STRUGGLE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE PAPACY.
Reformed by the Emperors and their Teutonic nominees, the Papacy had
resumed in the middle of the eleventh century the schemes of polity
shadowed forth by Nicholas I, and which the degradation of the last
age had only suspended. Under the guidance of her greatest mind,
Hildebrand, the archdeacon of Rome, she now advanced to their
completion, and proclaimed that war of the ecclesiastical power
against the civil power in the person of the Emperor, which became the
centre of the subsequent history of both. While the nature of the
struggle cannot be understood without a glance at their previous
connection, the vastness of the subject warns one from the attempt to
draw even its outlines, and restricts our view to those relations of
Popedom and Empire which arise directly out of their respective
positions as heads spiritual and temporal of the universal Christian
state.
[Sidenote: Growth of the Papal power.]
[Sidenote: Relations of the Papacy and the Empire.]
The eagerness of Christianity in the age immediately following her
political establishment to purchase by submission the support of the
civil power, has been already remarked. The change from independence
to supremacy was gradual. The tale we smile at, how Constantine,
healed of his leprosy, granted the West to bishop Sylvester, and
retired to Byzantium that no secular prince might interfere with the
jurisdiction or profane the neighbourhood of Peter's chair, worked
great effects through the belief it commanded for many centuries. Nay
more, its groundwork was true. It was the removal of the seat of
government from the Tiber to the Bosphorus that made the Pope the
greatest personage in the city, and in the prostration after Alaric's
invasion he was seen to be so. Henceforth he alone was a permanent and
effective, though still unacknowledged power, as truly superior to the
revived senate and consuls of the phantom republic as Augustus and
Tiberius had been to the faint continuance of their earlier
prototypes. Pope Leo the First asserted the universal jurisdiction of
his see[171], and his persevering successors slowly enthralled Italy,
Illyricum, Gaul, Spain, Africa, dexterously confounding their
undoubted metropolitan and patriarchal rights with those of œcumenical
bishop, in which they were finally merged. By his writings and the
fame of his personal sanctity, by the conversion of England and the
introduction of an impressive ritual, Gregory the Great did more than
any other pontiff to advance Rome's ecclesiastical authority. Yet his
tone to Maurice of Constantinople was deferential, to Phocas
adulatory; his successors were not consecrated till confirmed by the
Emperor or the Exarch; one of them was dragged in chains to the
Bosphorus, and banished thence to Scythia. When the iconoclastic
controversy and the intervention of Pipin broke the allegiance of the
Popes to the East, the Franks, as patricians and Emperors, seemed to
step into the position which Byzantium had lost[172]. At Charles's
coronation, says the Saxon poet,
'Et summus eundem
Præsul adoravit, sicut mos debitus olim
Principibus fuit antiquis.'
[Sidenote: Temporal power of the Popes.]
Their relations were, however, no longer the same. If the Frank
vaunted conquest, the priest spoke only of free gift. What Christendom
saw was that Charles was crowned by the Pope's hands, and undertook as
his principal duty the protection and advancement of the Holy Roman
Church. The circumstances of Otto the Great's coronation gave an even
more favourable opening to sacerdotal claims, for it was a Pope who
summoned him to Rome and a Pope who received from him an oath of
fidelity and aid. In the conflict of three powers, the Emperor, the
pontiff, and the people--represented by their senate and consuls, or
by the demagogue of the hour--the most steady, prudent, and
far-sighted was sure eventually to prevail. The Popedom had no
minorities, as yet few disputed successions, few revolts within its
own army--the host of churchmen through Europe. Boniface's conversion
of Germany under its direct sanction, gave it a hold on the rising
hierarchy of the greatest European state; the extension of the rule of
Charles and Otto diffused in the same measure its emissaries and
pretensions. The first disputes turned on the right of the prince to
confirm the elected pontiff, which was afterwards supposed to have
been granted by Hadrian I to Charles, in the decree quoted as
'_Hadrianus Papa_[173].' This '_ius eligendi et ordinandi summum
pontificem_,' which Lewis I appears as yielding by the '_Ego
Ludovicus_[174],' was claimed by the Carolingians whenever they felt
themselves strong enough, and having fallen into desuetude in the
troublous times of the Italian Emperors, was formally renewed to Otto
the Great by his nominee Leo VIII. We have seen it used, and used in
the purest spirit, by Otto himself, by his grandson Otto III, last of
all, and most despotically, by Henry III. Along with it there had
grown up a bold counter-assumption of the Papal chair to be itself the
source of the imperial dignity. In submitting to a fresh coronation,
Lewis the Pious admitted the invalidity of his former self-performed
one: Charles the Bald did not scout the arrogant declaration of John
VIII[175], that to him alone the Emperor owed his crown; and the
council of Pavia[176], when it chose him king of Italy, repeated the
assertion. Subsequent Popes knew better than to apply to the chiefs of
Saxon and Franconian chivalry language which the feeble Neustrian had
not resented; but the precedent remained, the weapon was only hid
behind the pontifical robe to be flashed out with effect when the
moment should come. There were also two other great steps which papal
power had taken. By the invention and adoption of the False Decretals
it had provided itself with a legal system suited to any emergency,
and which gave it unlimited authority through the Christian world in
causes spiritual and over persons ecclesiastical. Canonistical
ingenuity found it easy in one way or another to make this include all
causes and persons whatsoever: for crime is always and wrong is often
sin, nor can aught be anywhere done which may not affect the clergy.
On the gift of Pipin and Charles, repeated and confirmed by Lewis I,
Charles II, Otto I and III, and now made to rest on the more venerable
authority of the first Christian Emperor, it could found claims to the
sovereignty of Rome, Tuscany, and all else that had belonged to the
exarchate. Indefinite in their terms, these grants were never meant by
the donors to convey full dominion over the districts--that belonged
to the head of the Empire--but only as in the case of other church
estates, a perpetual usufruct or _dominium utile_. They were, in fact,
mere endowments. Nor had the gifts been ever actually reduced into
possession: the Pope had been hitherto the victim, not the lord, of
the neighbouring barons. They were not, however, denied, and might be
made a formidable engine of attack: appealing to them, the Pope could
brand his opponents as unjust and impious; and could summon nobles and
cities to defend him as their liege lord, just as, with no better
original right, he invoked the help of the Norman conquerors of Naples
and Sicily.
The attitude of the Roman Church to the imperial power at Henry the
Third's death was externally respectful. The right of a German king to
the crown of the city was undoubted, and the Pope was his lawful
subject. Hitherto the initiative in reform had come from the civil
magistrate. But the secret of the pontiff's strength lay in this: he,
and he alone, could confer the crown, and had therefore the right of
imposing conditions on its recipient. Frequent interregna had weakened
the claim of the Transalpine monarch and prevented his power from
taking firm root; his title was never by law hereditary: the holy
Church had before sought and might again seek a defender elsewhere.
And since the need of such defence had originated this transference of
the Empire from the Greeks to the Franks, since to render it was the
Emperor's chief function, it was surely the Pope's duty as well as his
right to see that the candidate was capable of fulfilling his task, to
degrade him if he rejected or misperformed it.
[Sidenote: Hildebrandine reforms.]
The first step was to remove a blemish in the constitution of the
Church, by fixing a regular body to choose the supreme pontiff. This
Nicholas II did in A.D. 1059, feebly reserving the rights of Henry IV
and his successors. Then the reforming spirit, kindled by the abuses
and depravity of the last century, advanced apace. It had two main
objects: the enforcement of celibacy, especially on the secular
clergy, who enjoyed in this respect considerable freedom, and the
extinction of simony. In the former, the Emperors and a large part of
the laity were not unwilling to join: the latter no one dared to
defend in theory. But when Gregory VII declared that it was sin for
the ecclesiastic to receive his benefice under conditions from a
layman, and so condemned the whole system of feudal investitures to
the clergy, he aimed a deadly blow at all secular authority. Half of
the land and wealth of Germany was in the hands of bishops and abbots,
who would now be freed from the monarch's control to pass under that
of the Pope. In such a state of things government itself would be
impossible.
[Sidenote: Henry IV and Gregory VII.]
[Sidenote: A.D. 1077.]
Henry and Gregory already mistrusted each other: after this decree war
was inevitable. The Pope cited his opponent to appear and be judged at
Rome for his vices and misgovernment. The Emperor[177] replied by
convoking a synod, which deposed and insulted Gregory. At once the
dauntless monk pronounced Henry excommunicate, and fixed a day on
which, if still unrepentant, he should cease to reign. Supported by
his own princes, the monarch might have defied a mandate backed by no
external force; but the Saxons, never contented since the first place
had passed from their own dukes to the Franconians, only waited the
signal to burst into a new revolt, whilst through all Germany the
Emperor's tyranny and irregularities of life had sown the seeds of
disaffection. Shunned, betrayed, threatened, he rushed into what
seemed the only course left, and Canosa saw Europe's mightiest prince,
titular lord of the world, a suppliant before the successor of the
Apostle. Henry soon found that his humiliation had not served him;
driven back into opposition, he defied Gregory anew, set up an
anti-pope, overthrew the rival whom his rebellious subjects had
raised, and maintained to the end of his sad and chequered life a
power often depressed but never destroyed. Nevertheless had all other
humiliation been spared, that one scene in the yard of the Countess
Matilda's castle, an imperial penitent standing barefoot and
woollen-frocked on the snow three days and nights, till the priest who
sat within should admit and absolve him, was enough to mark a decisive
change, and inflict an irretrievable disgrace on the crown so abased.
Its wearer could no more, with the same lofty confidence, claim to be
the highest power on earth, created by and answerable to God alone.
Gregory had extorted the recognition of that absolute superiority of
the spiritual dominion which he was wont to assert so sternly;
proclaiming that to the Pope, as God's vicar, all mankind are subject,
and all rulers responsible: so that he, the giver of the crown, may
also excommunicate and depose. Writing to William the Conqueror, he
says[178]: 'For as for the beauty of this world, that it may be at
different seasons perceived by fleshly eyes, God hath disposed the sun
and the moon, lights that outshine all others; so lest the creature
whom His goodness hath formed after His own image in this world should
be drawn astray into fatal dangers, He hath provided in the apostolic
and royal dignities the means of ruling it through divers offices....
If I, therefore, am to answer for thee on the dreadful day of judgment
before the just Judge who cannot lie, the creator of every creature,
bethink thee whether I must not very diligently provide for thy
salvation, and whether, for thine own safety, thou oughtest not
without delay to obey me, that so thou mayest possess the land of the
living.'
Gregory was not the inventor nor the first propounder of these
doctrines; they had been long before a part of mediæval Christianity,
interwoven with its most vital doctrines. But he was the first who
dared to apply them to the world as he found it. His was that rarest
and grandest of gifts, an intellectual courage and power of
imaginative belief which, when it has convinced itself of aught,
accepts it fully with all its consequences, and shrinks not from
acting at once upon it. A perilous gift, as the melancholy end of his
own career proved, for men were found less ready than he had thought
them to follow out with unswerving consistency like his the principles
which all acknowledged. But it was the very suddenness and boldness of
his policy that secured the ultimate triumph of his cause, awing men's
minds and making that seem realized which had been till then a vague
theory. His premises once admitted,--and no one dreamt of denying
them,--the reasonings by which he established the superiority of
spiritual to temporal jurisdiction were unassailable. With his
authority, in whose hands are the keys of heaven and hell, whose word
can bestow eternal bliss or plunge in everlasting misery, no other
earthly authority can compete or interfere: if his power extends into
the infinite, how much more must he be supreme over things finite? It
was thus that Gregory and his successors were wont to argue: the
wonder is, not that they were obeyed, but that they were not obeyed
more implicitly. In the second sentence of excommunication which
Gregory passed upon Henry the Fourth are these words:--
'Come now, I beseech you, O most holy and blessed Fathers and Princes,
Peter and Paul, that all the world may understand and know that if ye
are able to bind and to loose in heaven, ye are likewise able on
earth, according to the merits of each man, to give and to take away
empires, kingdoms, princedoms, marquisates, duchies, countships, and
the possessions of all men. For if ye judge spiritual things, what
must we believe to be your power over worldly things? and if ye judge
the angels who rule over all proud princes, what can ye not do to
their slaves?'
[Sidenote: Results of the struggle.]
Doctrines such as these do indeed strike equally at all temporal
governments, nor were the Innocents and Bonifaces of later days slow
to apply them so. On the Empire, however, the blow fell first and
heaviest. As when Alaric entered Rome, the spell of ages was broken,
Christendom saw her greatest and most venerable institution
dishonoured and helpless; allegiance was no longer undivided, for who
could presume to fix in each case the limits of the civil and
ecclesiastical jurisdictions? The potentates of Europe beheld in the
Papacy a force which, if dangerous to themselves, could be made to
repel the pretensions and baffle the designs of the strongest and
haughtiest among them. Italy learned how to meet the Teutonic
conqueror by gaining the papal sanction for the leagues of her cities.
The German princes, anxious to narrow the prerogative of their head,
were the natural allies of his enemy, whose spiritual thunders, more
terrible than their own lances, could enable them to depose an
aspiring monarch, or extort from him any concessions they desired.
Their altered tone is marked by the promise they required from Rudolf
of Swabia, whom they set up as a rival to Henry, that he would not
endeavour to make the throne hereditary.
[Sidenote: Concordat of Worms, A.D. 1122.]
It is not possible here to dwell on the details of the great struggle
of the Investitures, rich as it is in the interest of adventure and
character, momentous as were its results for the future. A word or two
must suffice to describe the conclusion, not indeed of the whole
drama, which was to extend over centuries, but of what may be called
its first act. Even that act lasted beyond the lives of the original
performers. Gregory the Seventh passed away at Salerno in A.D. 1087,
exclaiming with his last breath 'I have loved justice and hated
iniquity, therefore I die in exile.' Nineteen years later, in A.D.
1106, Henry IV died, dethroned by an unnatural son whom the hatred of
a relentless pontiff had raised in rebellion against him. But that
son, the emperor Henry the Fifth, so far from conceding the points in
dispute, proved an antagonist more ruthless and not less able than his
father. He claimed for his crown all the rights over ecclesiastics
that his predecessors had ever enjoyed, and when at his coronation in
Rome, A.D. 1112, Pope Paschal II refused to complete the rite until he
should have yielded, Henry seized both Pope and cardinals and
compelled them by a rigorous imprisonment to consent to a treaty which
he dictated. Once set free, the Pope, as was natural, disavowed his
extorted concessions, and the struggle was protracted for ten years
longer, until nearly half a century had elapsed from the first quarrel
between Gregory VII and Henry IV. The Concordat of Worms, concluded in
A.D. 1122, was in form a compromise, designed to spare either party
the humiliation of defeat. Yet the Papacy remained master of the
field. The Emperor retained but one-half of those rights of
investiture which had formerly been his. He could never resume the
position of Henry III; his wishes or intrigues might influence the
proceedings of a chapter, his oath bound him from open interference.
He had entered the strife in the fulness of dignity; he came out of it
with tarnished glory and shattered power. His wars had been hitherto
carried on with foreign foes, or at worst with a single rebel noble;
now his steadiest ally was turned into his fiercest assailant, and had
enlisted against him half his court, half the magnates of his realm.
At any moment his sceptre might be shivered in his hand by the bolt of
anathema, and a host of enemies spring up from every convent and
cathedral.
[Sidenote: The Crusades.]
Two other results of this great conflict ought not to pass unnoticed.
The Emperor was alienated from the Church at the most unfortunate of
all moments, the era of the Crusades. To conduct a great religious war
against the enemies of the faith, to head the church militant in her
carnal as the Popes were accustomed to do in her spiritual strife,
this was the very purpose for which an Emperor had been called into
being; and it was indeed in these wars, more particularly in the first
three of them, that the ideal of a Christian commonwealth which the
theory of the mediæval Empire proclaimed, was once for all and never
again realized by the combined action of the great nations of Europe.
Had such an opportunity fallen to the lot of Henry III, he might have
used it to win back a supremacy hardly inferior to that which had
belonged to the first Carolingians. But Henry IV's proscription
excluded him from all share in an enterprise which he must otherwise
have led--nay, more, committed it to the guidance of his foes. The
religious feeling which the Crusades evoked--a feeling which became
the origin of the great orders of chivalry, and somewhat later of the
two great orders of mendicant friars--turned wholly against the
opponent of ecclesiastical claims, and was made to work the will of
the Holy See, which had blessed and organized the project. A century
and a half later the Pope did not scruple to preach a crusade against
the Emperor himself.
Again: it was now that the first seeds were sown of that fear and
hatred wherewith the German people never thenceforth ceased to regard
the encroaching Romish court. Branded by the Church and forsaken by
the nobles, Henry IV retained the affections of the faithful burghers
of Worms and Liege. It soon became the test of Teutonic patriotism to
resist Italian priestcraft.
[Sidenote: Limitations of imperial prerogative.]
[Sidenote: Lothar II, 1125-1138.]
[Sidenote: Conrad III, 1138-1152.]
The changes in the internal constitution of Germany which the long
anarchy of Henry IV's reign had produced are seen when the nature of
the prerogative as it stood at the accession of Conrad II, the first
Franconian Emperor, is compared with its state at Henry V's death. All
fiefs are now hereditary, and when vacant can be granted afresh only
by consent of the States; the jurisdiction of the crown is less wide;
the idea is beginning to make progress that the most essential part of
the Empire is not its supreme head but the commonwealth of princes and
barons. The greatest triumph of these feudal magnates is in the
establishment of the elective principle, which when confirmed by the
three free elections of Lothar II, Conrad III, and Frederick I, passes
into an undoubted law. The Prince-Electors are mentioned in A.D. 1156
as a distinct and important body[179]. The clergy, too, whom the
policy of Otto the Great and Henry II had raised, are now not less
dangerous than the dukes, whose power it was hoped they would balance;
possibly more so, since protected by their sacred character and their
allegiance to the Pope, while able at the same time to command the
arms of their countless vassals. Nor were the two succeeding Emperors
the men to retrieve those disasters. The Saxon Lothar the Second is
the willing minion of the Pope; performs at his coronation a menial
service unknown before, and takes a more stringent oath to defend the
Holy See, that he may purchase its support against the Swabian faction
in his own dominions. Conrad the Third, the first Emperor of the great
house of Hohenstaufen[180], represents the anti-papal party; but
domestic troubles and an unfortunate crusade prevented him from
effecting anything in Italy. He never even entered Rome to receive the
crown.
FOOTNOTES:
[171] 'Roma per sedem Beati Petri caput orbis effecta.'--See note _i_,
p. 32.
[172] 'Claves tibi _ad regnum_ dimisimus.'--Pope Stephen to Charles
Martel, in _Codex Carolinus_, ap. Muratori, _S. R. I._ iii. Some,
however, prefer to read 'ad rogum.'
[173] _Corpus Iuris Canonici_, Dist. lxiii. c. 22.
[174] Dist. lxiii. c. 30. This decree is, however, in all probability
spurious.
[175] 'Nos elegimus merito et approbavimus una cum annisu et voto
patrum amplique senatus et gentis togatæ,' &c., ap. Baron. _Ann.
Eccl._, ad ann. 876.
[176] 'Divina vos pietas B. principum apostolorum Petri et Pauli
interventione per vicarium ipsorum dominum Ioannem summum pontificem
... ad imperiale culmen S. Spiritus iudicio provexit.'--_Concil.
Ticinense_, in Mur., _S. R. I._ ii.
[177] Strictly speaking, Henry was at this time only king of the
Romans: he was not crowned Emperor at Rome till 1084.
[178] Letter of Gregory VII to William I, A.D. 1080. I quote from
Migne, t. cxlviii. p. 568.
[179] 'Gradum statim post Principes Electores.'--Frederick I's
Privilege of Austria, in Pertz, _M. G. H._ legg. ii.
[180] Hohenstaufen is a castle in what is now the kingdom of
Würtemberg, about four miles from the Göppingen station of the railway
from Stuttgart to Ulm. It stands, or rather stood, on the summit of a
steep and lofty conical hill, commanding a boundless view over the
great limestone plateau of the Rauhe Alp, the eastern declivities of
the Schwartzwald, and the bare and tedious plains of western Bavaria.
Of the castle itself, destroyed in the Peasants' War, there remain
only fragments of the wall-foundations: in a rude chapel lying on the
hill slope below are some strange half-obliterated frescoes; over the
arch of the door is inscribed 'Hic transibat Cæsar.' Frederick
Barbarossa had another famous palace at Kaiserslautern, a small town
in the Palatinate, on the railway from Mannheim to Treves, lying in a
wide valley at the western foot of the Hardt mountains. It was
destroyed by the French and a house of correction has been built upon
its site; but in a brewery hard by may be seen some of the huge
low-browed arches of its lower story.