They had been converted to Islam, and they held the faith much more
simply and fiercely than the actively intellectual Arabs and Persians
to the south. In the tenth century the Turks were growing strong and
vigorous while the Arab power was divided and decaying. The relations
of the Turks to the Empire of the Caliphate became very similar to the
relations of the Medes to the last Babylonian Empire fourteen centuries
before. In the eleventh century a group of Turkish tribes, the Seljuk
Turks, came down into Mesopotamia and made the Caliph their nominal
ruler but really their captive and tool. They conquered Armenia. Then
they struck at the remnants of the Byzantine power in Asia Minor. In
1071 the Byzantine army was utterly smashed at the battle of Melasgird,
and the Turks swept forward until not a trace of Byzantine rule
remained in Asia. They took the fortress of Nicæa over against
Constantinople, and prepared to attempt that city.
The Byzantine emperor, Michael VII, was overcome with terror. He was
already heavily engaged in warfare with a band of Norman adventurers
who had seized Durazzo, and with a fierce Turkish people, the
Petschenegs, who were raiding over the Danube. In his extremity he
sought help where he could, and it is notable that he did not appeal to
the western emperor but to the Pope of Rome as the head of Latin
Christendom. He wrote to Pope Gregory VII, and his successor Alexius
Comnenus wrote still more urgently to Urban II.
CRUSADER TOMBS IN EXETER CATHEDRAL
CRUSADER TOMBS IN EXETER CATHEDRAL
_Photo: Mansell_
This was not a quarter of a century from the rupture of the Latin and
Greek churches. That controversy was still vividly alive in men’s
minds, and this disaster to Byzantium must have presented itself to the
Pope as a supreme opportunity for reasserting the supremacy of the
Latin Church over the dissentient Greeks. Moreover this occasion gave
the Pope a chance to deal with two other matters that troubled western
Christendom very greatly. One was the custom of “private war” which
disordered social life, and the other was the superabundant fighting
energy of the Low Germans and Christianized Northmen and particularly
of the Franks and Normans. A religious war, the Crusade, the War of
the Cross, was preached against the Turkish captors of Jerusalem, and a
truce to all warfare amongst Christians (1095). The declared object of
this war was the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre from the unbelievers.
A man called Peter the Hermit carried on a popular propaganda
throughout France and Germany on broadly democratic lines. He went clad
in a coarse garment, barefooted on an ass, he carried a huge cross and
harangued the crowd in street or market-place or church. He denounced
the cruelties practised upon the Christian pilgrims by the Turks, and
the shame of the Holy Sepulchre being in any but Christian hands. The
fruits of centuries of Christian teaching became apparent in the
response. A great wave of enthusiasm swept the western world, and
popular Christendom discovered itself.
VIEW OF CAIRO
VIEW OF CAIRO
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
Such a widespread uprising of the common people in relation to a single
idea as now occurred was a new thing in the history of our race. There
is nothing to parallel it in the previous history of the Roman Empire
or of India or China. On a smaller scale, however, there had been
similar movements among the Jewish people after their liberation from
the Babylonian captivity, and later on Islam was to display a parallel
susceptibility to collective feeling. Such movements were certainly
connected with the new spirit that had come into life with the
development of the missionary- teaching religions. The Hebrew
prophets, Jesus and his disciples, Mani, Muhammad, were all exhorters
of men’s individual souls. They brought the personal conscience face
to face with God. Before that time religion had been much more a
business of fetish, of pseudoscience, than of conscience. The old kind
of religion turned upon temple, initiated priest and mystical
sacrifice, and ruled the common man like a slave by fear. The new kind
of religion made a man of him.
The preaching of the First Crusade was the first stirring of the common
people in European history. It may be too much to call it the birth of
modern democracy, but certainly at that time modern democracy stirred.
Before very long we shall find it stirring again, and raising the most
disturbing social and religious questions.
Certainly this first stirring of democracy ended very pitifully and
lamentably. Considerable bodies of common people, crowds rather than
armies, set out eastward from France and the Rhineland and Central
Europe without waiting for leaders or proper equipment to rescue the
Holy Sepulchre. This was the “people’s crusade.” Two great mobs
blundered into Hungary, mistook the recently converted Magyars for
pagans, committed atrocities and were massacred. A third multitude with
a similarly confused mind, after a great pogrom of the Jews in the
Rhineland, marched eastward, and was also destroyed in Hungary. Two
other huge crowds, under the leadership of Peter the Hermit himself,
reached Constantinople, crossed the Bosphorus, and were massacred
rather than defeated by the Seljuk Turks. So began and ended this
first movement of the European people, as people.
Next year (1097) the real fighting forces crossed the Bosphorus.
Essentially they were Norman in leadership and spirit. They stormed
Nicæa, marched by much the same route as Alexander had followed
fourteen centuries before, to Antioch. The siege of Antioch kept them
a year, and in June 1099 they invested Jerusalem. It was stormed after
a month’s siege. The slaughter was terrible. Men riding on horseback
were splashed by the blood in the streets. At nightfall on July 15th
the Crusaders had fought their way into the Church of the Holy
Sepulchre and overcome all opposition there: blood-stained, weary and
“sobbing from excess of joy” they knelt down in prayer.
THE HORSES OF S. MARK, VENICE
THE HORSES OF S. MARK, VENICE
Originally on the arch of Trajan at Constantinople, the Doge Dandalo V
took them after the Fourth Crusade, to Venice, whence Napoleon I
removed them to Paris, but in 1815 they were returned to Venice.
During the Great War of 1914-18 they were hidden away for fear of air
raids.
_Photo: D. McLeish_
Immediately the hostility of Latin and Greek broke out again. The
Crusaders were the servants of the Latin Church, and the Greek
patriarch of Jerusalem found himself in a far worse case under the
triumphant Latins than under the Turks. The Crusaders discovered
themselves between Byzantine and Turk and fighting both. Much of Asia
Minor was recovered by the Byzantine Empire, and the Latin princes were
left, a buffer between Turk and Greek, with Jerusalem and a few small
principalities, of which Edessa was one of the chief, in Syria. Their
grip even on these possessions was precarious, and in 1144 Edessa fell
to the Moslim, leading to an ineffective Second Crusade, which failed
to recover Edessa but saved Antioch from a similar fate.
In 1169 the forces of Islam were rallied under a Kurdish adventurer
named Saladin who had made himself master of Egypt. He preached a Holy
War against the Christians, recaptured Jerusalem in 1187, and so
provoked the Third Crusade. This failed to recover Jerusalem. In the
Fourth Crusade (1202-4) the Latin Church turned frankly upon the Greek
Empire, and there was not even a pretence of fighting the Turks. It
started from Venice and in 1204 it stormed Constantinople. The great
rising trading city of Venice was the leader in this adventure, and
most of the coasts and islands of the Byzantine Empire were annexed by
the Venetians. A “Latin” emperor (Baldwin of Flanders) was set up in
Constantinople and the Latin and Greek Church were declared to be
reunited. The Latin emperors ruled in Constantinople from 1204 to 1261
when the Greek world shook itself free again from Roman predominance.
The twelfth century then and the opening of the thirteenth was the age
of papal ascendancy just as the eleventh was the age of the ascendancy
of the Seljuk Turks and the tenth the age of the Northmen. A united
Christendom under the rule of the Pope came nearer to being a working
reality than it ever was before or after that time.
A COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRA
A COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRA
_Photo: Lehnert & Landrock_
In those centuries a simple Christian faith was real and widespread
over great areas of Europe. Rome itself had passed through some dark
and discreditable phases; few writers can be found to excuse the lives
of Popes John XI and John XII in the tenth century; they were
abominable creatures; but the heart and body of Latin Christendom had
remained earnest and simple; the generality of the common priests and
monks and nuns had lived exemplary and faithful lives. Upon the wealth
of confidence such lives created rested the power of the church. Among
the great Popes of the past had been Gregory the Great, Gregory I
(590-604) and Leo III (795-816) who invited Charlemagne to be Cæsar and
crowned him in spite of himself. Towards the close of the eleventh
century there arose a great clerical statesman, Hildebrand, who ended
his life as Pope Gregory VII (1073- 1085). Next but one after him came
Urban II (1087-1099), the Pope of the First Crusade. These two were
the founders of this period of papal greatness during which the Popes
lorded it over the Emperors. From Bulgaria to Ireland and from Norway
to Sicily and Jerusalem the Pope was supreme. Gregory VII obliged the
Emperor Henry IV to come in penitence to him at Canossa and to await
forgiveness for three days and nights in the courtyard of the castle,
clad in sackcloth and barefooted to the snow. In 1176 at Venice the
Emperor Frederick (Frederick Barbarossa), knelt to Pope Alexander III
and swore fealty to him.
The great power of the church in the beginning of the eleventh century
lay in the wills and consciences of men. It failed to retain the moral
prestige on which its power was based. In the opening decades of the
fourteenth century it was discovered that the power of the Pope had
evaporated. What was it that destroyed the naive confidence of the
common people of Christendom in the church so that they would no longer
rally to its appeal and serve its purposes?
The first trouble was certainly the accumulation of wealth by the
church. The church never died, and there was a frequent disposition on
the part of dying childless people to leave lands to the church.
Penitent sinners were exhorted to do so. Accordingly in many European
countries as much as a fourth of the land became church property. The
appetite for property grows with what it feeds upon. Already in the
thirteenth century it was being said everywhere that the priests were
not good men, that they were always hunting for money and legacies.
The kings and princes disliked this alienation of property very
greatly. In the place of feudal lords capable of military support,
they found their land supporting abbeys and monks and nuns. And these
lands were really under foreign dominion. Even before the time of Pope
Gregory VII there had been a struggle between the princes and the
papacy over the question of “investitures,” the question that is of who
should appoint the bishops. If that power rested with the Pope and not
the King, then the latter lost control not only of the consciences of
his subjects but of a considerable part of his dominions. For also the
clergy claimed exemption from taxation. They paid their taxes to Rome.
And not only that, but the church also claimed the right to levy a tax
of one-tenth upon the property of the layman in addition to the taxes
he paid his prince.
The history of nearly every country in Latin Christendom tells of the
same phase in the eleventh century, a phase of struggle between monarch
and Pope on the issue of investitures and generally it tells of a
victory for the Pope. He claimed to be able to excommunicate the
prince, to absolve his subjects from their allegiance to him, to
recognize a successor. He claimed to be able to put a nation under an
interdict, and then nearly all priestly functions ceased except the
sacraments of baptism, confirmation and penance; the priests could
neither hold the ordinary services, marry people, nor bury the dead.
With these two weapons it was possible for the twelfth century Popes to
curb the most recalcitrant princes and overawe the most restive
peoples. These were enormous powers, and enormous powers are only to
be used on extraordinary occasions. The Popes used them at last with a
frequency that staled their effect. Within thirty years at the end of
the twelfth century we find Scotland, France and England in turn under
an interdict. And also the Popes could not resist the temptation to
preach crusades against offending princes—until the crusading spirit
was extinct.
It is possible that if the Church of Rome had struggled simply against
the princes and had had a care to keep its hold upon the general mind,
it might have achieved a permanent dominion over all Christendom. But
the high claims of the Pope were reflected as arrogance in the conduct
of the clergy. Before the eleventh century the Roman priests could
marry; they had close ties with the people among whom they lived; they
were indeed a part of the people. Gregory VII made them celibates; he
cut the priests off from too great an intimacy with the laymen in order
to bind them more closely to Rome, but indeed he opened a fissure
between the church and the commonalty. The church had its own law
courts. Cases involving not merely priests but monks, students,
crusaders, widows, orphans and the helpless were reserved for the
clerical courts, and so were all matters relating to wills, marriages
and oaths and all cases of sorcery, heresy and blasphemy. Whenever the
layman found himself in conflict with the priest he had to go to a
clerical court. The obligations of peace and war fell upon his
shoulders alone and left the priest free. It is no great wonder that
jealousy and hatred of the priests grew up in the Christian world.
Never did Rome seem to realize that its power was in the consciences of
common men. It fought against religious enthusiasm, which should have
been its ally, and it forced doctrinal orthodoxy upon honest doubt and
aberrant opinion. When the church interfered in matters of morality it
had the common man with it, but not when it interfered in matters of
doctrine. When in the south of France Waldo taught a return to the
simplicity of Jesus in faith and life, Innocent III preached a crusade
against the Waldenses, Waldo’s followers, and permitted them to be
suppressed with fire, sword, rape and the most abominable cruelties.
When again St. Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) taught the imitation of
Christ and a life of poverty and service, his followers, the
Franciscans, were persecuted, scourged, imprisoned and dispersed. In
1318 four of them were burnt alive at Marseilles. On the other hand
the fiercely orthodox order of the Dominicans, founded by St. Dominic
(1170-1221) was strongly supported by Innocent III, who with its
assistance set up an organization, the Inquisition, for the hunting of
heresy and the affliction of free thought.
So it was that the church by excessive claims, by unrighteous
privileges, and by an irrational intolerance destroyed that free faith
of the common man which was the final source of all its power. The
story of its decline tells of no adequate foemen from without but
continually of decay from within.
XLVII
RECALCITRANT PRINCES AND THE GREAT SCHISM
One very great weakness of the Roman Church in its struggle to secure
the headship of all Christendom was the manner in which the Pope was
chosen.
If indeed the papacy was to achieve its manifest ambition and establish
one rule and one peace throughout Christendom, then it was vitally
necessary that it should have a strong, steady and continuous
direction. In those great days of its opportunity it needed before all
things that the Popes when they took office should be able men in the
prime of life, that each should have his successor-designate with whom
he could discuss the policy of the church, and that the forms and
processes of election should be clear, definite, unalterable and
unassailable. Unhappily none of these things obtained. It was not
even clear who could vote in the election of a Pope, nor whether the
Byzantine or Holy Roman Emperor had a voice in the matter. That very
great papal statesman Hildebrand (Pope Gregory VII, 1073-1085) did much
to regularize the election. He confined the votes to the Roman
cardinals and he reduced the Emperor’s share to a formula of assent
conceded to him by the church, but he made no provision for a
successor-designate and he left it possible for the disputes of the
cardinals to keep the See vacant, as in some cases it was kept vacant,
for a year or more.
MILAN CATHEDRALA COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRA
MILAN CATHEDRALA COURTYARD IN THE ALHAMBRA
View showing the exquisite carvings characteristic of the 98 spires of
the edifice
The consequences of this want of firm definition are to be seen in the
whole history of the papacy up to the sixteenth century. From quite
early times onward there were disputed elections and two or more men
each claiming to be Pope. The church would then be subjected to the
indignity of going to the Emperor or some other outside arbiter to
settle the dispute. And the career of everyone of the great Popes
ended in a note of interrogation. At his death the church might be
left headless and as ineffective as a decapitated body. Or he might be
replaced by some old rival eager only to discredit and undo his work.
Or some enfeebled old man tottering on the brink of the grave might
succeed him.
It was inevitable that this peculiar weakness of the papal organization
should attract the interference of the various German princes, the
French King, and the Norman and French Kings who ruled in England; that
they should all try to influence the elections, and have a Pope in
their own interest established in the Lateran Palace at Rome. And the
more powerful and important the Pope became in European affairs, the
more urgent did these interventions become. Under the circumstances it
is no great wonder that many of the Popes were weak and futile. The
astonishing thing is that many of them were able and courageous men.
One of the most vigorous and interesting of the Popes of this great
period was Innocent III (1198-1216) who was so fortunate as to become
Pope before he was thirty-eight. He and his successors were pitted
against an even more interesting personality, the Emperor Frederick II;
_Stupor mundi_ he was called, the Wonder of the world. The struggle of
this monarch against Rome is a turning place in history. In the end
Rome defeated him and destroyed his dynasty, but he left the prestige
of the church and Pope so badly wounded that its wounds festered and
led to its decay.
Frederick was the son of the Emperor Henry VI and his mother was the
daughter of Roger I, the Norman King of Sicily. He inherited this
kingdom in 1198 when he was a child of four years. Innocent III had
been made his guardian. Sicily in those days had been but recently
conquered by the Normans; the Court was half oriental and full of
highly educated Arabs; and some of these were associated in the
education of the young king. No doubt they were at some pains to make
their point of view clear to him. He got a Moslem view of Christianity
as well as a Christian view of Islam, and the unhappy result of this
double system of instruction was a view, exceptional in that age of
faith, that all religions were impostures. He talked freely on the
subject; his heresies and blasphemies are on record.
As the young man grew up he found himself in conflict with his
guardian. Innocent III wanted altogether too much from his ward. When
the opportunity came for Frederick to succeed as Emperor, the Pope
intervened with conditions. Frederick must promise to put down heresy
in Germany with a strong hand. Moreover he must relinquish his crown in
Sicily and South Italy, because otherwise he would be too strong for
the Pope. And the German clergy were to be freed from all taxation.
Frederick agreed but with no intention of keeping his word. The Pope
had already induced the French King to make war upon his own subjects
in France, the cruel and bloody crusade against the Waldenses; he
wanted Frederick to do the same thing in Germany. But Frederick being
far more of a heretic than any of the simple pietists who had incurred
the Pope’s animosity, lacked the crusading impulse. And when Innocent
urged him to crusade against the Moslim and recover Jerusalem he was
equally ready to promise and equally slack in his performance.
A TYPICAL CRUSADER: DON RODRIGO DE CARDENAS
A TYPICAL CRUSADER: DON RODRIGO DE CARDENAS
From the Church of S. Pedro at Ocana, Spain
_(In the Victoria and Albert Museum)_
Having secured the imperial crown Frederick II stayed in Sicily, which
he greatly preferred to Germany as a residence, and did nothing to
redeem any of his promises to Innocent III, who died baffled in 1216.
Honorius III, who succeeded Innocent, could do no better with
Frederick, and Gregory IX (1227) came to the papal throne evidently
resolved to settle accounts with this young man at any cost. He
excommunicated him. Frederick II was denied all the comforts of
religion. In the half-Arab Court of Sicily this produced singularly
little discomfort. And also the Pope addressed a public letter to the
Emperor reciting his vices (which were indisputable), his heresies, and
his general misconduct. To this Frederick replied in a document of
diabolical ability. It was addressed to all the princes of Europe, and
it made the first clear statement of the issue between the Pope and the
princes. He made a shattering attack upon the manifest ambition of the
Pope to become the absolute ruler of all Europe. He suggested a union
of princes against this usurpation. He directed the attention of the
princes specifically to the wealth of the church.
Having fired off this deadly missile Frederick resolved to perform his
twelve-year-old promise and go upon a crusade. This was the Sixth
Crusade (1228). It was as a crusade, farcical. Frederick II went to
Egypt and met and discussed affairs with the Sultan. These two
gentlemen, both of sceptical opinions, exchanged congenial views, made
a commercial convention to their mutual advantage, and agreed to
transfer Jerusalem to Frederick. This indeed was a new sort of
crusade, a crusade by private treaty. Here was no blood splashing the
conqueror, no “weeping with excess of joy.” As this astonishing
crusader was an excommunicated man, he had to be content with a purely
secular coronation as King of Jerusalem, taking the crown from the
altar with his own hand—for all the clergy were bound to shun him. He
then returned to Italy, chased the papal armies which had invaded his
dominions back to their own territories, and obliged the Pope to grant
him absolution from his excommunication. So a prince might treat the
Pope in the thirteenth century, and there was now no storm of popular
indignation to avenge him. Those days were past.
In 1239 Gregory IX resumed his struggle with Frederick, excommunicated
him for a second time, and renewed that warfare of public abuse in
which the papacy had already suffered severely. The controversy was
revived after Gregory IX was dead, when Innocent IV was Pope; and again
a devastating letter, which men were bound to remember, was written by
Frederick against the church. He denounced the pride and irreligion of
the clergy, and ascribed all the corruptions of the time to their pride
and wealth. He proposed to his fellow princes a general confiscation
of church property—for the good of the church. It was a suggestion
that never afterwards left the imagination of the European princes.