THE PAPAL POLICY—DEMORALIZATION OF THE WORLD AND THE CHURCH—HILDEBRAND’S
PURPOSE INHERITED BY HIS SUCCESSORS.
We shall fail to appreciate the inception of the crusades if we overlook
the influence of the papal policy in the middle ages. These movements of
Europe against Asia, being under the direct patronage of the popes,
facilitated the plans of Rome to consolidate and universalize the
ecclesiastical empire. To understand this policy we must recall the
condition of the church in its relation to popular life and the secular
powers.
We have referred to the fact that the year 1000 had been looked forward
to as that which should mark the end of the world. So common was the
expectation of this termination of human affairs that many charters,
which have been preserved from this period, begin with the words, “As
the world is now drawing to its close.” When, however, the fatal day
passed without any perceptible shock to the universe, the popular
credulity added the thirty-three years of the life of our Lord to the
calculation, and prolonged the gruesome foreboding. But if the
chronological interpretation of the prophecy of the Book of Revelation
was a mistaken one, there was not wanting an apparent fulfilment of the
descriptive prediction, “Satan shall be loosed out of his prison.” The
falsity and viciousness of men certainly took on fiendish proportions.
The worst feature of the general demoralization was that the millennial
fear had driven all sorts of men into church orders. The priesthood and
monasteries were crowded with wretched characters, whose imagined
immunity in their sacred refuges gave license to their carnal vices. The
clergy were no longer the shepherds, but the bell-wethers of the wayward
flock. Priests lived in open concubinage. When Hildebrand, previous to
his elevation to the Papacy, took charge of the monastery of St. Paul in
Rome, his first work was to drive out the cattle that were stabled in
the basilica, and the prostitutes who served the tables of the monks.
Courtesans reigned even in the palaces of the popes with more effrontery
than in the courts of the secular princes. The offspring of such
creatures as the infamous Theodora, and of her daughters Theodora and
Marozia, had, in the tenth century, purchased the tiara with their
vices. In those days the papal staff was wrenched by violence from the
hands that held it with more frequency than the old Roman sceptre had
been stolen in the worst days of the empire. It may well be credited
that men began to pray again to pagan deities in sheer despondency under
the darkness which veiled the Christian truth. The surviving religious
sentiment was voiced in the solemn utterance of the Council of Rheims,
which declared that the church was “ruled by monsters of iniquity,
wanting in all culture, whether sacred or profane.”
If the tenth century closed with a gleam of hope in the elevation of
Gregory V. (996-999) and Sylvester II. (999-1003), it was quickly
remembered that the learning of the latter had been acquired among the
Saracens; and his biographer attributed his attainments to magic and
undue familiarity with the fiends in hell.
In the early part of the eleventh century the papal chair was filled
with the nominees of politicians, and from 1033 to 1045 disgraced by
Benedict IX., who at the age of twelve was selected to pose as the
Vicegerent of God. The lowest vices and caprices of unconscionable youth
were enthroned in the place that was most sacred in the thoughts of men.
One of his successors, Victor III. (1086-87), said of Benedict that he
led a life so shameful, so foul and execrable, that it made one shudder
to describe it. A man of such grovelling appetites naturally wearied
with even the slight usages of decency which had come to be regarded as
necessary in the papal palace; and after twelve years of irksome attempt
to support its lessened dignity, he sold his tiara to Gregory VI. An
unknown writer, about the middle of the eleventh century, attempting a
review of the passing age, exclaimed, “Everything is degenerate and all
is lost. Faith has disappeared. The world has grown old and must soon
cease altogether.”
As the debasement of the church could go no lower, a reaction was
natural and inevitable, if virtue was not altogether decayed at the
roots. The sentiment of human decency reasserted itself, and, since
there was no power at Rome to inaugurate reform, an appeal was made to
the German emperor. Henry III., in response to the call, deposed by
force three rival claimants to the papal throne, and secured the
ascendency of a line of German popes. It was not without the suspicion
of poison that two of them died after brief power: Clement II. within
the year, and Damasus II. in twenty-three days.
With Leo IX. (1049) came a better era. The year 1033, the ultimate date
set by the prophecy-mongers for the end of the world, being clearly
past, and men becoming again possessed of hope in the continuance of
mundane affairs, the best spirits dared to labor for the renovation of
society, that the earth thus saved as by fire might become indeed “a new
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
From this time the commanding genius and pure purpose of Hildebrand
guided, if he did not select, the occupants of the seat of St. Peter,
until, in 1073, the great counsellor himself assumed the sacred sceptre.
History, while it severely condemns the methods by which Hildebrand
sought to attain his ends, credits him with rigid honesty and devotion
to what he believed to be the will of Heaven. While it writes into his
epitaph the charge of most inordinate ambition, it does not erase from
it the record of his utterance as he lay dying, a fugitive at Salerno:
“I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity; therefore I die in
exile.”
The religious degradation of Christendom afflicted the soul of this
truly great man; but whence could come reform? The age was too far gone
in its demoralization to wait for recuperation through the slow process
of education. Society could not endure another generation of its own
putridity. The secular powers were utterly impotent to cope with the
gigantic evils that were abroad in every land. Even had they possessed
the disposition to champion the virtues, such sovereigns as the King of
France, the Emperor of Germany, the new Norman King of England, were
altogether engrossed in holding their precarious crowns, surrounded as
they were by a multitude of feudal lords, some of whom could collect in
their own names a larger force than that which would rise to defend the
throne.
To Hildebrand but one course seemed open, a desperate one, whose hazard
showed the audacity of the genius that conceived it. It was nothing less
than to declare the Papacy a world monarchy, and to force universal
reform by the combined power of the secular and spiritual sceptre held
in his own hand. In his bull against the Emperor Henry IV. he used these
words: “Come now, I pray thee, O most holy Father, and ye princes [St.
Peter and St. Paul], that all the world may know that if ye are able to
bind and loose in heaven, ye are able on earth to take away, or to give
to each according to his merits, empires, kingdoms, duchies,
marquisates, counties, and the possessions of all men.... If ye judge in
spiritual affairs, how great must be your power in secular! and if ye
are to judge angels, who rule over proud princes, what may ye not do to
these their servants! Let kings, then, and all the princes of the world
learn what ye are and how great is your power, and fear to treat with
disrespect the mandates of the church.”
To practicalize this enormous claim, the Pope made two demands, which
threw Europe into a state of turmoil, (1) He ordered the renunciation of
all investitures of religious office by secular potentates. The clergy
held of the empire cities, duchies, entire provinces, rights of levying
taxes, coinage, etc., amounting to one half of all property. The sees
thus held Hildebrand declared to be vacated until their occupants should
again receive them from his hand under pledge of absolute obedience to
the papal, as opposed to the imperial, authority. By this stroke the
Pope would gather to himself the practical control of all countries. (2)
Hildebrand forbade the marriage of the clergy—a custom wide-spread at
the time—and commanded those who had entered into matrimony, however
innocently and legally, to forsake their wives, as having been but
concubines, and their children, since logically they were but bastards.
By enforcing the celibacy of the clergy, he would have at his call an
army of men without domestic ties, care, or encumbrance, and, so far as
possible to human nature, divested of individuality, and thus the pliant
agents of his single will.
The audacity of Hildebrand’s scheme will be noted by comparing it with
the attitude of the most devoted adherents to the papal authority
previous to his time.
The capitularies of Charlemagne contain many rules for the regulation of
religious duties. The emperor himself (794) presided at the Synod of
Frankfort, though a papal legate was in attendance. While he brought the
church all possible help as an ally, and yielded to it all obedience as
a private Christian, he never allowed his imperial authority to be under
so much as the shadow of control by the papal. He suffered but one
religion in his domains, that which had the Pope for its chief
administrator; but he held with equal strenuousness that the emperor was
the vicar of God in things temporal.
From 964 to 1055 the popes had been the direct nominees of the emperor.
In 1059 the papal election devolved for the first time upon the conclave
of cardinals; but the Lateran Council decreed that the imperial
confirmation must follow. Though in 1061 Alexander II. was chosen
without imperial sanction, yet in 1073 Hildebrand himself, becoming Pope
as Gregory VII., did not venture to discharge the duties of the office
without first asking and obtaining the emperor’s assent.
But this outward deference to the secular power was only that he might
grasp more securely the weapon with which he would beat that power to
pieces. When the Emperor Henry IV. resented the sweeping claim of the
Pope, Hildebrand launched against him all the terrors of the pontifical
throne. His bull reads as follows: “Henry and all of his adherents I
excommunicate and bind in the fetters of anathema; on the part of
almighty God, I interdict him from the government of all Germany and
Italy; I deprive him of all royal power and dignity; I prohibit every
Christian from rendering him obedience as king; I absolve all who have
sworn or shall swear allegiance to his sovereignty from their oaths.”
(For the details of this controversy and the general history of
Hildebrand, the reader is referred to the previous volume in this
series, Vincent’s “Age of Hildebrand.”)
This policy of the Papacy to make itself the world monarchy had a direct
bearing upon the crusades and facilitated the enterprise. The astute
mind of Hildebrand saw that a movement which should combine the
Catholics of all countries in Europe under his command would immensely
augment his prestige as their great overlord. During his pontificate
there opportunely arrived at Rome messengers from the Greek emperor at
Constantinople, beseeching the aid of Western Christendom in expelling
the Turks, who were menacing the capital of the East. Hildebrand,
consistently with his policy, prescribed as the condition of such aid
the recognition on the part of the Greek Church of the headship of the
Roman pontiff. But in this demand he overshot the mark, while at the
same time the apathy of the Latin Christians towards their Greek
brethren, and his own controversy with the German emperor, left him no
opportunity to launch the movement. It was left to Urban II., his second
successor in the pontificate, to undertake the great adventure. As Dean
Milman remarks, “No event could be more favorable or more opportune for
the advancement of the great papal object of ambition, the acknowledged
supremacy over Latin Christendom, or for the elevation of Urban himself
over the rival Pope [Guibert] and the temporal sovereign, his enemies.”