important official; and natural also to regard his office as a benefice,
tenable for life or during good behaviour. At an early date we find
cases of conquered princes--a Duke of Aquitaine, a Duke of Bavaria, a
King of Denmark--who take the vassal's oath and agree to hold their
former dominions as a _beneficium_. So again a member of the royal
house does homage and promises service in return for his appanage. More
common, and more important for the future, is the practice of treating
counts as vassals. All over the Frankish Empire the county was the
normal unit of local administration. The count led the military levies,
collected the royal dues, enforced the laws, maintained the peace, and
was a judge with powers of life and death. The Carolingians controlled
their counts by means of itinerant inspectors (_missi dominici_);
but with the disruption of their Empire this check was destroyed, while
the power of the count survived. By that time the office had often
become hereditary, on the analogy of the _beneficium_, and the
count appropriated to his own use the profits of his office. In such
cases his county became a small principality, classed by lawyers as a
fief, but often ruled without any reference to the interests of the
royal overlord. The fiefs of Anjou, Champagne and Flanders began in this
way as hereditary countships. Sometimes, again, we find that a great
vassal obtains, by grant of usurpation, the prerogatives of a count over
his own lands; examples are the prince-bishops of Trier (898 A.D.),
Hamburg (937), and Metz (945).
The first effect of this striking change in the nature of landed
property and of public office was to substitute for the centralised
state of the Carolingians a lax federal system, in which each unit was a
group of men attached to the person of a hereditary superior. This
nascent feudalism was often brutal, always summary and short-sighted, in
its methods of government. The feudal group was engaged in a perpetual
struggle for existence with neighbouring groups. Feudal policy was
aggressive; for every lord had his war-band, whom he could only hold
together by providing them with adventure and rich plunder; nor could
any lord regard himself as safe while a neighbour of equal resources
remained unconquered. Furthermore, as though the disintegration of
society had not gone far enough, every great fief was in constant danger
of civil war and partition. As the lord had treated the King, so he in
turn was treated by his vassals. He endowed them with lands, he allowed
them to found families, he gave them positions of authority; and then
they defied him. In the eleventh century the great fief bristled with
castles held by chief vassals of the lord; in the small county of Maine
alone we hear of thirty-five such strongholds; generally speaking they
were centres of rebellion and indiscriminate rapine. Such feudalism was
not a system of government; it was a symptom of anarchy.
Yet feudalism had not always been a mere tyranny of the military class
over the unarmed population. Like the Roman Empire, that of the Franks
had forfeited respect and popularity by misgovernment, by feeble
government, by insupportable demands on the personal service of the
subject. The land-owner was a less exacting master than the Empire;
often he could defend his tenants from imperial exactions. During the
invasions of the Northmen and Hungarians, he was impelled by his own
interest to guard his estates to the best of his ability. Therefore
common men looked to their landlord, or looked about them for a
landlord, to whom they could commend themselves. The great estate was
the ark of refuge from the general flood of social evils. In the
eleventh century the situation changed. The Hungarian tide of invasion
was rolled back by a Henry the Fowler and an Otto the Great; the
Northmen enrolled themselves as members of the European commonwealth.
The petty feudal despot was no longer needed. From a protector he had
degenerated into a pest of society. The great political problem of the
age was to make him innocuous. It was taken in hand, and it was settled,
by a variety of means.
In France the Church took the lead of the repressive movement,
endeavouring to mitigate the horrors of private war by certain
restrictions upon the combatants. During the eleventh century it was not
unusual for the bishop of a diocese to secure the co-operation of
representative men, from all classes of society, in proclaiming a local
Truce of God (_Treuga Dei_). This Truce, which all men were invited
to swear that they would observe, forbade the molestation of
ecclesiastics, peasants and other non-combatants; provided that
cultivated land should not be harried or cattle carried off; and named
certain seasons when no war should be waged. A typical agreement of this
kind enjoins that all private hostilities shall be suspended from
Wednesday evening to Monday morning in each week; from the beginning of
Advent till a week after the Epiphany; from the beginning of Lent till a
week after Easter; from the Rogation Days till a week after Pentecost.
The Truce of God was approved by the Crown both in France and in
Germany; even in the twelfth century it was still recommended by church
councils as a useful expedient. But it was seldom effectual. There was
no machinery for enforcing it; and those who swore to uphold it were so
divided by conflicting class interests that they could not co-operate
with any cordiality. The second of these defects, though not the first,
can also be perceived in the German system of the Land-peace.
Periodically we find an Emperor constraining a particular province, or
even the whole German kingdom, to accept a set of rules which are partly
modelled on those of the _Treuga Dei_ and partly in the nature of
criminal legislation. Thus in 1103 the magnates of the kingdom were
required to swear that for the next four years they would not molest
ecclesiastics, merchants, women, or Jews; that during the same period
they would neither burn nor break into private houses; that they would
not kill or wound or hold to ransom any man. In regard to the last rule
the magnates insisted on some modification; it was finally provided that
a man meeting a private enemy on the high-road might attack him, but
might not pursue him if he took refuge in a private house. The general
Land-peaces of Frederic Barbarossa (1152) and Frederic II (1235) are the
most important enactments of this kind; but they deviate widely from the
original type. They are permanent; they aim at the total suppression of
lawless self-help; they are codes of criminal law which, if thoroughly
enforced, would have opened a new era in German history. As the case
stands--they are only the evidence of an unrealised project of reform.
It was not by confederations of this kind, whether spontaneous or
compulsory, that feudalism could be bridled. The twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, the great age of medieval statesmanship, saw other and more
effectual remedies applied. In the free cities of France, Italy, the
Netherlands and Germany, the commercial classes perfected a form of
association which, however faulty in other respects, was successful in
excluding feudalism from the principal centres of urban industry. In the
larger states, whether kingdoms or not, the rulers, supported by the
Church and the commons, bestirred themselves to slay the many-headed
Hydra. Feudalism was not extirpated, but it was brought under the law.
In many districts it defied repression. To the end of the Middle Ages
the Knights of Suabia and the Rhineland maintained the predatory
traditions of the Dark Ages; and everywhere feudalism remained a force
inimical to national unity. But the great feudatories who survived into
the age of Machiavelli and of the new despotisms had usually some claims
upon the respect of their subjects. The Duchy of Brittany, the
Burgundian inheritance, the German electorates, were mainly
objectionable as impeding the growth of better communities--better
because more comprehensive, more stable, more fitted to be the nurseries
of great ideas and proud traditions.
It remains to speak of chivalry, that peculiar and often fantastic code
of etiquette and morals which was grafted upon feudalism in the eleventh
and succeeding centuries. The practical influence of chivalry has been
exaggerated. Chivalrous ethics were in great measure the natural product
of a militarist age. Bravery and patriotism, loyalty and truthfulness,
liberality and courtesy and magnanimity--these are qualities which the
soldier, even in a semi-civilised society, discovers for himself. The
higher demands of chivalric morality were as habitually disregarded as
the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith. The chivalric statesmen
of the Middle Ages, from Godfrey of Bouillon to Edward III and the Black
Prince, appear, under the searchlight of historical criticism, not less
calculating than Renaissance despots or the disciples of Frederic the
Great of Prussia. But something less than justice has been rendered to
the chivalric ideal. The ethics which it embodied were arbitrary and
one-sided; but they represent a genuine endeavour to construct, if only
for one class, a practicable code of conduct at a time when religion too
often gloried in demanding the impossible. Chivalry degenerated into
extravagance and conventional hyperbole; but at the worst it had the
merit of investing human relationships and human occupations with an
ideal significance. In particular it gave to women a more honourable
position than they had occupied in any social system of antiquity. It
rediscovered one half of human nature. But for chivalry the Beatrice of
Dante, the Laura of Petrarch, Shakespeare's Miranda and Goethe's
Marguerite, could not have been created, much less comprehended.
Chivalry in the oldest discoverable form was the invention of the
Church. The religious service by which the neophyte was initiated as a
knight has been traced back to the time of Otto III, when it appears in
the liturgy of the Roman churches. But the ceremony was not in general
use, outside Italy, before the age of the Crusades. It was Urban II who
inspired the knighthood of northern Europe with the belief that they
were _Dei militia_, the soldiers of the Church; and it is significant
that warfare against the unbeliever ranks prominently among the duties
enjoined upon the new-made knight, though it does not stand alone. The
defence of the true faith and of the Church is also inculcated; merit
might be acquired in persecuting heretics or in fighting for the Pope
against an unjust Emperor. Nor are the claims of the widow, the orphan
and the defenceless totally forgotten. But the perfect knight of the
Church was the Templar, the soldier living under the rule of a religious
order and devoting his whole energies to the cause of the Holy
Sepulchre. It was a remarkable innovation when St. Bernard, the mirror
of orthodox conservatism, undertook to legislate for the Order of the
Temple; for the primitive Church had hardly tolerated wars in self-
defence. From one point of view it was a wholesome change of attitude in
the moral leaders of society, that they should recognise war and a
military class as inevitable necessities, that they should undertake to
moralise and idealise the commonest of occupations. But the resolve was
marred in the execution. In the desire to be practical, the Church set
up too low an aim and translated Christianity into precepts which were
only suited for one short stage of medieval civilisation, the stage of
the Crusades.
In the long run the poet had far more influence than the priest upon the
chivalric classes. It is remarkable how uniformly Popes and Councils set
their faces against the bloodshed and extravagant futilities of the
tournament; still more remarkable that even threats of excommunication
could not deter the most orthodox of knights from seeking distinction
and distraction in these mimic wars. Equally significant is the growth
of the _service des dames_ which, although invested by troubadours
and minnesingers with a halo of religious allegory, was disliked by the
Church, not merely from a dread of possible abuses, but as inherently
idolatrous. The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new
conception of womanhood, was also a protest against a secular
romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von Eschenbach essays the feat of
reconciling poetry with religion in the picture of the perfect knight.
But the school of _courtoisie_ prevailed; the most celebrated of
the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der
Vogelweide, with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of
his class than Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal.
It was in Provence, on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the
society which was most indifferent to official Christianity and most
hostile to the clergy, that chivalry was most sedulously preached and
developed in the most curious detail. In the hands of the troubadours it
became a gospel of pageantry and fanfaron, of artificial sentiments and
artificial heroisms, cloaking the materialism, the sensuality and the
inordinate ostentation of a theatrical and frivolous society,
intoxicated with the pride of life.
V
THE PAPACY BEFORE GREGORY VII
An institution is not necessarily discredited when we discover that it
has grown from small beginnings, has been applied under new conditions
to new purposes, and in the course of a long history has been defended
by arguments which are demonstrably false. The child, no doubt, is
father of the man; but the man is something different from, and may well
be something better than, his infant self. We must not attach undue
importance to the study of origins. On the other hand we cannot afford
to neglect them. However slight the fibres by which the present is
rooted in the past, to observe them is to realise the continuity of
human development--the most important, the most obvious, and the most
neglected of the lessons that history can teach. It is true that the
roots, however strong and however deeply set, are insufficient to
account for the characteristics of the plant which springs from them.
But it is also true that neither plants nor institutions can altogether
shed the husk of their immaturity. They are not entirely adapted to the
conditions under which they reach their full development. The Papacy in
the zenith of its power and renown is partly new and partly old. When we
consider the papal theory, as it floated before the mind of a Gregory
VII or an Innocent III, it produces in us the same impression of
symmetry, logical consistency and completeness, which we experience on
entering for the first time one of the great medieval churches. But when
once we have grasped the design of the architect, we shall usually find
that he has conformed in some respects to unmeaning traditions inherited
from an earlier period, and further that his work incorporates the
remnants of an older, simpler structure. Here are pillars of massive
girth altogether disproportionate to the delicate arches which they
carry; there an old tower has been buttressed to make it capable of
supporting a new spire. For all the builder's cunning, we can yet
distinguish between the new and the renovated. So it is with the papal
apologia in the great days of papal policy. A sentence from the laws of
ancient Rome dovetails with an axiom stolen from the philosophers of the
Porch or the Academy. Fables of Gallic or Egyptian origin are invoked to
corroborate the canons of Nicene and Chalcedonian synods. A text from a
Hebrew prophet is interpreted by the fancy of an African expositor. The
fabric composed of these incongruous elements has in truth a unity of
purpose; but the design is so disguised and so perverted by the
recalcitrance of the materials, that we are irresistibly impelled to ask
how and why they came to be employed.
More than any other human institution the Papacy has suffered from a
supposed necessity of justifying every forward step by precedent and
reference to authority. Twice in the course of sixteen centuries the
Holy See has ventured on a startling change of front, and has been
sorely embarrassed to rebut the charge of inconsistency. One such change
was silently effected at the close of the seventeenth century, when the
Popes ceased to concern themselves more than was unavoidable with
international affairs. This was a great change; yet not so great as that
made in the latter part of the eleventh century, by Gregory VII. For he
revolutionised the whole theory of papal prerogative. Neither a profound
lawyer nor a profound theologian, he regarded the past history of his
office with the idealism of a poet, and looked into its future with the
sanguine radicalism of a Machiavelli or a Hobbes. Gregory VII conceived
of Christendom as an undivided state; of a state as a polity dominated
by a sovereign; of a sovereign as a ruler who must be either absolute or
useless. And who, he asked, but the heir of the Prince of the Apostles
could presume to claim a power so tremendous? For us the audacity of his
pretensions is excused by the lofty aims which they were meant to serve.
To conciliate contemporary opinion it was necessary that the new claims
should be represented as the revival of old rights, as the logical
corollaries of undisputed truths. And this course involved as its
consequence an industrious, if partially unconscious, perversion of past
history. For the Popes who had gone before him claimed powers which,
though extensive, were capable of definition; which, though startling,
could in the main be defended by appeal to well-established usage. The
new policy led to this paradoxical situation, that precedents were
diligently invoked to prove the Pope superior to all precedents.
With Gregory VII the primacy of Western Christendom assumed a new
character. But the primacy, in one form or another, had for centuries
belonged to the Roman See. So much his remote predecessors had achieved,
and their success is all the more remarkable when we remember how few of
them had been distinguished statesmen. It is no matter for surprise
that, in the course of nine troubled centuries, some Bishops of Borne
had proved incompetent and others had betrayed the interests committed
to their charge. It is, however, surprising that the Roman See was able
to assume and hold the leading position among Western bishops without
rendering much service to the extension or the organisation of the
Church.
Of all the early Popes, save Leo I and Gregory I, it is true that we may
be tolerably at home in the history of their times without knowing much
about them. No Pope is ranked among the leading Western Fathers. The
only considerable theologian who occupied the Holy See, before the year
1000, is Gregory I; and the highest praise which we can give his
writings is that they imparted new life to some ideas of St. Augustine.
It is as statesmen, not as thinkers, that the early Popes appeal to our
attention. Yet their practical achievements scarcely account for the
reverence which they inspired. The one great mission which Rome set on
foot was that of Augustine to England. The other evangelists of the Dark
Ages found their inspiration elsewhere, in the monasteries of Ireland or
of Gaul and Germany. If we consider the progress of theological science,
and of ecclesiastical organisation, we find that the great controversies
were resolved, and the great legislative assemblies convened, in the
Eastern Empire. It was but rarely that Rome asserted her right to speak
in the name even of the Western Church; the record of the early Popes
who attained to such a momentary pre-eminence was not such as the West
could recollect with satisfaction. In fact, it was due to other causes
than the merits of individual Popes that Rome became and remained the
religious metropolis of Europe.
How, then, are we to account for her triumphant progress? Hobbes
suggested one explanation when he called the Papacy "the ghost of the
Roman Empire." And it is true that the later Emperors found it
convenient to confer special privileges on the bishops of their ancient
capital. But they adopted this policy too late, when reverence for the
Empire was already declining in the West. By imperial grants the Papacy
gained no substantial powers, while individual Popes lost credit and
independence by their special connection with the New Rome on the
Bosporus. They were compelled to play an ignominious part in the
squabbles of the Eastern Churches, they were loaded with onerous secular
duties; they became the emblems and the agents of an alien tyranny,
mistrusted alike by the barbarian invaders and the nominal subjects of
the Empire.
Other critics have explained the prestige of the Papacy as the fruit of
successful impostures. For this hypothesis there is little to be said.
One or two Popes, not the greatest, have condescended to use forged
title-deeds. But the effect of these frauds has been much exaggerated.
The most famous of them are the _Donation of Constantine_ and the
_False Decretals_. The former, though probably of Roman origin, was
little used at Rome, and only served to justify the modest beginnings of
the temporal power. The latter are of more importance, and are sometimes
regarded as opening an era of new pretensions. In fact they are little
more than reiterations and amplifications of very ancient claims. Though
frequently quoted by the canon lawyers, they are not indispensable links
in the claim of historical proofs and precedents. They are chiefly
significant as attesting the general desire of churchmen to find some
warrant for a vigorous exercise of the papal prerogative. A primate with
real powers was desired, not only by the clergy of the national churches
as a bulwark against the brutal oppression of the State, but also by all
religious thinkers as a symbol of corporate unity and a guarantee of
doctrinal uniformity.
No theory can be regarded as supplying a satisfactory explanation of
papal authority, unless it explains this general belief in the necessity
for a visible Head of the Western Church. In part the necessity was
political. Exposed to the common danger of secular tyranny, the national
churches looked for safety in federation; and they notified their union
in the only way that uneducated laymen could understand, by announcing
their subjection to a single spiritual sovereign. But there remained the
problem of justifying this act of independence amounting to rebellion.
The justification was found in two arguments, the one historical, the
other doctrinal; the one based upon the Roman legend of St. Peter, the
other on the acknowledged importance of holding fast to right tradition.
Each of these arguments calls for some consideration.