By the Assize of Clarendon it was decreed that twelve men from each

hundred and four from each township should decide in criminal cases who

amongst the accused were sufficiently implicated to be justly sentenced

by the royal judges. Local representatives also were employed on other

occasions during Henry’s reign in assisting his judges in assessing

taxes and in deciding how many weapons and of what sort the ordinary

freeman might fittingly carry to the safety of his neighbours and of

himself. In civil cases, as when the ownership of land or personal

property was in dispute, twelve ‘lawful men’ of the neighbourhood,

or in certain cases twelve Knights of the Shire, were to be elected

to help the Sheriff arrive at a just decision. In this system of

‘recognition’, as it was called, lay the germ of our modern jury.

It is probable that the knights and representatives of the hundreds

and townships grumbled continually at the trouble and expense to

which the King’s legislation put them; for neither they nor Henry II

himself would realize that they were receiving a splendid education in

the A B C of self-government that must be the foundation of any true

democracy. Yet a few generations later, when Henry’s weak grandson and

namesake Henry III misruled England, the Knights of the Shire were

already accepted as men of public experience, and their representatives

summoned to a parliament to defend the liberties of England.

Henry II used popular institutions and crown officials as levers

against the independence of his baronage, but the chief struggle of his

reign in England was not with the barons so much as with the Church.

Thomas Becket as Chancellor had been Henry’s right hand in attacking

feudal privileges: he had warned his master that as a leading Churchman

his love might turn to hate, his help to opposition. The King refused

to believe him, thrust the burden of the archbishopric of Canterbury

on his unwilling shoulders, and then found to his surprise and rage

that he had secured the election of a very Hildebrand, who held so high

a conception of the dignity of the Church that it clashed with royal

demands at every turn.

[Sidenote: The Becket Controversy]

One of the chief subjects of dispute was the claim of the Church to

reserve for her jurisdiction all cases that affected ‘clerks’, that is,

not only priests, but men employed in the service of the Church, such

as acolytes or choristers. The King insisted that clerks convicted in

ecclesiastical courts of serious crimes should be handed over to the

royal courts for secular punishment. His argument was that if a clerk

had committed a murder the ecclesiastical judge was not allowed by

Canon law to deliver a death-sentence, and so could do no more than

‘unfrock’ the guilty man and fine or imprison him. Thus a clerk could

live to commit two murders where a layman would by command of the royal

judges be hung at the first offence.

Becket, on his side, would not swerve from his opinion that it was

sacrilege for royal officials to lay hands on a priest or clerk whether

‘criminous’ or not; and when Henry embodied his suggestions of royal

supremacy in a decree called the Constitutions of Clarendon, the

Archbishop publicly refused to sign his agreement to them. Threats

and insults were heaped upon him by angry courtiers, and one of his

attendants, terrified by the scene, exclaimed, ‘Oh, my master, this

is a fearful day!’ ‘The Day of Judgement will be yet more fearful,’

answered the undaunted Becket, and in the face of his fearlessness no

one at the moment dared to lay hands on him.

Shortly afterwards Becket fled abroad, hoping to win the support of

Rome, but the Pope to whom he appealed did not wish to quarrel with

the King of England, and used his influence to patch up an agreement

that was far too vague to have any binding strength. Thomas Becket

returned to Canterbury, but exile had not modified his opinions, and

he had hardly landed before he once more appeared in open opposition

to Henry’s wishes, excommunicating those bishops who had dared to act

during his absence without his leave.

The rest of the story is well known--the ungovernable rage of the

Angevin king at an obstinacy as great as his own, his rash cry, ‘Is my

house so full of fools and dastards that none will avenge me on this

upstart clerk?’ and then his remorse on learning of the four knights

who had taken him at his word and murdered the Archbishop as he knelt,

still undaunted, on the altar steps of Canterbury Cathedral.

So great was the horror and indignation of Europe, even of those who

were devoted to Henry’s cause, that the King was driven to strip and

scourge himself before the tomb of Thomas the Martyr, as a public act

of penance, and all question of the supremacy of the state over the

Church was for the time dropped.

One of the many pilgrims who in the next few years visited the shrine

of St. Thomas of Canterbury in the hope of a miracle was Louis VII of

France, and the miracle that he so earnestly desired was the recovery

of his son and heir, Philip Augustus, from a fever that threatened his

life. With many misgivings the old king crossed the Channel to the land

of a ruler with whom he had been at almost constant war since Eleanor

of Aquitaine’s remarriage; but his faith in the vision of the Martyr

that had prompted his journey was rewarded. Henry received him with

‘great rejoicing and honour’ after the manner of a loyal vassal, and

when the French king returned home he found his son convalescent.

The sequel to this journey, however, was the sudden paralysis and

lingering death of Louis himself, and the coronation of the boy prince

in whom France was to find so great a ruler. When the bells of Paris

had rung out the joyous tidings of his birth one hot August evening

fourteen years before, a young British student had put his head out

of his lodging window and demanded the news. ‘A boy,’ answered the

citizens, ‘has been given to us this night who by God’s grace shall

be the hammer of your king, and who beyond a doubt shall diminish the

power and lands of him and his subjects.’ One-half of the reign of

Philip Augustus, _le Dieu-donné_, or ‘God-given’, was the fulfilment of

this prophecy.

At first sight it would seem as though Henry II of England entered the

lists against his overlord the Champion of France with overwhelming

odds in his favour. Ruler of a territory stretching from Scotland, his

dependency, to the Pyrenees, he added to his lands and wealth the brain

of a statesman and the experience of long years of war and intrigue.

What could a mere boy, fenced round even in his capital of Paris by

turbulent barons, hope to achieve against such strength?

Yet the weapons of destruction lay ready to his hand, in the very

household of the Angevin ruler himself. Legend records that the blood

of some Demon ancestress ran in the veins of the Dukes of Aquitaine,

endowing them with a ferocity and falseness strange even to mediaeval

minds; and the sons whom Eleanor bore to her second husband were true

to this bad strain if to nothing else. ‘Dost thou not know’, wrote

one of them to his father who had reproached him for plotting against

his authority, ‘that it is our proper nature that none of us should

love the other, but that ever brother should strive with brother and

son against father? I would not that thou shouldst deprive us of our

hereditary right and seek to rob us of our nature.’

Louis VII, in order to weaken Henry II, had encouraged this spirit of

treachery, and even provided a refuge for Becket during his exile: his

policy was continued by Philip Augustus, who kept open house at Paris

for the rebellious family of his tenant-in-chief whenever misfortune

drove them to fly before their father’s wrath or ambition brought them

to hatch some new conspiracy.

Could Henry have once established the same firm grip he had obtained

in England over his French possessions, he might have triumphed in

the struggle with both sons and overlord; but in Poitou and Aquitaine

he was merely regarded as Eleanor’s consort, and the people looked to

his heirs as rulers, especially to Richard his mother’s favourite. Yet

never had they suffered a reign of greater licence and oppression than

under the reckless and selfish Lion-Heart.

After much secret plotting and open rebellion, Henry succeeded in

imprisoning Eleanor, who had encouraged her sons to defy their father,

but with Richard supported by Philip Augustus and the strength of

southern France he was forced to come to terms towards the end of his

reign. Though only fifty-six, he was already failing in health, and the

news that his own province of Maine was fast falling to his enemies had

broken his courage. Cursing the son who had betrayed him, he sullenly

renewed the oath of homage he owed to Philip, and promised to Richard

the wealth and independence he had demanded. The compact signed he rode

away, heavy with fever, to his castle of Chinon, and there, indifferent

to life, sank into a state of stupor. News was brought him that his

youngest son John, for whom he had carved out a principality in

Ireland, had been a secret member of the League that had just brought

him to his knees. ‘Is it true,’ he asked, roused for the minute, ‘that

John, my heart ... has deserted me?’ Reading the answer in the downcast

faces of his attendants, he turned his face to the wall. ‘Now let

things go as they will ... I care no more for myself or the world.’

Thus the old king died.

[Sidenote: Richard I of England]

In 1189 Richard the False succeeded his father, and by his prowess

in Palestine became Richard ‘Cœur-de-Lion’. How he quarrelled with

Philip II we have seen in the last chapter, and that Philip, after the

siege of Acre, returned home in disgust at the other’s overbearing

personality.

Philip Augustus does not cut the same heroic figure on the battle-field

as his rival: indeed there was no match in Europe for the ‘Devil of

Aquitaine’, who knew not the word fear, and the glamour of whose feats

of arms has outlasted seven centuries. It is in kingship that Philip

stands pre-eminent in his own age, ready to do battle at the right

moment, but still more ready to serve France by patient statecraft.

While Richard remained in Palestine, Philip plotted with the

ever-treacherous John for their mutual advantage at the absent king’s

expense; but their enmity remained secret until the joyful news arrived

that the royal crusader had been captured in disguise on his way home

by the very Leopold of Austria whose banner he had once contemptuously

cast into a ditch.

Now the Duke of Austria’s overlord was the Emperor Henry VI, whose

claims to Sicily Richard had often derided; and the Lion-Heart, passing

from the dungeon of the vassal to that of the overlord, did not escape

until his subjects had paid a huge ransom and he himself had promised

to hold England as a fief of the Empire. ‘Beware, the Devil is loose’,

wrote Philip to John, when he heard that their united efforts to bribe

Henry VI into keeping his prisoner permanently had failed.

The next few years saw a prolonged struggle between the French armies

that had invaded Normandy and the forces of Richard, who, burning for

revenge, proved as terrible a rival to Philip in the north of France as

he had been in the East; and the duel continued until a poisoned arrow

pierced the Lion-Heart’s shoulder, causing his death. ‘God visited the

land of France,’ wrote a chronicler, ‘for King Richard was no more.’

From this moment Philip Augustus began to realize his most cherished

ambitions, slowly at first, but, thanks to the ‘worst of the English

kings’, with ever-increasing rapidity. John, who had succeeded Richard,

was neither statesman nor soldier. To meaningless outbursts of Angevin

rage he added the treachery and cruelty of the House of Aquitaine and a

sluggish disregard of dignity and ordinary decency peculiarly his own.

Soon all his subjects were banded together against him in fear, hatred,

and scorn: the Church, on whose privileges he trampled; the barons,

whose wives and daughters were unsafe at his court, and whose lands he

ravaged and confiscated; the people, whom his mercenaries tortured and

oppressed. How he quarrelled with the Chapter of Canterbury over its

choice of an archbishop, defied Pope Innocent III, and then, brought

to his knees by an interdict, did homage to the Holy See for his

possessions; these things, and the signing of Magna Charta, the English

Charter of Popular Liberties, at Runymede, are tales well known in

English history.

What is important to emphasize here in a European history is the

contrast of the unpopularity that John had gained for himself amongst

all classes of his own subjects at the very moment that Philip Augustus

seemed, in French eyes, to be indeed their ‘God-given’ king.

[Sidenote: French Conquest of Normandy]

While John feasted at Rouen messengers brought word that Philip was

conquering Normandy. ‘Let him alone! Some day I will win back all

he has taken.’ So answered the sluggard, but when he at last raised

his standard it was already too late. The English barons would have

followed ‘Cœur-de-Lion’ on the road to Paris: they were reluctant to

take sword out of scabbard for John: the very Angevins and Normans were

beginning to realize that they had more in common with their French

conquerors than with any king across the Channel. Aquitaine, it is

true, looked sourly on Philip’s progress, but the reason was not that

she loved England, but that she feared the domination of Paris, and

made it a systematic part of her policy for years to support the ruler

who lived farthest away, and would therefore be likely to interfere the

least in her internal affairs.

In 1214 John made his most formidable effort, dispatching an army to

Flanders to unite with that of the powerful Flemish Count Ferrand,

one of Philip’s tenants-in-chief, and with the Emperor Otto IV, in a

combined attack on the northern French frontier. At Bouvines the armies

met, Philip Augustus, in command of his forces, riding with a joyful

face ‘no less than if he had been bidden to a wedding’.

The battle, when it opened, found him wherever the fight was hottest,

wielding his sword, encouraging, rallying, until by nightfall he

remained victor of the field, with the Count of Flanders and many

another of his chief enemies, including the English commander,

prisoners at his mercy.

Philip carried Count Ferrand behind him in chains on his triumphal

march to Paris, while all the churches along the way rang their bells,

and the crowds poured forth to cheer their king and sing _Te Deums_.

‘The Battle of Bouvines was perhaps the most important engagement ever

fought on French soil.’ So wrote a modern historian before the war of

1914.

In the days of Louis VII the Kings of France had stood dwarfed amid

Dukes of Normandy and Aquitaine and Counts of Flanders and Anjou.

Now the son of Louis had defeated an emperor, thrown one rebellious

tenant-in-chief into a dungeon, and from another, the Angevin John,

gained as the reward of his victory all the long-coveted provinces

north of the Loire. Even the crown treasury, once so poor, was replete

for the time with the revenues of the confiscated Norman and Angevin

estates of English barons, who had been forbidden by their sovereign to

do homage any more to a French overlord.

Philip Augustus had shown himself Philip ‘the Conqueror’; but he was

something far greater--a king who, like Henry II of England, could

build as well as destroy. During his reign the menace of the old feudal

baronage was swept away, and the government received its permanent

stamp as a servant of the monarchy.

In his dealing with the French Church Philip followed the traditions

of Pepin the Short and Charlemagne, yet gratifying as were his

numerous gifts to monasteries and convents, they were dovetailed into

a scheme of combining the liberal patron with the firm master. That

good relations between the king and clergy resulted was largely due to

Philip’s policy of replacing bishops belonging to powerful families

by men of humble origin accustomed to subservience. Also he would

usually support the lesser clergy in their frequent quarrels with their

ecclesiastical superiors, thus weakening the leaders while he won the

affection of the rank and file.

[Sidenote: Innocent III and France]

Like John he came into collision with the iron will of Pope Innocent

III, but on a purely moral question, his refusal to live with

the Danish princess Ingeborg, to whom he had taken a violent and

unaccountable dislike on his wedding-day. The bride was a girl of

eighteen; she could speak no French, her husband’s bishops were afraid

to uphold her cause whatever their secret opinions, but in appealing to

the Pope for help she gained an unyielding champion.

In other chapters we shall see Innocent III as a politician and a

persecutor of heretics: here he stands as the moral leader of Europe;

and no estimate of his character and work would be fair that neglected

this aspect. It was to Innocent’s political advantage to please the

French king, whose help he needed to chastise the English John and to

support a crusade against an outburst of heresy in Languedoc. Moreover,

he had no armies to compel a king who accused his wife of witchcraft to

recognize her as queen. Yet Innocent believed that Philip was in the

wrong; and when the French king persuaded his bishops to divorce him

and then promptly married again, papal letters proceeded to denounce

the divorce as a farce and the new marriage as illegal.

‘Recall your lawful wife,’ wrote Innocent, ‘and then we will hear all

that you can righteously urge. If you do not do this no power shall

move us to right or left until justice be done.’ This letter was

followed by threats of excommunication, and after some months by an

interdict that reduced Philip to a promise of submission in return

for a full inquiry into his case. The promise so grudgingly given

remained but a promise, and it was not until 1213, nearly twenty years

since he had so cruelly repudiated Ingeborg, that, driven by continual

papal pressure and the critical state of his fortunes, Philip openly

acknowledged the Danish princess as his wife and queen.

We have seen something of Philip’s dealings with his greater

tenants-in-chief; but such achievements as the conquest of Normandy

and Anjou and the victory of Bouvines were but the fruits of years of

diplomacy, during which the royal power had permeated the land, like

ether the atmosphere, almost unnoticed. In lending a sympathetic ear to

the complaints of Richard and his brothers against their father, Philip

was merely carrying out the policy we have noticed in his treatment of

the Church.

‘He never began a new campaign without forming alliances that might

support him at each step’, says Philip’s modern biographer; and these

allies were often the sub-tenants of large feudal estates to whom

in the days of peace he had given his support against the claims of

their feudal overlords. Sometimes he had merely used his influence as

a mediator, at others he had granted privileges to the tenants, or

else he had called the case in dispute before his own royal court for

judgement. By one means or another, at any rate, he had made the lesser

tenants feel that he was their friend, so that when he went out to

battle they would flock eagerly to his banner, sometimes in defiance of

their overlord.

One danger to the crown lay, not in the actual feudal baronage, but

in the _prévôts_, officials appointed by the king with power to exact

taxes, administer the laws, and judge offenders in his name in the

provinces. When the monarchy was weak these _prévôts_, from lack of

control, developed into petty tyrants, and it was fortunate for Philip

that their encroachments were resented by both nobles and clergy,

so that a system of reform that reduced them again to a subordinate

position was everywhere welcomed.

Gradually a link was established between local administration and

the king’s council, namely, officials called in the north of France

_baillis_, in the south _sénéchals_, whose duty was to keep a watch

over the _prévôt_ and to depose or report him if necessary. The

_prévôt_ was still to collect the royal revenues as of old, but the

_bailli_ would take care that he did not cheat the king, and would

forward the money that he received to the central government: he would

also hold assizes and from time to time visit Paris, where he would

give an account of local conditions and how he had dealt with them.

In these reforms, as in those of Henry II of England, a process that

was gradually changing the face of Europe can be seen at work, first

the crumbling of feudal machinery too clumsy to keep pace with the

needs and demands of dawning civilization, and next its replacement by

an official class, educated in the intricacies of finance, justice, and

administration, and dependent not on the baronage but on the monarchy

for its inspiration and success.

The chief nobles of France in early mediaeval times had regarded such

titles as ‘Mayor of the Palace’, ‘Seneschal’, ‘Chamberlain’, ‘Butler’,

&c., as bestowing both hereditary glory and also political power. With

the passing of years some of the titles vanished, while under Philip

Augustus and his grandson Louis IX those that remained passed to ‘new’

men of humbler rank, who bore them merely while they retained the

office, or else, shorn of any political power, continued as honours

of the court and ballroom. In effect the royal household, once a kind

of general servant ‘doing a bit of everything inadequately’ as in the

days of Charlemagne, had now developed into two distinct bodies, each

with their separate sphere of work: the great nobles surrounding their

sovereign with the dignity and ceremonial in which the Middle Ages

rejoiced, the trained officials advising him and carrying out his will.

[Sidenote: French Communes]

In his attitude to the large towns, except on his own crown lands where

like other landowners he hesitated to encourage independence, Philip

II showed himself sympathetic to the attempts of citizens to throw

off the yoke of neighbouring barons, bishops, and abbots. Many of the

towns had formed ‘communes’, that is, corporations something like a

modern trade union, but these, though destined to play a large part

in French history, were as yet only in their infancy. They had their

origin sometimes in a revolutionary outburst against oppression, but

often in a real effort on the part of leading townsmen to organize the

civil life on profitable lines by means of ‘guilds’, or associations

of merchants and traders with special privileges and laws. Some of

the privileges at which these city corporations aimed were the right

to collect their own taxes, to hold their own law-courts for deciding

purely local disputes, and to protect their trade against fraud,

tyranny, and competition from outside. It all sounds natural enough to

modern ears, but it awoke profound indignation in a French writer of

the twelfth century.

‘The word “commune”, he says, ‘is new and detestable, for this is

what it implies; that those who owe taxes shall pay the rent that

is due to their lord but once in the year only, and if they commit

a crime against him they shall find pardon when they have made

amends according to a fixed tariff of justice.’

Except within his own demesnes Phillip II readily granted charters

confirming the ‘communes’ in their coveted rights, and he also founded

‘new’ towns under royal protection, offering there upon certain

conditions a refuge to escaped serfs able to pay the necessary taxes.

[Sidenote: Achievements of Philip II]

In Paris itself his reign marks a new era, when, instead of a town

famed according to a chronicler of the day chiefly for its pestiferous

smells, there were laid the foundations of one of the most luxurious

cities of Europe. The cleansing and paving of the filthy streets, the

building of fortifications, of markets, and of churches, and above

all of that glory of Gothic architecture, Nôtre Dame de la Victoire,

founded to celebrate the triumph of Bouvines: such were some of the

works planned or undertaken in the capital during this reign. Over the

young University of Paris the King also stretched out a protecting

hand, defending the students from the hostility of the townsfolk by

the command that they should be admitted to the privileges enjoyed by

priests. For this practical sympathy he and his successors were well

repaid in the growth of an educated public opinion ready to exalt its

patron the crown by tongue and pen.

Philip Augustus died in July 1223. Great among the many great figures

of his day, French chroniclers have yet left no distinct impression of

his personality. It would almost seem as if the will, the foresight,

and the patience that have won him fame in the eyes of posterity, built

up a baffling barrier between his character and those who actually saw

him. Men recognized him as a king to be admired and feared, ‘august’

in his conquests, terrible in his wrath if any dared cross his will,

but his reserve, his indifference to court gaiety, his rigid attitude

of dislike to those who used oaths or blasphemy, they found wholly

unsympathetic and strange. Of the great work he had done for France

they were too close to judge fairly, and would have understood him

better had he been rash and heedless of design like the Lion-Heart.

For a real appreciation of Philip Augustus we must turn to his modern

biographer.

‘He had found France a small realm hedged in by mighty rivals. When

he began his reign but a very small portion of the French-speaking

people owned his sway. As suzerain his power was derided. Even as

immediate lord he was defied and set at nought. But when he died

the whole face of France was changed. The King of the Franks was

undisputedly the king of by far the greater part of the land, and

the internal strength of his government had advanced as rapidly

and as securely as the external power.’

Such was the change in France itself, but we can estimate also to-day,

what no contemporary of Philip Augustus could have realized, the effect

of that change on Europe, when France from a collection of feudal fiefs

stood forth at last a nation in the modern sense, ready to take her

place as a leader amongst her more backward neighbours.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

Louis VII of France 1137-47

Henry II of England 1154-89

Philip II of France 1180-1223

John, King of England 1199-1216

Battle of Bouvines 1214

XIV

EMPIRE AND PAPACY

When the Emperor Henry IV crossed the ice-bound Alps on his journey

of submission to Canossa he was accompanied by a faithful knight,

Frederick of Buren, whom he later rewarded for his loyalty with the

hand of his daughter and the title Duke of Suabia. Frederick’s son was

elected Emperor as Conrad III,[17] the first of the imperial line of

Hohenstaufen that was destined to carry on through several generations

the war between Empire and Papacy.

The Hohenstaufen received their name from a hill on which stood one

of Frederick of Buren’s strongest castles, but they were also called

‘Waiblingen’ after a town in their possession; while the House of

Bavaria, their chief rivals, was called ‘Welf’ after an early ancestor.

The feud of the Waiblingen and the Welfs that convulsed Germany had

no less devastating an effect upon Italy, always exposed to influence

from beyond the Alps, and the names of the rivals, corrupted on Italian

tongues into ‘Ghibellines’ and ‘Guelfs’, became party cries throughout

the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

[Sidenote: The Italian Communes]

In our last chapter we spoke of French ‘communes’, municipalities that

rebelled against their overlords, setting up a government of their own:

the same process of emancipation was at work in North Italy only that

it was able to act with greater rapidity and success for a time on

account of the national tendency towards separation and the vigour of

town life.

‘In France’, says a thirteenth-century Italian, in surprise, ‘only the

townspeople dwell in towns: the knights and noble ladies stay ... on

their own demesnes.’ Certainly the contrast with his native Lombardy

was strong. There each city lived like a fortified kingdom on its

hill-top, or in the midst of wide plains, cut off from its neighbours

by suspicion, by jealousy, by competition. In the narrow streets

noble and knight jostled shoulders perforce with merchants, students,

mountebanks, and beggars. The limits of space dictated that many things

in life must be shared in common, whether religious processions or

plagues, and if street fighting flourished in consequence so also did

class intimacy and a sharpening of wits as well as of swords. Thus

the towns of North Italy, like flowers in a hot-house, bore fruits of

civilization in advance of the world outside, whether in commerce,

painting, or the art of self-government; and visitors from beyond the

Alps stared astonished at merchants’ luxurious palaces that made the

castles of their own princes seem mere barbarian strongholds.

Yet this profitable independence was not won without struggles so

fierce and continuous that they finally endangered the political

freedom in whose interests they had originally been waged. At first the

struggle was with barbarian invaders; and here, as in the case of Rome

and the Popes, it was often the local bishops who, when emperors at

Constantinople ceased to govern except in name, fostered the young life

of the city states and educated their citizens in a rough knowledge of

war and statecraft.

With the dawn of feudalism bishops degenerated into tyrants, and

municipalities began to elect consuls and advisory councils and under

their leadership to rebel against their former benefactors, and to

establish governments independent of their control.

The next danger was from within: cities are swayed more easily than

nations, and too often the ‘communes’ of Lombardy became the prey of

private factions or of more powerful city neighbours. Class warred

against class and city against city; and out of their struggles

arose leagues and counter-leagues, bewildering to follow like the

ever-changing colours of a kaleidoscope.

Into this atmosphere of turmoil the quarrel between Popes and Holy

Roman Emperors, begun by Henry IV and Hildebrand and carried on by

the Hohenstaufen and the inheritors of Hildebrand’s ideals, entered

from the ‘communes’ point of view like a heaven-sent opportunity

for establishing their independence. In the words of a tenth-century

bishop: ‘The Italians always wish to have two masters that they may

keep one in check by the other.’

The cities that followed the Hohenstaufen were labelled ‘Ghibelline’,

those that upheld the Pope ‘Guelf’; and at first, and indeed throughout

the contest where cruelty and treachery were concerned, there was

little to choose between the rivals. Later, however, the fierce

imperialism of Frederick I was to give to the warfare of his opponents,

the Guelfs, a patriotic aspect.

Frederick I, the ‘Barbarossa’ of the Third Crusade, was a Hohenstaufen

on his father’s side, a Welf on his mother’s; and it had been the

hope of those who elected him Emperor that ‘like a corner-stone he

would bind the two together ... that thus with God’s blessing he

might end their ancient quarrel’. At first it appeared this hope

might be realized, for the new Emperor made a friend of his cousin

Henry the Lion who, as Duke of Bavaria and Saxony, was heir of the

Welf ambitions. Frederick also, by his firm and business-like rule,

established what the chroniclers called such ‘unwonted peace’ that ‘men

seemed changed, the world a different one, the very Heaven milder and

softer’.

Unfortunately Frederick, who has been aptly described as an

‘imperialist Hildebrand’, regarded the peace of Germany merely as a

stepping-stone to wider ambitions. Justinian, who had ruled Europe from

Constantinople, was his model, and with the help of lawyers from the

University of Bologna, whom he handsomely rewarded for their services,

he revived all the old imperial claims over North Italy that men had

forgotten or allowed to slip into disuse. The ‘communes’ found that

rights and privileges for which their ancestors had fought and died

were trampled under foot by an imperial official, the _podestà_, sent

as supreme governor to each of the more important towns: taxes were

imposed and exacted to the uttermost coin by his iron hand: complaint

or rebellion were punished by torture and death.

‘Death for freedom is the next best thing to freedom,’ cried the men of

Crema, flaming into wild revolt, while Milan shut her gates against

her _podestà_ in an obstinate three years’ siege. Deliverance was not

yet, and Frederick and his vast army of Germans desolated the plains:

Crema was burned, her starving population turned adrift: the glory of

Milan was reduced to a stone quarry: Pope Alexander III who, feeling

his own independence threatened by imperial demands, had supported the

movement for liberty, was driven from Rome and forced to seek refuge

in France. Everywhere the Ghibellines triumphed, and it was in these

black days in Italy that the Guelfs ceased for a time to be a faction

and became patriots, while the Pope stood before the world the would-be

saviour of his land from a foreign yoke.

Amid the smouldering ruins of Milan the Lombard League sprang into

life: town after town, weary of German oppression and insolence,

offered their allegiance: even Venice, usually selfish in the safe

isolation of her lagoons, proffered ships and money. Milan was rebuilt,

and a new city, called after the patriot Pope ‘Alessandria’, was

founded on a strategic site. _Alessandria degla paglia_, ‘Alessandria

of the straw’, Barbarossa nicknamed it contemptuously, threatening to

burn it like a heap of weeds; but the new walls withstood his best

engines, and plague and the damp cold of winter devastated his armies

encamped around them.

The political horizon was not, indeed, so fair for the Emperor as in

the early days of his reign. Germany seethed with plots in her master’s

absence, and Frederick had good reason to suspect that Henry the Lion

was their chief author, the more that he had sulkily refused to share

in this last Italian campaign. Worst of all was the news that Alexander

III, having negotiated alliances with the Kings of France and England,

had returned to Italy and was busy stirring up any possible seeds of

revolt against Frederick, whom he had excommunicated.

[Sidenote: Battle of Legnano]

In the year 1176, at Legnano, fifteen miles from Milan, the armies

of the League and Empire met in decisive battle, Barbarossa nothing

doubting of his success against mere armed citizens; but the spirit of

the men of Crema survived in the ‘Company of Death’, a bodyguard of

Milanese knights sworn to protect their _carroccio_, or sacred cart,

or else to fall beside it. Upon the _carroccio_ was raised a figure of

Christ with arms outstretched, beneath his feet an altar, while from a

lofty pole hung the banner of St. Ambrose, patron saint of Milan.

When the battle opened the first terrific onslaught of German cavalry

broke the Milanese lines; but the Company of Death, reckless in their

resolve, rallied the waverers and turned defence into attack. In the

ensuing struggle the Emperor was unhorsed, and, as the rumour spread

through the ranks that he had been killed, the Germans broke, and their

retreat became a wild, unreasoning rout that bore their commander back

on its tide, unable to stem the current, scarcely able to save himself.

Such was the battle of Legnano, worthy to be remembered not as an

isolated twelfth-century victory of one set of forces against another,

but as one of the first very definite advances in the great campaign

for liberty that is still the battle of the world. At Venice in the

following year the Hohenstaufen acknowledged his defeat and was

reconciled to the Church; while by the ‘Perpetual Peace of Constance’

signed in 1183 he granted to the communes of North Italy ‘all the royal

rights (regalia) which they had ever had or at the moment enjoyed’.

Such rights--coinage, the election of officials and judges, the power

to raise and control armies, to impose and exact taxes--are the pillars

on which democracy must support her house of freedom. Yet since

‘freedom’ to the mediaeval mind too often implied the right to oppress

some one else or maintain a state of anarchy, too much stress must not

be laid on the immediate gains. North Italy in the coming centuries was

to fall again under foreign rule, her ‘communes’ to abuse and betray

the rights for which the Company of Death had risked their lives: yet,

in spite of this taint of ignorance and treachery, the victory of

Legnano had won for Europe something infinitely precious, the knowledge

that tyrants could be overthrown by the popular will and feudal armies

discomfited by citizen levies.

[Sidenote: Henry ‘the Lion’]

Barbarossa returned to Germany to vent his rage on Henry the Lion,

to whose refusal to accompany him to Italy he considered his defeat

largely due. Strong in the support of the Church, to which he was now

reconciled, he summoned his cousin to appear before an imperial Diet

and make answer to the charge of having confiscated ecclesiastical

lands and revenues for his own use. Henry merely replied to this

mandate by setting fire to Church property in Saxony, and in his

absence the ban of outlawry was passed against him by the Diet. Here

again was the old ‘Waiblingen’ and ‘Welf’ feud bursting into flame,

like a fire that has been but half-suppressed, and cousinship went to

the wall. Henry the Welf was a son-in-law of Henry II of England and

had made allies of Philip Augustus and the King of Denmark: his Duchy

of Bavaria in the south and of Saxony in the north covered a third of

German territory: he had been winning military laurels in a struggle

against the Slavs, while Frederick had been losing Lombardy. Thus he

pitted himself against the Emperor, unmindful that even in Germany the

hands of the political clock were moving forward and feudalism slowly

giving up its dominion.

To the dawning sense of German nationality Barbarossa was something

more than first among his barons, he was a king supported by the

Church, and Bavarians and Saxons came reluctantly to the rebel banner;

while, as the campaign developed, the other princes saw their fellow

vassal beaten and despoiled of his lands and driven into exile without

raising a finger to help him.

Frederick allowed Henry the Lion to keep his Brunswick estates, but

Saxony and Bavaria he divided up amongst minor vassals, in order to

avoid the risk of another powerful rival. Master of Germany not merely

in name but in power, he and his successors could have built up a

strong monarchy, as Philip II and the House of Capet were to do in

France, had not the siren voice of Italy called them to wreck on her

shifting policies.

Hitherto we have spoken chiefly of North Italy; but Frederick I bound

Germany to her southern neighbours by fresh ties when he married his

eldest son Henry in 1187 to Constance, heiress of the Norman kingdom of

Naples and Sicily. By this alliance he hoped to establish a permanent

Hohenstaufen counterpoise in the south to the alliance of the Pope

and the Guelf towns in the north. Triumphant over the wrathful but

helpless Roman See, he felt himself an emperor indeed, and having

crowned his son Henry as ‘Caesar’, in imitation of classic times, he

rode away to the Third Crusade, still lusting after adventure and glory.

The news of his death in Asia Minor[18] swept Germany with sadness and

pride. Like all his house, he had been cruel and hard; but vices like

these seemed to weigh little to the mediaeval mind against the peace

and prosperity enjoyed under his rule. Legends grew about his name,

and the peasants whispered that he had not died but slept beneath the

sandstone rocks, and would awake again when his people were in danger

to be their leader and protector.

Henry VI, who succeeded Frederick in the Empire, succeeded also to

his dreams and the pitfalls that they inspired. One of his earliest

struggles had been the finally successful attempt to secure Sicily

against the claims of Count Tancred, an illegitimate grandson of the

last ruler. Great were the sufferings of the unhappy Sicilians who

had adopted the Norman’s cause; for Henry, having bribed or coerced

the Pope and North Italy into a temporary alliance, exacted a bitter

vengeance. Tancred’s youthful son, blinded and mutilated, was sent with

his mother to an Alpine prison to end his days, while in the dungeons

of Palermo and Apulia torture and starvation brought to his followers

death as a blessed relief from pain.

Queen Constance, who had been powerless to check these atrocities,

turned against her husband in loathing: the Pope excommunicated their

author; but Henry VI laughed contemptuously at both. It was his

threefold ambition: first, to make the imperial crown not elective but

hereditary in the House of Hohenstaufen; next, to tempt the German

princes into accepting this proposition by the incorporation of Naples

and Sicily as a province of the Empire; and thirdly, to rule all his

dominions from his southern kingdom, with the Pope at Rome, as in the

days of Otto the Great, the chief bishop in his empire.

Strong-willed, persistent, resourceful, with the imagination that sees

visions, and the practical brain of a man of business who can realize

them, Henry VI, had he lived longer, might have gained at least a

temporary recognition of his schemes; but in 1197 he died at the age

of thirty-two, leaving a son not yet three years old as the heir of

Hohenstaufen ambitions. Twelve months later died also Queen Constance,

having reversed as much as she could during her short widowhood of her

hated husband’s German policy, and having bequeathed the little King of

Naples to the guardianship of the greatest of mediaeval Popes and the

champion of the Guelfs, Innocent III.

[Sidenote: Pope Innocent III]

At the coronation of Innocent III the officiating priest had used these

words: ‘Take the tiara and know that thou art the father of princes and

kings, the ruler of the world, the Vicar on earth of our Saviour Jesus

Christ.’ To Lothario di Conti this utterance was but the confirmation

of his own beliefs, as unshakable as those of Hildebrand, as wide in

their scope as the imperialism of Frederick Barbarossa or Henry VI.

‘The Lord Jesus Christ,’ he declared, ‘has set up one ruler over all

things as His Universal Vicar, and as all things in Heaven, Earth, and

Hell bow the knee to Christ, so should all obey Christ’s Vicar that

there be one flock and one shepherd.’ Again: ‘Princes have power on

earth, priests have also power in Heaven.’

In illustration of these views he likened the Papacy to the sun, the

Empire to the lesser light of the moon, and recalled how Christ in

the Garden of Gethsemane gave to St. Peter two swords. By these, he

explained, were meant temporal and spiritual power, and emperors who

claimed to exercise the former could only do so by the gracious consent

of St. Peter’s successors, since ‘the Lord gave Peter the rule not only

of the universal Church but also the rule of the whole world’.

Gregory VII had made men wonder in the triumph of Canossa whether such

an ideal of the Papacy could ever be realized; but as if in proof he

had been hunted from Rome and died in exile. It was left to Innocent

III to exhibit the partial fulfilment, at any rate, of all that his

predecessor had dreamed. In character no saintly Bernard of Clairvaux,

but a clear-brained practical statesman, he set before himself the

vision of a kingdom of God on earth after the pattern of earthly

kingdoms; and to this end, that he sincerely believed carried with it

the blessing of God for the perfecting of mankind, he used every weapon

in his armoury.

Sometimes his ambitions failed, as when, in a real glow of enthusiasm,

he preached the Fourth Crusade--an expedition that ended in Venice,

who had promised the necessary ships, diverting the crusaders to storm

her a coveted port on the Dalmatian coast, and afterwards to sack and

burn Constantinople in the mingled interests of commerce and pillage.

His anger at the news that the remonstrances of his legates had been

ignored could hardly at first be extinguished. Not thus had been his

plan of winning Eastern Christendom to the Catholic Faith and of

destroying the infidel; for the Latin Empire of Constantinople, set

up by the victorious crusaders, was obviously too weak to maintain

for long its tyranny over hostile Greeks, or to serve as an effective

barrier against the Turks. Statesmanship, however, prompted him to reap

what immediate harvest he could from the blunders of his faithless

sons; and he accepted the submission of the Church in Constantinople as

a debt long owing to the Holy See.

The Fourth Crusade, in spite of the extension of Rome’s ecclesiastical

influence, must be reckoned as one of Innocent’s failures. In the

West, on the other hand, the atmosphere created by his personality

and statecraft made the name of ‘The Lord Innocent’ one of weight and

fear to his enemies, of rejoicing to his friends. When upholding Queen

Ingeborg he had stood as a moral force, bending Philip Augustus to his

will by his convinced determination; and this same tenacity of belief

and purpose, added to the purity of his personal life and the charm of

his manner, won him the affection of the Roman populace, usually so

hostile to its Vicars.

Mediaeval popes were, as a rule, respected less in Italy than beyond

the Alps, and least of all in their own capital, where too many

spiritual gifts had been seen debased for material ends, and papal acts

were often at variance with pious professions. During the pontificate

of Innocent III, however, we find the ‘Prefect’, the imperial

representative at Rome, accept investiture at his hands, the ‘Senator’,

chief magistrate of the municipality, do him homage; and through this

double influence his control became paramount over the city government.

In Naples and Sicily he was able to continue the policy of Constance,

drive out rebellious German barons, struggle against the Saracens

in Sicily, and develop the education of his ward, the young King of

Naples, as the spiritual son who should one day do battle for his

ideals. ‘God has not spared the rod,’ he wrote to Frederick II. ‘He

has taken away your father and mother: yet he has given you a worthier

father, His Vicar; and a better mother, the Church.’

In Lombardy, where the Guelfs naturally turned to him as their

champion, the papal way was comparatively smooth, for the cruelty of

Barbarossa and his son Henry VI had aroused hatred and suspicion on all

sides. Thus Innocent found himself more nearly the master of Italy than

any Pope before his time, and from Italy his patronage and alliances

extended like a web all over Europe.

Philip Augustus of France, trying to ignore and defy him, found

in the end the anger he aroused worth placating: John of England

changed his petulant defiance into submission and an oath of homage:

Portugal accepted him as her suzerain: rival kings of Hungary sought

his arbitration: even distant Armenia sent ambassadors to ask his

protection. His most impressive triumph, however, was secured in his

dealings with the Empire.

Henry VI had wished, we have seen, to make the imperial crown

hereditary; but no German prince would have been willing to accept

the child he left as heir to his troubled fortunes. The choice of the

electors therefore wavered between another Hohenstaufen, Philip of

Suabia, brother of the late Emperor, and the Welf Otto, son of Henry

the Lion. The votes were divided, and each claimant afterwards declared

himself the legally elected emperor, one with the title Philip II, the

other with that of Otto IV.

For ten long years Germany was devastated by their civil wars. Otto,

as the Guelf representative, gained the support of Innocent the Great,

to whom the claimants at one time appealed for arbitration; but Philip

refused to submit to this judgement in favour of his rival, believing

that he himself had behind him the majority of the German princes and

of the official class.

‘Inasmuch,’ declared Innocent, ‘as our dearest son in Christ, Otto,

is industrious, prudent, discreet, strong and constant, himself

devoted to the Church ... we by the authority of St. Peter receive

him as King and will in due course bestow on him the imperial

crown.’

Here was papal triumph! Rome no longer patronized but patron, with

Otto on his knees, gratefully promising submission and homage with

every kind of ecclesiastical privilege, to complete the picture.

Yet circumstances change traditions as well as people, and when the

death of Philip of Suabia left him master of Germany, the Guelf Otto

found his old ideals impracticable: he became a Ghibelline in policy,

announced his imperial rights over Lombardy, even over some of the

towns belonging to the Pope, while he loudly announced his intention of

driving the young Hohenstaufen from Naples.

Innocent’s wrath at this _volte-face_ was unbounded. Otto, no longer

his ‘dearest son in Christ’, was now a perjurer and schismatic, whose

excommunication and deposition were the immediate duty of Rome.

Neither, however, was likely to be effective unless the Pope could

provide Italy and Germany with a rival, whose dazzling claims, backed

by papal support, would win him followers wherever he went. In this

crisis Innocent found his champion in the Hohenstaufen prince denounced

by Otto, a lad educated almost since infancy in the tenets and

ambitions of the Catholic Church.

[Sidenote: Frederick II]

Frederick, King of Naples and Sicily, was an interesting development

of hereditary tastes and the atmosphere in which he had been reared.

To the southern blood that leaped in his veins he owed perhaps his

hot passions, his sensuous appreciation of luxury and art, his almost

Saracen contempt for women save as toys to amuse his leisure hours.

From the Hohenstaufen he imbibed strength, ambition, and cruelty,

from the Norman strain on his mother’s side his reckless daring

and treachery. With the ordinary education of a prince of his day,

Frederick’s qualities and vices might have merely produced a warrior

king of rather exceptional ability; but thanks to the papal tutors

provided by Innocent, the boy’s naturally quick brain and imagination

were stirred by a course of studies far superior to what his lay

contemporaries usually enjoyed, and he emerged in manhood with a real

love of books and culture, and with an eager curiosity on such subjects

as philosophy and natural history.

In the royal charter by which he founded the University of Naples

Frederick expressed his intention that here ‘those within the Kingdom

who had hunger for knowledge might find the food for which they were

yearning’; and his court at Palermo, if from one aspect dissolute and

luxurious, was also a centre for men of wit and knowledge against whose

brains the King loved to test his own quips and theories.

When Frederick reached Rome, on Innocent’s hasty summons to unsheath

the sword of the Hohenstaufen against Otto, much of his character

was as yet a closed book even to himself. Impulsive and eager, like

any ambitious youth of seventeen called to high adventure, and with

a genuine respect for his guardian, he did not look far ahead; but

kneeling at the Pope’s feet, pledged his homage and faith before he

rode away northwards to win an empire. In Germany a considerable

following awaited him, lifelong opponents of Otto on account of his

Welf blood, and others who hated him for his churlish manners. Amongst

them Frederick scattered lavishly some money he had borrowed from the

Republic of Genoa, and this generosity, combined with his Hohenstaufen

strength and daring, increased the happy reputation that papal legates

had already established for him in many quarters.

In December 1212 he was crowned in Mainz. Civil war followed,

embittered by papal and imperial leagues, but in 1214 Otto IV was

decisively beaten at Bouvines in the struggle with Philip II of France

that we have already described,[19] and the tide which had been

previously turning against him now swept away his few friends and last

hopes. With the entry of his young rival into the Rhineland provinces

the dual Empire ceased to exist, and Frederick was crowned in Aachen,

the old capital of Charlemagne.

Innocent III had now reached the summit of his power, for his pupil

and protégé sat on the throne of Rome’s imperial rival. In the same

year he called a Council to the Lateran Palace, the fourth gathering

of its kind, to consider the two objects dearest to his heart, ‘the

deliverance of the Holy Land and the reform of the Church Universal’.

Crusading zeal, however, he could not rouse again: to cleanse and

spiritualize the life of the Church in the thirteenth century was

to prove a task beyond men of finer fibre than Innocent: but, as an

illustration of his immense influence over Europe, the Fourth Lateran

Council with its dense submissive crowds, representative of every land

and class, was a fitting end to his pontificate.

In the year 1216 Innocent III died--the most powerful of all Popes,

a striking personality whose life by kindly fate did not outlast his

glory. In estimating Innocent’s ability as a statesman there stands

one blot against his record in the clear light shed by after-events,

namely, the short-sighted policy that once again united the Kingdom of

Naples to the Empire, and laid the Papacy between the upper millstone

of Lombardy and the nether millstone of southern Italy. Excuse may

be found in Innocent’s desperate need of a champion with Otto IV

threatening his papal heritage, added to his belief in the promises of

the young Hohenstaufen to remain his faithful vassal. He also tried

to safeguard the future by making Frederick publicly declare that he

would bequeath Naples to a son who would not stand for election to the

Empire; but in trusting the word of the young Emperor he had sown a

wind from which his successors were to reap a whirlwind.

The new Emperor was just twenty years old when Innocent died. Either

to please his guardian, or moved by a momentary religious impulse, he

had taken the Cross immediately after his entry into Aachen; but the

years passed and he showed himself in no haste to fulfil the vow. Much

of his time was spent in his loved southern kingdom, where he completed

Innocent’s work of reducing to submission the Saracen population that

had remained in Sicily since the Mahometan conquest.[20] As infidels

the Papacy had regarded these Arabs with special hatred; but Frederick,

once assured that they were so weak that they would be in future

dependent on his favour, began protecting instead of persecuting them.

He also encouraged their silk industry by building them a town, Lucera,

on the Neapolitan coast, where they could pursue it undisturbed; while

he enrolled large numbers of Arab warriors in his army, and used them

to enforce his will on the feudal aristocracy, descendants of the

Norman adventurers of the eleventh century.

So successful was he in playing off one section of his subjects against

another, opposing or aiding the different classes as policy dictated,

that he soon reigned as an autocrat in Naples. Many of the nobles’

strongholds were levelled with the dust: their claim to wage private

war was forbidden on pain of death: cases were taken away from their

law-courts and those of the feudal bishops to be decided by royal

justices: towns were deprived of their freedom to elect their own

magistrates, while crown officials sent from Palermo administered the

laws, and imposed and collected taxes.

On the whole these changes were beneficial, for private privileges had

been greatly abused in Naples, and Frederick, like Philip Augustus or

the Angevin Henry II, had the instinct and ability to govern well when

he chose. Nevertheless the subjugation of ‘the Kingdom’, as Naples was

usually called in Italy, was of course received with loud outcries of

anger by Neapolitan barons and churchmen, who hastened to inform the

Holy See that their ruler loved infidels better than Christians and

kept an eastern harem at Palermo.

Honorius III, the new Pope, accepted such reports and scandals with

dismay. He had himself noted uneasily Frederick’s absorption in Italian

affairs and frequently reminded him of his crusading vow. Being gentle

and slow to commit himself to any decided step however, it was not till

the Hohenstaufen deliberately broke his promise to Innocent III, and

had his eldest son Henry crowned King of the Romans as well as King of

Naples, thus acknowledging him as his heir in both Germany and Italy,

that Honorius’s wrath flamed into a threat of excommunication. For a

time it spread no farther, since Frederick was lavish in explanations

and in promises of friendship that he had no intention of fulfilling,

while the old Pope chose to believe him rather than risk an actual

conflagration. At last, however, the patient Honorius died.

Gregory IX, the new Pope, was of the family of Innocent, and

shared to the full his views of the world-wide supremacy of the

Church. An old man of austere life and feverish energy, he regarded

Frederick as a monster of ingratitude and became almost hysterical

and quite unreasonable in his efforts to humble him. Goaded by his

constant reproaches and threats, the Emperor began to make leisurely

preparations at Brindisi for his crusade; but when he at last started,

an epidemic of fever, to which he himself fell a victim, forced him

to put back to port. Gregory, refusing to believe in this illness as

anything more than an excuse for delay, at once excommunicated him;

and then, though Frederick set sail as soon as he was well enough,

repeated the ban, giving as his reason that the Emperor had not waited

to receive his pardon for the first offence like an obedient son of the

Church.

A crusader excommunicated by the Head of Christendom first for not

fulfilling his vow and then for fulfilling it! This was a degrading

and ridiculous sight; and Frederick, now definitely hostile to Rome,

continued on his way, determined with obstinate pride that, if not for

the Catholic Faith, then for his own glory, he would carry out his

purpose. The Templars refused him support: the Christians still left

in the neighbourhood of Acre helped him half-heartedly or stood aloof,

frightened by the warnings of their priests; but Frederick achieved

more without the Pope’s aid than other crusaders had done of late

years with his blessing. By force of arms, and still more by skilful

negotiations, he obtained from the Sultan possession of Jerusalem, and

entering in triumph placed on his head the crown of the Latin kings.

His vow fulfilled, he sailed for Sicily, and the Pope, whose troops in

Frederick’s absence had been harrying ‘the Kingdom’, hastily patched

up a peace at San Germano. ‘I will remember the past no more,’ cried

Frederick, but anger burned within him at papal hostility. ‘The Emperor

has come to me with the zeal of a devoted son,’ said Gregory, but there

was no trust in his heart that corresponded to his words.

A Hohenstaufen, who had taken Jerusalem unaided, supreme in Naples,

supreme also in Germany, stretching out his imperial sceptre over

Lombardy! What Pope, who believed that the future of the Church rested

on the temporal independence of Rome, could sleep tranquilly in his bed

with such a vision?

It is not possible to describe here in any detail the renewed war

between Empire and Papacy that followed the inevitable breakdown of

the treaty of San Germano. Very bitter was the spirit in which it was

waged on both sides. Frederick, whatever his intentions, could not

forget that it was the Father of Christendom who had tried to ruin his

crusade. The remembrance did not so much shake his faith as wake in

him an exasperated sense of injustice that rendered him deaf to those

who counselled compromise. Unable to rid himself wholly of the fear of

papal censure, he yet saw clearly enough that the sin for which Popes

relentlessly pursued him was not his cruelty, nor profligacy, nor even

his toleration of Saracens, but the fact that he was King of Naples as

well as Holy Roman Emperor.

To a man of Frederick’s haughty temperament there was but one

absolution he could win for this crime, so to master Rome that he could

squeeze her judgements to his fancy like a sponge between his strong

fingers. ‘Italy is my heritage,’ he wrote to the Pope, ‘and all the

world knows it.’

In his passionate determination to obtain this heritage statesmanship

was thrown to the winds. He had planned a strong monarchy in Naples,

but in Germany he undermined the foundations of royal authority that

Barbarossa and Henry VI had begun to lay. ‘Let every Prince’, he

declared, ‘enjoy in peace, according to the improved custom of his

land, his immunities, jurisdictions, counties and hundreds, both those

which belong to him in full right, and those which have been granted

out to him in fief.’

The Italian Hohenstaufen only sought from his northern kingdom, whose

good government he thus carelessly sacrificed to feudal anarchy,

sufficient money to pay for his campaigns beyond the Alps and leisure

to pursue them. In the words of a modern historian, ‘he bartered his

German kingship for an immediate triumph over his hated foe.’

At first victory rewarded his energy and skill. His hereditary enemy,

the ‘Lombard League’, had tampered with the loyalty of his eldest

son, Henry, King of the Romans, whom he had left to rule in Germany:

but Frederick discovered the plot in time and deposed and imprisoned

the culprit. In despair at the prospect of lifelong imprisonment held

out to him, the young Henry flung himself to his death down a steep

mountain-side; and Conrad, his younger brother, a boy of eight, was

crowned in his stead.

In North Italy Frederick pursued the policy not so much of trampling

down resistance with his German levies, like his grandfather

Barbarossa, as of employing Italian nobles of the Ghibelline party,

whom he supported and financed that they might fight his battles and

make his wrath terrible in the popular hearing. Such were Eccelin de

Romano and his brother Alberigo, lords of Verona and Vicenza, whose

tyranny and cruelties seemed abnormal even in their day.

‘The Devil’s own Servant’ Eccelin is called by a contemporary, who

describes how he slaughtered in cold blood eleven thousand prisoners.

‘I believe, in truth, no such wicked man has been from the

beginning of the world unto our own days: for all men trembled at

him as a rush quivers in the water ... he who lived to-day was not

sure of the morrow, the father would seek out and slay his son, and

the son his father or any of his kinsfolk to please this man.’

Alberigo ‘hanged twenty-five of the greatest men of Treviso who had

in no wise offended or harmed him’; and as the prisoners struggled in

their death agonies he thrust among their feet their wives, daughters,

and sisters, whom he afterwards turned adrift half-naked to seek

protection where they might.

Revenge when this ‘Limb of Satan’ fell into the hands of his enemies

was of a brutality to match; for Alberigo and his young sons were torn

in pieces by an infuriated mob, his wife and daughters burned alive,

‘though they were noble maidens and the fairest in the world and

guiltless.’

Passions ran too deep between Guelf and Ghibelline to distinguish

innocency, or to spare youth or sex. Cruelty, the most despicable and

infectious of vices, was the very atmosphere of the thirteenth century,

desecrating what has been described from another aspect as ‘an age of

high ideals and heroic lives’.

It is remarked with some surprise by contemporaries that Frederick II

could pardon a joke at his own expense; but on the other hand we read

of his cutting off the thumb of a notary who had misspelt his name,

and callously ordering one of his servants, by way of amusement, to

dive and dive again into the sea after a golden cup, until from sheer

exhaustion he reappeared no more.

At Cortenuova the Lombard League was decisively beaten by the imperial

forces, the _carroccio_ of Milan seized and burned. Frederick, flushed

with success, now declared that not only North but also Middle Italy

was subject to his allegiance, and replied to a new excommunication by

advancing into Romagna and besieging some of the papal towns. Gregory,

worn out by grief and fury, died as his enemy approached the gates of

Rome: and his immediate successor, unnerved by excitement, followed him

to the grave before the cardinals who had elected him could proceed to

his consecration.

Innocent IV, who now ascended the papal throne, had of old shown some

sympathy to the imperial cause; but Frederick, when he heard of his

election, is reported to have said, ‘I have lost a friend, for no Pope

can be a Ghibelline.’ With the example of Otto IV in his mind he should

have added that no Emperor could remain a Guelf.

Frederick had indeed gained an inveterate enemy, more dangerous than

Gregory IX, because more politic and discreet. From Lyons, whither

he had fled, Innocent IV maintained unflinchingly the claims he

could no longer set forth in Rome, declaring the victorious Emperor

excommunicate and deposed. ‘Has the Pope deposed me?’ asked Frederick

scornfully, when the news came. ‘Bring me my crowns that I may see what

he has taken away!’

One after another he placed on his head the seven crowns his attendants

brought him, the royal crown of Germany and imperial diadem of Rome,

the iron circlet of Lombardy, the crowns of Jerusalem, of Burgundy, of

Sardinia, and of Sicily and Naples. ‘See!’ he said, ‘Are they not all

mine still? and none shall take them from me without a struggle.’

So the hideous war between Welf and Waiblingen, between Guelf and

Ghibelline continued, and Germany and Italy were deluged with blood and

flames. ‘After the Emperor Frederick was put under the ban,’ says a

German chronicler, ‘the robbers rejoiced over the spoils. Then were the

ploughshares beaten into swords and reaping-hooks into lances. No one

went anywhere without flint and steel to set on fire whatever he could

kindle.’

The ebb from the high-water mark of the Emperor’s fortunes was marked

by the revolt and successful resistance of the Guelf city of Parma to

the imperial forces--a defeat Frederick might have wiped out in fresh

victory had not his own health begun to fail. In 1250 he died, still

excommunicate, snatched away to hell, according to his enemies, not

dead, according to many who from love or hate believed his personality

of more than human endurance.

Yet Frederick, whether for good or ill, had perished, and with him his

imperial ambitions. Popes might tremble at other nightmares, but the

supremacy of the Holy Roman Empire over Italy would no more haunt their

dreams for many years. Naples also, to whose conquest and government

he had devoted the best of his brain and judgement, was torn from

his heirs and presented by his papal enemy to the French House of

Anjou. Struggling against these usurpers the last of the royal line of

Hohenstaufen, Conradin, son of Conrad, a lad of fifteen, gallant and

reckless as his grandfather, was captured in battle and beheaded.

Frederick had destroyed in Germany and built on sand elsewhere; and

of all his conquests and achievements only their memory was to dazzle

after-generations. _Stupor et Gloria Mundi_ he was called by those who

knew him, and in spite of his ultimate failure and his vices he still

remains a ‘wonder of the world’, set above enemies and friends by his

personality, the glory of his courage, his audacity, and his strength

of purpose.

_Supplementary Dates. For Chronological Summary, see pp. 368-73._

Pope Alexander III 1159-81

Emperor Philip II 1197-1208

Emperor Otto IV 1197-1215

Fourth Lateran Council 1215

The Sixth Crusade 1228-9

Battle of Cortenuova 1237

Death of Conradin 1268

XV

LEARNING AND ECCLESIASTICAL ORGANIZATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The word ‘progress’ implies to modern men and women a moving forward

towards a perfection as yet unknown, freshly imagined indeed by each

generation: to the Middle Ages it meant rather a peering back through

the mist of barbarian invasions to an idealized Christian Rome.

Inspiration lay in the past, not merely in such political conceptions

as the Holy Roman Empire, but in the domain of art and thought, where

too often tradition laid her choking grip upon originality struggling

for expression.

The painting of the early Middle Ages was stereotyped in the stiff

though beautiful models of Byzantium, that ‘Fathers of the Church’

had insisted, by means of decrees passed at Church councils, should

be considered as fitting representations of Christian subjects for

all time. Less impressive but more lifelike were the illuminations of

missals and holy books, that, in illustrating the Gospels or lives of

the Saints, reproduced the artist’s own surroundings--the noble he

could see from the window of his cell ride by with hawk or hounds, the

labourer sowing or delving, the merchant with his money-bags, the man

of fashion trailing his furred gown.

Vignettes such as these, with their neat craftsmanship of line and

colour, their almost photographic love of detail, lend a reality to

our glimpses of life in Europe from the twelfth to the fourteenth

centuries; yet great as is the debt we owe them, the real art of the

Middle Ages was not consummated with the brush but with the builder’s

tools and sculptor’s chisel.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Architecture]

Like the painter’s, the architect’s impulse was at first almost

entirely religious, though guild-halls and universities followed on

the erection of churches and monasteries. Nourished on St. Augustine’s

belief in this life as a mere transitory journey towards the eternal

‘City of God’, mediaeval men and women saw this pilgrimage encompassed

with a vast army of devils and saints, ranged in constant battle for

the human soul. Only through faith and the kindly assistance of the

Saints could man hope to beat off the legions of hell which hung like a

pack of wolves about his footsteps, and nowhere with greater efficacy

than in the sanctuary from which human prayer arose daily to God’s

throne.

Churches and chapels in modern times have become the property of a

section of the public--that is, of those who think or believe in a

certain way; and sometimes through poverty of purse or spirit, through

bad workmanship or material, the architecture that results is shoddy

or insignificant. In the Middle Ages his parish church was the most

certain fact in every Christian’s existence, from the day he was

carried to the font for baptism until his last journey to rest beneath

its shadow. Here he would make his confessions, his vows of repentance

and amendment, and offer his worship and thanksgiving: here he would

often find a fortified refuge from violence in the street outside, a

school, a granary, a parish council-chamber.

What more natural than that mediaeval artists, their souls attune with

the hopes and fears of their age, should realize their genius best in

constructing and ornamenting buildings that were to all citizens alike

the symbol of their belief? ‘Let us build,’ said the people of Siena in

the thirteenth century, ‘such a church to the glory of God that all men

shall wonder!’

The cathedral, when completed, was but a third in size and grandeur

of the original design, for the Black Death fell upon Siena and

carried off her builders in the midst of their work; yet it remains

magnificently arresting to modern eyes, as though the faith of those

who planned and fashioned its slabs of black and white marble for

the love of God and their city had breathed into their workmanship

something of the mediaeval soul.

The same is true of ‘Nôtre Dame de la Victoire’ in Paris, founded by

Philip Augustus, of which Victor Hugo says ‘each face, each stone, is

a page of history’. It is true of nearly all mediaeval churches that

have outlived the ravages of war and fire, memorials of an age, that if

it lagged behind our own in ultimate achievement, was pre-eminent in

one art at least--ecclesiastical architecture.

Where the architect stopped the mediaeval sculptor took up his work,

at first with simple severity but later in a riot of imagination that

peopled façades, vaulted roofs, and capitals of columns with the

angels, demons, and hybrid monsters that haunted the fancy of the

day. The flying buttress, the invention of which made possible lofty

clerestories with vast expanses of window, brought to perfection

another art, the painting of glass. Here also the mediaeval artist

excelled, and the crucibles in which he mixed the colours that hold

us wrapt before the windows of Leon, Albi, and Chartres, still keep

unsolved the secret of their transparent delicacy and depth.

[Sidenote: Learning and Church Organization]

In the architecture, the sculpture, and in the stained glass of the

Middle Ages we see original genius at work, but in learning and culture

Europe was slower to throw off the giant influence of Rome. Even

under the crushing inroads of barbarian ignorance Italy had managed

to keep alive the study of classical authors and of Roman law. Latin

remained the language of the educated man or woman, the language in

which the services of the Church were recited, sermons were preached,

correspondence carried on, business transacted, and students in

universities and schools addressed by their professors.

The advantages of a common tongue can be imagined: the comparative

ease with which a pope or king could keep in touch with bishops or

subjects of a different race; the accessibility of the best books to

students of all nations, since scarcely a mediaeval author of repute

would condescend to employ his own tongue: above all perhaps the ease

with which an ambassador, a merchant, or a pilgrim could make himself

understood on a journey across Europe, instead of torturing his brain

with struggles after the right word in first one foreign dialect and

then another.

This classical form, so rigidly withholding knowledge from the grasp

of the ignorant, had also its disadvantage; for many a mediaeval

pen, that could have flown across the vellum in joyful intimacy in

its owner’s tongue, stumbled clumsily amidst Latin constructions,

leaving in the end not a spontaneous record of current events, but a

‘dry-as-dust’ catalogue, in bad imitation of some Latin stylist. The

modern world is more grateful to mediaeval culture for such lapses as

Dante’s _Divina Commedia_ than for all the heavy Latin tomes, whose

authors hoped for laurelled immortality.

For those in England and France who could not easily master Latin or

found its stately periods too cumbrous for ordinary conversation,

French, descended from the spoken Latin of the Roman soldier or

merchant in Gaul, was in the Middle Ages, as to-day, the language of

polite society. It possessed two distinct dialects, the ‘langue d’œil’

and the ‘langue d’oc’, so called because the northern Frenchman,

including the Norman, was supposed to pronounce _oui_ as _œil_, while

his southern fellow countryman pronounced it as _oc_.

England, where, ever since the Conquest of William I, French had been

the natural tongue of a semi-foreign court, owed an enormous literary

impulse to the ‘langue d’œil’ during the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries; while the ‘langue d’oc’ that gave its name to a district in

the south of France shared its poetry and romance between Provençals

and Catalans. The descendants of the former are to-day French, of the

latter Spanish: but in the eleventh century they were fellow subjects

of the Counts of Toulouse, who ruled over a district stretching from

the source of the Rhone to the Mediterranean, from the Italian Alps to

the Ebro.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Culture]

In this semi-independent kingdom there developed a civilization and

culture of hot-house growth, precocious in its appreciation of the

less violent pleasures of life, such as love, art, music, literature,

but often corrupt in their enjoyment. The gay court of Toulouse paid

no heed to St. Augustine’s hell, whose fears haunted the rest of

Europe in its more thoughtful moments. Joyous and inconsequent, it

lived for the passing hour, and out of its atmosphere of dalliance

and culture was born a race of poet-singers. These troubadours

(_trouvers_ = discoverers) sang of love, whose silken fetters could

hold in thrall knights and fair ladies; and their golden lyrics, now

plaintive, now gay, were carried to the crowded cities of Italy and

Spain, or found schools of imitators elsewhere, as in Germany amongst

her thirteenth-century _minnesingers_ (love-singers). In the north of

France and in England appeared minstrels also, but their themes were

less of love than of battle; and audiences revelled by castle and

camp-fire in the ‘gestes’ or ‘deeds’ of Charlemagne and his Paladins,

the chivalry of Arthur and his Knights, or in stirring Border ballads

such as Chevy Chase.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Universities]

The market-place, the camp, and the baronial hall, where were sung or

recited these often imaginary stories of the past, were the schools of

the many unlettered; just as the conversation of Arabs and Jews around

the desert fires had stimulated the imagination of the young Mahomet;

but for the few who could afford a sounder education there were the

universities--Paris, Bologna, Oxford, to name but three of the most

famous.

The word _universitas_ implied in the Middle Ages a union of men;

such a corporation as the ‘guilds’ formed by fishmongers and drapers

to protect their trade interests; and the universities had indeed

originated for a similar purpose. Cities to-day that have universities

in their midst are proud of the fact, and welcome new students; but in

early mediaeval times an influx of young men of all ages from every

part of Europe, many of them wild and unruly, some so poor that they

must beg or steal their daily bread, was at first sight a very doubtful

blessing. Street fights between nationalities who hated one another on

principle, or between bands of students and citizens, were a common

occurrence in the towns that learning honoured with her presence, and

had their usual accompaniment of broken heads, fires, and looting. But

for the _universitas_ formed by masters and students to control and

protect their members, these centres of education would probably have

been stamped out by indignant tradesmen: as it was they had to fight

for their existence.

Municipalities looked with no lenient eye upon a corporation that

seemed to them a ‘state within a state’, threatening their own right

to govern all within the city. It was not until after many generations

that they understood the meaning of the word co-operation, that is,

the possibility of assisting instead of hindering the work of the

_universitas_. Sometimes a king like Philip Augustus insisted on

toleration by granting to his students the ‘privilege of clergy’, but

as the University grew it became able to enforce its own lessons. In

the thirteenth century the Masters of Paris closed their lecture-halls

and led away their flock, in protest for what they considered unfair

treatment by the city authorities during a riot, and their absence

taught Parisians that, in spite of head-breakings, the students were an

asset, not a loss, to municipal life. Under the protection therefore of

a papal ‘bull’, they returned a few weeks later in triumph to the Latin

Quarter.

It was only by degrees that colleges where the students could live

were erected, or that anything resembling the elaborate organization

of a modern university was evolved. Students lodged where they could,

and ‘masters’ lived on the goodwill of those who paid their fees, and

starved if their popularity waned and with it their audience. The life

of both teacher and pupil was vague and hazardous, with a background

of poverty and crime lurking at the street corners to ruin the unwary

or foolish. Nor was the period of study a mere ‘passing sojourn’ like

some modern ‘terms’: the Bachelor of Arts at Oxford or Paris must be

a student of five years’ standing, the Master of Arts calculated on

devoting three years more to gaining his final degree, a Doctor of

Theology would be faced with eight years’ hard work at least. It might

almost be said that higher education under these circumstances became a

profession.

To Bologna, the greatest of Italian universities, went those who

wished to study Roman law at the fountain-head. This does not mean to

stir up the legal dust of a dead empire out of a student’s curiosity,

but to master a living system of law that barbarian invaders had

gradually grafted on to their own national codes. In the eleventh

century the laws of Justinian[21] were as much or more revered than

in his own day. We have seen that Frederick Barbarossa set the lawyers

of Bologna to work to justify from old legal documents the claims he

wished to establish over Lombardy; and when they had succeeded to his

satisfaction he rewarded them with gifts and knighthood, showing what

value he put on their achievement. This is a very good example of the

respect felt by mediaeval minds for the laws and title-deeds of an

earlier age, even though the tyranny that resulted led the ‘Lombard

League’ to dispute such claims.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Papal Government]

Still more closely allied than the civil codes of Europe to the old

Roman legal texts was the ‘Canon’ law of the Church that had been

directly based upon classic models; and with the rise of Hildebrand’s

world-wide ambitions its decisions assumed a growing importance and

demanded an enormous army of trained lawyers to interpret and arrange

them. For youths of a practical and ambitious turn of mind here was a

course of study leading to a profession profitable in all ages; and

a text-book was provided for such budding lawyers in the _decretum_

of Gratian, a monk who in the twelfth century compiled a full and

authoritative text of Canon law.

The existence of the Ecclesiastical Courts, in which Canon law was

administered, we have already mentioned in discussing the quarrel of

Henry II of England and Thomas Becket.[22] Founded originally to deal

with purely ecclesiastical cases and officials, they tended in time to

draw within their competence any one over whom the Church could claim

protection and any causes that affected the rites of the Catholic

Church. It was a wide net with a very small mesh, as the Angevin Henry

II and other lay rulers of Europe found. The protection that spread

its wings over priests and clerks stretched also to crusaders, widows,

and orphans: the jurisdiction of the Church Courts claimed not merely

moral questions such as heresy, sacrilege, and perjury, but all matters

connected with probate of wills, marriage and divorce, and even libel.

Rome became a hive of ecclesiastical lawyers, with the Pope, like the

Roman emperors of old, the supreme law-giver and final court of appeal

for all Church Courts of Europe. His rule was absolute, at least in

theory, for by his power of ‘dispensation’ he could set aside, if he

considered advisable, the very Canon law his officials administered. He

could also summon to his _curia_, or papal court, any case on which he

wished to pronounce judgement, at whatever stage in its litigation in

an inferior ecclesiastical court.

Under the Pope in an ordered hierarchy, corresponding to the feudal

arrangement of lay society, came the metropolitans, who received from

his hand or from those of his legates the narrow woollen scarf, or

_pallium_, that was the symbol of their authority. Next in order came

the diocesan bishops with their ‘officials’, the archdeacons and rural

deans, each with their own court and measure of jurisdiction.

The Pope’s will went forth to Christendom in the form of letters called

‘bulls’, from the _bulla_ or heavy seal that was attached to them.

Against those who paid no heed to their contents he could hurl either

the weapon of excommunication--that is, of personal outlawry from the

Church--or else, if the offender were a king or a city, the still more

blasting ‘interdict’ that fell on ruler and ruled alike. The land that

groaned under an interdict was bereft of all spiritual comfort: no

priest might say public Mass, baptize a new-born child, perform the

marriage service, console the dying with ‘supreme unction’, or bury the

dead. The very church bells would ring no more.

It was under this pressure of spiritual starvation, when the Saints

seemed to have withdrawn their sheltering arms and the demons to have

gathered joyfully to a harvest of lost souls, that John of England

was brought by the curses of his people to turn to Rome in repentance

and submission. Yet, as in the case of most weapons, familiarity

bred contempt, and too frequent use of powers of ‘interdict’ and

‘excommunication’ was to blunt their efficacy--a Frederick II, the

oft-excommunicated, proved able to conquer Jerusalem and dominate Italy

even under the papal ban.

The Church, in her claims to world empire, demanded in truth an

obedience it was beyond her ability to enforce. She also laid herself

open to temptations to which from the nature of her temporal

ambitions she must inevitably succumb. No such elaborate and expensive

administration as emanated from her _curia_ could continue without

an inexhaustible flow of money into her treasury. Lawyers, priests,

legates, cardinals, the Pope himself, had each to be maintained in a

state befitting their office in the eyes of a world, as ready in the

thirteenth century as in the twentieth to judge by appearances and

offer its homage accordingly.

In addition to the ordinary expenses of a ruler, whose court was a

centre of religious and intellectual life for Europe, there was the

constant burden of war, first with neighbouring Italian rulers and

then with the Empire. Innocent IV triumphed over the Hohenstaufen; but

largely by dipping his hands into English money-bags, to such an extent

indeed during the reign of John’s son, Henry III, that England gained

the scoffing name of the ‘milch cow of the Papacy’.

At first, when the ecclesiastical courts had offered to criminals a

justice at once more humane and comprehensive than the rough-and-ready

tyranny of a king or feudal lord, the upholders of the rights of Canon

law were regarded as popular heroes. Later, however, with the growth of

national feeling and the development and better administration of the

civil codes, men and women began to falter in their allegiance. Canon

law was found to be both expensive and tardy, especially in the case of

‘appeals’, that is, of cases, called from some inferior court to Rome.

The key also to the judgements given at Rome was often too obviously

gold and of heavy weight.

[Sidenote: Papal Exactions]

Nor was justice alone to be bought or sold. A large part of the money

that filled the Roman treasury was derived from benefices and livings

in different countries of Europe that had by one means or another

accumulated in papal hands. The constant pressure of the wars with

emperors and Italian Ghibellines made it necessary for the Popes

to administer this patronage as profitably as possible; and so the

spiritual needs of dioceses and parishes became sacrificed to the

military calls on the Roman treasury.

Sometimes it was not a living itself for which a clerical candidate

paid heavily, but merely the promise of ‘preferment’ to the next

vacancy; or he would pledge himself in the case of nomination to send

his ‘firstfruits’, that is, his first year’s revenue, to Rome. Those

who could afford the requisite sum might be natives of the country in

which the vacant bishopric or living occurred; often they were not,

and the successful nominee, instead of going in person to exercise his

duties, would merely send an agent to collect his dues. These dues came

from many different sources, but in the case of livings principally

from the ‘tithe’, a tax for the maintenance of the Church, supposed to

represent one-tenth of every man’s income.

People usually grumble when they are continually asked for money, and

mediaeval men and women were no exception to this rule. Thus, to take

the case of England, while the wars between Emperor and Pope left

her comparatively indifferent as to the issues involved, the growing

exactions of the Roman _curia_ that touched her pockets awoke a

smouldering resentment that every now and then flared into hostility.

‘In these times’, wrote the chronicler, Matthew Paris, ‘the small

fire of faith began to grow exceeding chill, so that it was well

nigh reduced to ashes ... for now was simony practised without

shame.... Every day illiterate persons of the lowest class,

armed with bulls from Rome, feared not to plunder the revenues

which our pious forefathers had assigned for the maintenance of

the Religious, the support of the poor, and the sustaining of

strangers.’

At Oxford in the reign of Henry III (1216-72), the papal legate was

forced to fly from the town by indignant ‘clerks’ of the university, or

undergraduates as we should call them to-day. ‘Where is that usurer,

that simoniac, that plunderer of revenues, that thirster for money?’

they cried, as they hunted him and his retinue through the streets,

‘it is he who perverts the King and subverts the kingdom to enrich

foreigners with our spoils.’

At Lincoln Bishop Grosstete indignantly refused to invest Innocent

IV’s nephew, a boy of twelve, with the next vacant prebendary of his

cathedral. Other papal relatives were absorbing livings and bishoprics

elsewhere in Europe, for under Innocent IV began the open practice of

‘nepotism’, that is, of Popes using their revenues and their office in

order to provide for their nephews and other members of their families.

‘He laid aside all shame,’ says Matthew Paris of this Pope, ‘he

extorted larger sums of money than any before him.’ The ‘sums of money’

enabled Rome to cast down her imperial foe, but the extortion was a

dangerous expedient. Throughout the early Middle Ages the Pope had

been accepted by Western Christendom as speaking for the Church with

the voice of Christ’s authority. In his disputes with kings the latter

could never be sure of the loyalty of their people, should they call on

them to take up arms against the ‘Holy Father’.

With the growth of nations and of Rome as a temporal power a gradual

change came over the European outlook; subjects were more inclined

to obey rulers whom they knew than a distant potentate whom they did

not; they were also less ready to accept papal interference without

criticism. Thus a distinction was for the first time drawn between the

Pope and the Church.

When King Hako of Norway was offered the imperial crown on the

deposition of Frederick II by Innocent IV, he refused, saying, ‘I will

gladly fight the enemies of the Church, but I will not fight against

the foes of the Pope.’ His words were significant of a new spirit.

In the feuds of Guelfs and Ghibellines that racked the twelfth and

thirteenth centuries were laid the foundations of a movement to control

the Popes by Universal Councils in the fifteenth, and of that still

more drastic opposition to his powers in the sixteenth that we call the

Reformation.

XVI

THE FAITH OF THE MIDDLE AGES

A modern student, when he passes from school to a university, soon

finds that he is standing at a cross-roads: he cannot hope, like a

philosopher of the sixteenth century, to ‘take all knowledge for

his province’, but must choose which of the many signposts he will

follow--law, classics, science, economics, chemistry, medicine, to

name but a few of the more important. Mediaeval minds would have

been sorely puzzled by some of these avenues of knowledge, while the

rest they would denounce as mere sidetracks, leading by a devious

route to the main high road of theology. Science, for instance, the

patient searching after truth by building up knowledge from facts, and

accepting nothing as a fact that had not been verified by proof, was a

closed book in the thirteenth century.

Roger Bacon, an English friar, one of the first to attempt scientific

experiments, was regarded with such suspicion on account of his

researches and his sarcastic comments on the views of his day that he

was believed to be in league with the devil; and even the favour of a

pope more enlightened than most of his contemporaries could not save

him in later years from imprisonment as a suspected magician.

Men and women hate to change the ideas in which they have been brought

up; and in the thirteenth century they readily accepted as facts

such fabulous stories told by early Christian writers as that of the

phoenix who at five hundred years old casts herself into a sacred fire,

emerging renewed in health and vigour from her own ashes, or of the

pelican killing her young at birth and reviving them in three days,

or of the unicorn resisting all the wiles of the hunter but captured

easily by a pure maiden. The charm of such natural history lay to

mediaeval minds not in its legendary quaintness but in the use to

which it could be turned in pointing a moral or adorning the doctrines

of theology.

Theology was the chief course of study at Paris, just as Roman law

reigned at Bologna. It comprised a thorough mastery of the Scriptures

as expounded by ‘Fathers of the Church’, and also of what was then

known through Latin and Arabic translations of the works of the Greek

philosopher Aristotle. Although he had been a pagan, Aristotle was

almost as much revered by many mediaeval theologians as St. Jerome or

St. Augustine, and it was their life-work to try and reconcile his

views with those of Catholic Christianity.

[Sidenote: Scholasticism]

The philosophy that resulted from the study of these very different

authorities is called ‘scholasticism’, and those who gave patient years

of thought to the arguments that built up and maintained its theories

the ‘schoolmen’.

The first of the great Paris theologians was Peter Abelard, a

Breton--handsome, self-confident, ready of tongue and brain. Having

studied ‘dialectics’, that is, the system of reasoning by which the

mediaeval mind constructed its philosophy, he aroused the disgust of

his masters by drawing away their pupils, through his eloquence and

originality, as soon as he understood the subject-matter sufficiently

to lecture on his own account.

In Paris so many young men of his day crowded round his desk that

Abelard has been sometimes called the founder of the university. This

is not true, but his popularity may be said to have decided that Paris

rather than any other town should become the intellectual centre of

France. Greedily his audience listened while he endeavoured to prove by

human reason beliefs that the Church taught as a matter of faith; and,

though he had set out with the intention of defending her, it was with

the Church that he soon came into conflict.

One of his books, called _Yes and No_, contained a brief summary of

the views of early Christian Fathers on various theological questions.

Drawn into such close proximity some of these views were found to

conflict, and the Breton lecturer became an object of suspicion in

ecclesiastical quarters, especially to St. Bernard of Clairvaux,

who believed that human reason was given to man merely that he might

accept the teaching of the Church, not to raise arguments or criticisms

concerning it.

‘Peter Abelard’, he wrote to the Pope, ‘is trying to make void the

merit of Christian faith when he deems himself able by human reason

to comprehend God altogether ... the man is great in his own eyes

... this scrutinizer of Majesty and fabricator of heresies.’

The minds of the two men were indeed utterly opposed--types of

conflicting human thought in all ages. St. Bernard, in spite of his

frank denunciations of the sins of the Church, was docile to the voice

of her authority, and hated and feared the pride of the human intellect

as the deadliest of all sins. Abelard, by nature inquisitive and

sceptical, regarded his deft brain as a surgeon’s knife, given him to

cut away diseased or worn-out tissues from the thought of his day in

order to leave it healthier and purer.

As antagonists they were no match, for St. Bernard was infinitely the

greater man, without any of the other’s petty vanity and worldliness

to confuse the issue for which they struggled: he had behind him also

the sympathy of mediaeval minds not as yet awakened to any spirit of

inquiry, and so the Breton was driven into the retirement of a monk’s

cell and his condemned works publicly burned.

One of his pupils, Peter Lombard, adopted his master’s methods without

arousing the anger of the orthodox by any daring feats of controversy,

and produced a _Book of Sentences_ (_sententiae_ = opinions) that

became the text-book for scholasticism, just as the _Decretum_ was the

authority for students of Roman law. Without being a work of genius the

_Sentences_ cleared a pathway through the jungle of mediaeval thought

for more original minds, while the discovery in the latter half of

the twelfth century of several hitherto unknown works of Aristotle

gave added zest to the researches of the ‘Schoolmen’. Greatest of all

these ‘Schoolmen’ was Thomas Aquinas, ‘the Angelic Doctor’, as he has

sometimes been called.

Aquinas was a Neapolitan of noble family, who ran away from home as a

boy to join the Dominicans, an Order of wandering preachers of whose

foundation we shall shortly speak. Thomas was recaptured and brought

home by his elder brother, a noble at the court of Frederick II; but

neither threats nor imprisonment could persuade the young novice to

give up the life he had chosen. After a year he broke the bars of his

window, escaped from Naples, and went to Cologne and Paris, where he

studied theology, emerging from this education the greatest lecturer

and teacher of his day. In his _Summa Theologiae_, his best-known book,

he set forth his belief in man’s highest good as the chief thought

of God, using both the commentaries of the Church Fathers and the

works of Aristotle as quarries to provide the material for fashioning

his arguments. Like Abelard, he believed in the voice of reason, but

without any of the Breton’s probing scepticism. Human reason bridled by

divine grace was the guide he sought to lead his pen through the maze

of theology; and so clear and judicial were his methods, so brilliant

the intellect that shone through his writings, that Aquinas became for

later generations an authority almost equal to St. Augustine.

[Sidenote: Mediaeval Faith]

The intense preoccupation of mediaeval minds with theology and the

importance attached to ‘right belief’ are the most striking mental

characteristics of the period with which we are dealing. To-day we are

inclined to judge a man by his actions rather than by his beliefs, to

sum up a character as good or bad because its owner is generous or

selfish, kind or cruel, brave or cowardly. In the twelfth or thirteenth

centuries this would have seemed a wholly false standard. The ideal

of conduct, for one thing, maintained by monks like St. Bernard of

Clairvaux was so exalted that, to the ordinary men and women in an age

of cruelty and fierce passions, a good life seemed impossible save

for Saints. The sins and failings of the rest of the world received a

very easy pardon except from ascetics; and it was generally felt that

God in His mercy, through the intercession of the kindly Saints, would

be compassionate to human weakness so long as the sinner repented,

confessed, and clung to a belief in the teaching of the Church. This

teaching, or ‘Faith’, declared to have been given by Christ to His

Apostles, set forth in the writings of the Christian Fathers, gathered

together in the Creeds and Sacraments defined by Church Councils,

preached and expounded by the clergy and theologians, defended by the

Pope, was the torch that could alone guide man’s wavering footsteps to

the ‘City of God’.

‘Do you know what I shall gain,’ asked a French Count of the

thirteenth century, ‘in that during this mortal life I have

believed as Holy Church teaches? I shall have a crown in the

Heavens above the angels, for the angels cannot but believe

inasmuch as they see God face to face.’

Heresy--the refusal to accept the teaching of the Church--was the one

unpardonable sin, a moral leprosy worse in mediaeval eyes than any

human disease because it affected the soul, not the body, and the life

of the soul was everlasting. The heretic must be suppressed, converted

if possible, but if not, burned and forgotten like a diseased rag,

lest his wrong beliefs should infect others and so lose their souls

also eternally. To-day we know that neither suppression nor burnings

can ultimately extinguish that independence of thought and spirit of

inquiry that are as much the motive power of some human natures as the

acceptance of authority is of others. Tolerance, and how far it can be

extended to actions as well as beliefs, is one of the problems that

the world is still studying. The towns and provinces, where the first

battles were fought, are sown with the blood and ashes of those who

neither sought nor offered the way of compromise as a solution.

Another of Abelard’s pupils, besides the orthodox Peter Lombard, was an

Italian, Arnold of Brescia--in many ways a man of like intellect with

his master, self-centred, restless, and ambitious. When he returned

home from the University he at once took a violent part in the life of

the Brescian commune, declaring publicly that the Church should return

to the days of ‘apostolic poverty’, and urging the citizens to cast off

the yoke of their bishop. Exiled from Italy by the anger of the Pope

and clergy at his views he went again to Paris, where he taught in the

University until by the King’s command he was driven away. He next

found a refuge in Germany under the protection of a papal legate, who

had known and admired him in earlier days; but this news aroused the

furious anger of St. Bernard.

‘Arnold of Brescia,’ he wrote to the legate, ‘whose speech is honey

... whose doctrine poison, the man whom Brescia has vomited forth,

whom Rome abhors, whom France drives into exile, whom Germany

curses, whom Italy refuses to receive, obtains thy support. To be

his friend is to be the foe of the Pope and God.’

The legate contrived by mediation to reconcile the heretic temporarily

with the Church; but Arnold was by nature a firebrand, and, having

settled in Rome, soon became leader in one of the many plots to make

that city a ‘Free Town’, owing allegiance only to the Emperor. Largely

through his efforts the Pope was compelled to go into exile; but later

the Romans, under the fear of an interdict that would deprive them of

the visits of pilgrims out of whom they usually made their living,

deserted him; and the republican leader was forced to fly. Captured

amongst the Italian hills, he was taken to Rome and burned, his ashes

being thrown into the Tiber lest they should be claimed as relics by

those of the populace who still loved him. His judges need not have

taken this precaution, for neither Arnold’s religious nor political

views could claim any large measure of public approval in his own day.

Elsewhere, indeed, heresy and rebellion were seething, but it was not

till the beginning of the thirteenth century that the outbreak became a

vital problem for the Papacy.

The widest area of heresy was in the provinces of Languedoc and

Provence, to whose precocious mental development we have already

referred.[23] The Counts of Toulouse no longer ruled in the thirteenth

century over any of modern Spain, but north of the Pyrenees they

were tenants-in-chief to the French king for one of the most fertile

provinces of southern France, while as Marquesses of Provence they were

vassals of the Emperor for the country beyond the Rhone.

Semi-independent of the control of either of these overlords, Count

Raymond VI presided over a court famed for its luxury and gaiety

of heart, its light morals, and unorthodox religious views. When

he received complaints from Rome that his people were deriding the

Catholic Faith and stoning his bishops and priests, he scarcely

pretended regret, for his sceptical nature was quite unshocked by

heresy, and both he and his nobles fully approved of popular insistence

on ‘apostolic poverty’, a doctrine that enabled them to appropriate

ecclesiastical lands and revenues for their own purposes.

[Sidenote: Heresy in Languedoc]

The heretical sects in Languedoc were many: perhaps the most important

those of the Albigenses and Waldensians. The former practically denied

Christianity, maintaining that good and evil were co-equal powers, and

that Christ’s death was of no avail to save mankind. The Waldensians,

or ‘Poor men of Lyons’, on the other hand, had at first tried to find

acceptance for their beliefs within the Church. Peter Waldo, their

founder, a rich merchant of Lyons, had translated some of the Gospels

from Latin into the language of the countryside, and, having given

away all his goods, he travelled from village to village, preaching,

and trying with his followers to imitate the lives of the Apostles in

simplicity and poverty.

In spite of condemnation from the Pope, who was suspicious of their

teaching, the Waldensians increased in number. They declared that the

authority of the Bible was superior to that of the Church, appointed

ministers of their own, and denied many of the principal articles of

Faith that the Church insisted were necessary to salvation.

The mediaeval Church taught that only through belief in these articles

of Faith, that is, in the Creeds and Sacraments (_sacramentum_ =

something sacred), as administered by the clergy, could man hope to be

saved. The most important of the Sacraments, of which there were seven,

was the miracle of the Mass, sometimes called ‘transubstantiation’. Its

origin was the Last Supper, when Christ before His crucifixion gave

His disciples bread and wine, saying ‘Take, eat, this is my body....’

‘Take, drink, this is my blood which was shed for you.’ The mediaeval

Church declared that every time at the service of Mass the priest

offered up ‘the Host’, or consecrated bread, Christ was sacrificed anew

for the sins of the world, and that the bread became in truth converted

into the substance of His body.

The Waldensians, and many sects that later broke away from the tenets

of the mediaeval Church, denied this miracle and also the sacred

character of the priests who could perform it. According to the Church,

her clergy at ordination received through the laying on of the bishop’s

hands some of the mysterious power that Christ had given to St. Peter,

conferring on them the power also to forgive sins. No matter if the

priest became idle or vicious, he still by virtue of his ordination

retained his sacred character, and to lay hands upon him was to incur

the wrath of God.

Even in the twelfth century, when St. Bernard travelled in Languedoc,

he had been horrified to find ‘the sacraments no longer sacred and

priests without respect’. His attempts at remonstrance were met

with stones and threats, while the establishment of an ‘episcopal

inquisition’ to inquire into and stamp out this hostility only

increased Provençal bitterness and determination.

‘I would rather be a Jew,’ was an expression of disdain in the Middle

Ages; but in Toulouse the people said, ‘I had rather be a priest,’ and

the clergy who walked abroad were forced to conceal their tonsures for

fear of assault.

‘Heresy can only be destroyed by solid instruction’ was Innocent III’s

first verdict. ‘It is by preaching the truth that we sap foundations

of error.’ He therefore sent some Cistercians to hold a mission in

Languedoc, and in their company travelled a young Spaniard, Dominic

de Guzman, burning to win souls for the Faith or suffer martyrdom.

The Cistercians rode on horses with a large train of servants and

with wagons drawn by oxen to carry their clothes and their food. This

display aroused the scornful mirth of the Albigenses and Waldensians.

‘See,’ they cried, ‘the wealthy missionaries of a God who was humble

and despised, loaded with honours!’

Everywhere were the same ridicule and contempt, and it was in this

moment of failure that Dominic the Spaniard interposed, speaking

earnestly to those who were with him of the contrast between the

heretic ministers in their lives of poverty and self-denial with

the luxury and worldliness of the local clergy, and even with the

ostentatious parade of his fellow preachers. Because he had long

practised austerities himself, wearing a hair shirt, fasting often,

and denying himself every pleasure, the young Spaniard received a

respectful hearing, and so fired the Cistercians with his enthusiasm

that they sent away their horses and baggage-wagons, and set out on

foot through the country to try and win the populace by different

methods. With them went Dominic, barefoot, exulting in this opportunity

of bearing witness in the face of danger to the Faith he held so

precious.

The attitude of the men and women of Languedoc towards the papal

mission was no longer derisive but it remained hostile, for they

also held their Faith sacred, while all the racial prejudice of the

countryside was thrown into the balance of opposition to Rome. Thus

converts were few, and angry gatherings at which stones were thrown at

the strangers many; and so matters drifted on and the mission grew more

and more discouraged.

In 1208 occurred a violent crisis, for the papal legate, having

excommunicated Count Raymond of Toulouse for appropriating certain

Church lands and refusing to restore them, was murdered, and the

Count himself implicated in the crime, seeing that, as in the case of

Henry II and Becket, it had been his angry curses that had prompted

some knights to do the deed. Innocent III at once declared the Count

deposed, and preached a crusade against him and his subjects as

heretics.

Twenty years of bloodshed and cruelty followed; for under the command

of the French Count Simon de Montfort, an utterly unscrupulous and

brutal general, the orthodox legions of northern France gathered at

the papal summons to stamp out the independence of the south that they

had always hated as a rival. Languedoc, her nobles and people united,

fought hard for her religious and political freedom; but the struggle

was uneven, and she was finally forced into submission. Thirty

thousand of her sons and daughters had perished, and with them the

civilization and culture that had made the name of Provence glorious in

mediaeval Europe.

[Sidenote: The Albigensian Crusade]

The name of Dominic the Spaniard does not appear in the bloodstained

annals of the Albigensian Crusade. He had advocated very different

measures; and in 1216, pursuing his ideal, received from the Pope leave

to form an Order of ‘Preaching Brothers’, modelled on the Monastic

Orders, except that the ‘Friars’ (_Fratres_ = brothers), as these monks

were called, were commanded not to live permanently in communities

but to spend their lives travelling about from village to village,

preaching as they went. They were to beg their daily bread; and the

very Order itself was forbidden to acquire wealth, their founder hoping

by this stringent rule to prevent the worldliness that had corrupted

the other religious communities.

Dominic, or St. Dominic, for the enthusiasm of the mediaeval Church

soon canonized him, was a son of his age in his intense devotion to

the Faith; but his spiritual outlook was beyond the comprehension of

all save a few. In Innocent III may be found a more typical figure of

the early thirteenth century; and to Innocent’s standard, and not to

that of their founder, the followers of St. Dominic for the most part

conformed.

Pope Innocent had advocated the driving out of error by right

teaching; but his failure by this method woke in him an exasperation

that made the obstinate heresy of Languedoc seem a moral and social

plague to be suppressed ruthlessly. Thorough in this undertaking as

in all to which he set his mind and hand, he added to the slaughter

of Simon de Montfort’s Crusade the terrible and efficient machinery

of the Inquisition, and this during the pontificate of Gregory IX was

transferred from the jurisdiction of local bishops to that of the Papal

See. The Inquisitors, empowered to discover heresy and convert the

heretic by torture and fire, were mainly Dominicans, selected for this

task on account of their theological training and the very devotion to

the Faith on which their founder had laid such stress.

The most important political fruits of the Albigensian Crusade were

gathered by Philip II of France, who had himself stood aloof from the

struggle, although permitting and encouraging his nobles to take the

Cross. By the deposition and fall of his powerful tenant-in-chief, the

Count of Toulouse, the centre and south of France, hitherto so proudly

independent, lost a formidable ally; and large tracts of Poitou and

Aquitaine fell under royal influence and were incorporated amongst the

crown lands.

This process continued under Philip’s son, Louis VIII, who himself

joined in the Crusade and marched with an army down the valley of the

Rhone, capturing Avignon, and arriving almost at the gates of Toulouse.

His sudden illness and death brought the campaign to an end; but his

widow, Blanche of Castile, acting as regent for her son the boy King

Louis IX, concluded a treaty with the new Count of Toulouse, Raymond

VII, that left that noble a chastened and submissive vassal of both

king and pope. Amongst other things he was forced to acknowledge one of

the French king’s younger brothers as his successor in the County of

Provence.

[Sidenote: St. Francis of Assisi]

It is pleasant to turn from the Albigensian Crusade, one of the

blackest pictures of the Middle Ages, to its best and brightest, the

story of St. Francis of Assisi.