East, made himself a real ruler of the Empire in Church as well as in State, and after the disputed succession of his cousin Bruno (Gregory V., 996-99) placed on the papal throne the first of the great line of later medieval popes. Gregory V. was the first pope of transalpine birth imposed by the Germans; Gerbert was the first of the French popes. It needed the imperial army to keep Gregory on the throne, and to crush the last of the Roman princelets who had made the papacy infamous; Gerbert (Silvester II., 999-1003) was only able to remain in the eternal city so long as Otto was there to protect him. [Sidenote: Gerbert.] But Gerbert's greatness belonged to a sphere far wider than that of the local papacy. He was a scholar in the ancient classics, a logician, mathematician, astronomer and musician, a great collector of books and a great teacher of men. An Aquitanian by birth, he was brought up at Aurillac, and then passed from one place of study to another, till, by the influence of the Emperor Otto I., he settled at Rheims in 972. His school was a famous one: among those whom he taught were many bishops, Robert the future king of the Franks and Otto the future emperor. From Rheims he went as abbat to {201} Bobbio, where the necessary severity of his rule provoked such opposition that he was obliged to return to Gaul. [Sidenote: In Gaul] He returned in time to win the influence of the great see of Rheims on behalf of the child heir of Otto II., who died at the end of 983, and to take part in the diplomacy which ended in the transfer of the West Frankish crown to Hugh the duke of the Franks. When Arnulf, of the very Karling house which had been dispossessed, became archbishop, and tried to hand over Rheims to his kindred, Gerbert, the steadfast supporter of the "Capetians," was made his successor. The election was of more than doubtful legality, and the politics, papal and imperial, of the time still further complicated the question: it was only settled by the transference of Gerbert, on the nomination of his old pupil, Otto III., to the see of Ravenna, From 998 he remained in Italy till his death. [Sidenote: and in Italy.] In 999 he became pope, and then he gave himself, heart and soul, to forward the great schemes, missionary, reforming, imperial, which were indeed as much his own as those of the enthusiastic genius of the young emperor. The old offices of the "republic" were revived and harmonised, as in the East, with the Christian character of the imperial power. Pope and emperor worked hand in hand for the conversion of the barbarians: it is said that it was Silvester who gave the kingship to the Hungarian Duke Stephen, as a son of the Christian Empire and the holy see of the imperial city. In the unquiet days of his papacy he was yet able to set an example of wisdom, counsel, godliness, charity, which formed an epoch in the regeneration of the Roman episcopate. Zealous, loyal, inspired by an overpowering sense of duty, {202} Silvester II. in a short time fulfilled a long time and left a mark on the history of the Middle Ages such as was made by but few even of its greatest men. [Sidenote: Pope Silvester II.] At his death in 1003 the age of reform had started on its way; and his was the light which had directed its beginnings. Thus in the West the end of the period shows the Empire and the papacy of one mind, eager for a spiritual reform in the Church, for Christian and missionary ideals in the State, not careful to delimit the provinces of Church and State, but eager rather for unity of action as well as sentiment in the cause of Christian extension and endeavour.
[Sidenote: The end of the Dark Age.]
Though the contest was not yet over, it might be said with confidence that the Church of Christ had won over the barbarians. Missionaries and martyrs had changed the face of Europe, and the fierce tribes which were pouring over the Continent in the fifth century, barbarous and heathen, were now for the most part tamed and converted to the love of Christ. Out of a land which had been wild and barbarous, and where one of the greatest of saints and missionaries had met his death, had come a revival in Christian form of the old imperial idea, and the great men who had been nourished by it had given new health to the central Church of Europe. For the moment, the Empire and the Papacy, Germany and the new temporal State in the hands of the Roman bishop, were united to lead the Christian nations and to convert the heathen on their borders. In the East remained the magnificent fabric of the immemorial Empire, active still in missionary labour and setting an example of the union of Church and State in {203} agreement to which the West could never attain. The eleventh century was to bring to East and West alike, with new responsibilities, new difficulties in action and new problems in thought. Everywhere it was for unity men strove, the unity which if in its main aspect it was political, was on its spiritual and ideal side embodied in the visible Church of Christ.
[1] Dr. O. L. Wells, The Age of Charlemayne, p. 434.