FALL OF THE HOHENSTAUFEN.
In the three preceding chapters the Holy Empire has been described in
what is not only the most brilliant but the most momentous period of
its history; the period of its rivalry with the Popedom for the chief
place in Christendom. For it was mainly through their relations with
the spiritual power, by their friendship and protection at first, no
less than by their subsequent hostility, that the Teutonic Emperors
influenced the development of European politics. The reform of the
Roman Church which went on during the reigns of Otto I and his
successors down to Henry III, and which was chiefly due to the efforts
of those monarchs, was the true beginning of the grand period of the
Middle Ages, the first of that long series of movements, changes, and
creations in the ecclesiastical system of Europe which was, so to
speak, the master current of history, secular as well as religious,
during the centuries which followed. The first result of Henry III's
purification of the Papacy was seen in Hildebrand's attempt to subject
all jurisdiction to that of his own chair, and in the long struggle of
the Investitures, which brought out into clear light the opposing
pretensions of the temporal and spiritual powers. Although destined in
the end to bear far other fruit, the immediate effect of this struggle
was to evoke in all classes an intense religious feeling; and, in
opening up new fields of ambition to the hierarchy, to stimulate
wonderfully their power of political organization. It was this impulse
that gave birth to the Crusades, and that enabled the Popes, stepping
forth as the rightful leaders of a religious war, to bend it to serve
their own ends: it was thus too that they struck the alliance--strange
as such an alliance seems now--with the rebellious cities of Lombardy,
and proclaimed themselves the protectors of municipal freedom. But the
third and crowning triumph of the Holy See was reserved for the
thirteenth century. In the foundation of the two great orders of
ecclesiastical knighthood, the all-powerful all-pervading Dominicans
and Franciscans, the religious fervour of the Middle Ages culminated:
in the overthrow of the only power which could pretend to vie with her
in antiquity, in sanctity, in universality, the Papacy saw herself
exalted to rule alone over the kings of the earth. Of that overthrow,
following with terrible suddenness on the days of strength and glory
which we have just been witnessing, this chapter has now to speak.
[Sidenote: Henry VI, 1190-1197.]
[Sidenote: Philip, 1198-1208.]
[Sidenote: Innocent III and Otto IV.]
[Sidenote: Otto IV, 1208 (1198)-1212.]
It happened strangely enough that just while their ruin was preparing,
the house of Swabia gained over their ecclesiastical foes what seemed
likely to prove an advantage of the first moment. The son and
successor of Barbarossa was Henry VI, a man who had inherited all his
father's harshness with none of his father's generosity. By his
marriage with Constance, the heiress of the Norman kings, he had
become master of Naples and Sicily. Emboldened by the possession of
what had been hitherto the stronghold of his predecessors' bitterest
enemies, and able to threaten the Pope from south as well as north,
Henry conceived a scheme which might have wonderfully changed the
history of Germany and Italy. He proposed to the Teutonic magnates to
lighten their burdens by uniting these newly-acquired countries to the
Empire, to turn their feudal lands into allodial, and to make no
further demands for money on the clergy, on condition that they should
pronounce the crown hereditary in his family. Results of the highest
importance would have followed this change, which Henry advocated by
setting forth the perils of interregna, and which he doubtless meant
to be but part of an entirely new system of polity. Already so strong
in Germany, and with an absolute command of their new kingdom, the
Hohenstaufen might have dispensed with the renounced feudal services,
and built up a firm centralized system, like that which was already
beginning to develope itself in France. First, however, the Saxon
princes, then some ecclesiastics headed by Conrad of Mentz, opposed
the scheme; the pontiff retracted his consent, and Henry had to
content himself with getting his infant son Frederick the Second
chosen king of the Romans. On Henry's untimely death the election was
set aside, and the contest which followed between Otto of Brunswick
and Philip of Hohenstaufen, brother of Henry the Sixth, gave the
Popedom, now guided by the genius of Innocent the Third, an
opportunity of extending its sway at the expense of its antagonist.
The Pope moved heaven and earth on behalf of Otto, whose family had
been the constant rivals of the Hohenstaufen, and who was himself
willing to promise all that Innocent required; but Philip's personal
merits and the vast possessions of his house gave him while he lived
the ascendancy in Germany. His death by the hand of an assassin, while
it seemed to vindicate the Pope's choice, left the Swabian party
without a head, and the Papal nominee was soon recognized over the
whole Empire. But Otto IV became less submissive as he felt his throne
more secure. If he was a Guelf by birth, his acts in Italy, whither he
had gone to receive the imperial crown, were those of a Ghibeline,
anxious to reclaim the rights he had but just forsworn. The Roman
Church at last deposed and excommunicated her ungrateful son, and
Innocent rejoiced in a second successful assertion of pontifical
supremacy, when Otto was dethroned by the youthful Frederick the
Second, whom a tragic irony sent into the field of politics as the
champion of the Holy See, whose hatred was to embitter his life and
extinguish his house.
[Sidenote: Frederick the Second, 1212-1250.]
Upon the events of that terrific strife, for which Emperor and Pope
girded themselves up for the last time, the narrative of Frederick the
Second's career, with its romantic adventures, its sad picture of
marvellous powers lost on an age not ripe for them, blasted as by a
curse in the moment of victory, it is not necessary, were it even
possible, here to enlarge. That conflict did indeed determine the
fortunes of the German kingdom no less than of the republics of Italy,
but it was upon Italian ground that it was fought out and it is to
Italian history that its details belong. So too of Frederick himself.
Out of the long array of the Germanic successors of Charles, he is,
with Otto III, the only one who comes before us with a genius and a
frame of character that are not those of a Northern or a Teuton[251].
There dwelt in him, it is true, all the energy and knightly valour of
his father Henry and his grandfather Barbarossa. But along with these,
and changing their direction, were other gifts, inherited perhaps from
his Italian mother and fostered by his education among the
orange-groves of Palermo--a love of luxury and beauty, an intellect
refined, subtle, philosophical. Through the mist of calumny and fable
it is but dimly that the truth of the man can be discerned, and the
outlines that appear serve to quicken rather than appease the
curiosity with which we regard one of the most extraordinary
personages in history. A sensualist, yet also a warrior and a
politician; a profound lawgiver and an impassioned poet; in his youth
fired by crusading fervour, in later life persecuting heretics while
himself accused of blasphemy and unbelief; of winning manners and
ardently beloved by his followers, but with the stain of more than one
cruel deed upon his name, he was the marvel of his own generation, and
succeeding ages looked back with awe, not unmingled with pity, upon
the inscrutable figure of the last Emperor who had braved all the
terrors of the Church and died beneath her ban, the last who had ruled
from the sands of the ocean to the shores of the Sicilian sea. But
while they pitied they condemned. The undying hatred of the Papacy
threw round his memory a lurid light; him and him alone of all the
imperial line, Dante, the worshipper of the Empire, must perforce
deliver to the flames of hell[252].
[Sidenote: Struggle of Frederick with the Papacy.]
Placed as the Empire was, it was scarcely possible for its head not to
be involved in war with the constantly aggressive Popedom--aggressive
in her claims of territorial dominion in Italy as well as of
ecclesiastical jurisdiction throughout the world. But it was
Frederick's peculiar misfortune to have given the Popes a hold over
him which they well knew how to use. In a moment of youthful
enthusiasm he had taken the cross from the hands of an eloquent monk,
and his delay to fulfil the vow was branded as impious neglect.
Excommunicated by Gregory IX for not going to Palestine, he went, and
was excommunicated for going: having concluded an advantageous peace,
he sailed for Italy, and was a third time excommunicated for
returning. To Pope Gregory he was at last after a fashion reconciled,
but with the accession of Innocent IV the flame burst out afresh. Upon
the special pretexts which kindled the strife it is not worth while to
descant: the real causes were always the same, and could only be
removed by the submission of one or other combatant. Chief among them
was Frederick's possession of Sicily. Now were seen the fruits which
Barbarossa had stored up for his house when he gained for Henry his
son the hand of the Norman heiress. Naples and Sicily had been for
some two hundred years recognized as a fief of the Holy See, and the
Pope, who felt himself in danger while encircled by the powers of his
rival, was determined to use his advantage to the full and make it the
means of extinguishing imperial authority throughout Italy. But
although the struggle was far more of a territorial and political one
than that of the previous century had been, it reopened every former
source of strife, and passed into a contest between the civil and the
spiritual potentate. The old war-cries of Henry and Hildebrand, of
Barbarossa and Alexander, roused again the unquenchable hatred of
Italian factions: the pontiff asserted the transference of the Empire
as a fief, and declared that the power of Peter, symbolized by the two
keys, was temporal as well as spiritual: the Emperor appealed to law,
to the indelible rights of Cæsar; and denounced his foe as the
antichrist of the New Testament, since it was God's second vicar whom
he was resisting. The one scoffed at anathema, upbraided the avarice
of the Church, and treated her soldiery, the friars, with a severity
not seldom ferocious. The other solemnly deposed a rebellious and
heretical prince, offered the imperial crown to Robert of France, to
the heir of Denmark, to Haco the Norse king; succeeded at last in
raising up rivals in Henry of Thuringia and William of Holland. Yet
throughout it is less the Teutonic Emperor who is attacked than the
Sicilian king, the unbeliever and friend of Mohammedans, the
hereditary enemy of the Church, the assailant of Lombard independence,
whose success must leave the Papacy defenceless. And as it was from
the Sicilian kingdom that the strife chiefly arose, so was the
possession of the Sicilian kingdom a source rather of weakness than of
strength, for it distracted Frederick's forces and put him in the
false position of a liegeman resisting his lawful suzerain. Truly, as
the Greek proverb says, the gifts of foes are no gifts, and bring no
profit with them. The Norman kings were more terrible in their death
than in their life: they had sometimes baffled the Teutonic Emperor;
their heritage destroyed him.
[Sidenote: Conrad IV, 1250-1254.]
With Frederick fell the Empire. From the ruin that overwhelmed the
greatest of its houses it emerged, living indeed, and destined to a
long life, but so shattered, crippled, and degraded, that it could
never more be to Europe and to Germany what it once had been. In the
last act of the tragedy were joined the enemy who had now blighted its
strength and the rival who was destined to insult its weakness and at
last blot out its name. The murder of Frederick's grandson Conradin--a
hero whose youth and whose chivalry might have moved the pity of any
other foe--was approved, if not suggested, by Pope Clement; it was
done by the minions of Charles of France.
[Sidenote: Italy lost to the Empire.]
The Lombard league had successfully resisted Frederick's armies and
the more dangerous Ghibeline nobles: their strong walls and swarming
population made defeats in the open field hardly felt; and now that
South Italy too had passed away from a German line--first to an
Angevin, afterwards to an Aragonese dynasty--it was plain that the
peninsula was irretrievably lost to the Emperors. Why, however, should
they not still be strong beyond the Alps? was their position worse
than that of England when Normandy and Aquitaine no longer obeyed a
Plantagenet? The force that had enabled them to rule so widely would
be all the greater in a narrower sphere.
[Sidenote: Decline of imperial power in Germany.]
[Sidenote: The Great Interregnum]
[Sidenote: Double election, of Richard of England and Alfonso of
Castile.]
[Sidenote: State of Germany during the Interregnum.]
[Sidenote: Rudolf of Hapsburg, 1272-1292.]
So indeed it might once have been, but now it was too late. The German
kingdom broke down beneath the weight of the Roman Empire. To be
universal sovereign Germany had sacrificed her own political
existence. The necessity which their projects in Italy and disputes
with the Pope laid the Emperors under of purchasing by concessions the
support of their own princes, the ease with which in their absence the
magnates could usurp, the difficulty which the monarch returning found
in resuming the privileges of his crown, the temptation to revolt and
set up pretenders to the throne which the Holy See held out, these
were the causes whose steady action laid the foundation of that
territorial independence which rose into a stable fabric at the era of
the Great Interregnum[253]. Frederick II had by two Pragmatic
Sanctions, A.D. 1220 and 1232, granted, or rather confirmed, rights
already customary, such as to give the bishops and nobles legal
sovereignty in their own towns and territories, except when the
Emperor should be present; and thus his direct jurisdiction became
restricted to his narrowed domain, and to the cities immediately
dependent on the crown. With so much less to do, an Emperor became
altogether a less necessary personage; and hence the seven magnates of
the realm, now by law or custom sole electors, were in no haste to
fill up the place of Conrad IV, whom the supporters of his father
Frederick had acknowledged. William of Holland was in the field, but
rejected by the Swabian party: on his death a new election was called
for, and at last set on foot. The archbishop of Cologne advised his
brethren to choose some one rich enough to support the dignity, not
strong enough to be feared by the electors: both requisites met in the
Plantagenet Richard, earl of Cornwall, brother of the English Henry
III. He received three, eventually four votes, came to Germany, and
was crowned at Aachen. But three of the electors, finding that his
bribe to them was lower than to the others, seceded in disgust, and
chose Alfonso X of Castile[254], who, shrewder than his competitor,
continued to watch the stars at Toledo, enjoying the splendours of his
title while troubling himself about it no further than to issue now
and then a proclamation. Meantime the condition of Germany was
frightful. The new Didius Julianus, the chosen of princes baser than
the prætorians whom they copied, had neither the character nor the
outward power and resources to make himself respected. Every floodgate
of anarchy was opened: prelates and barons extended their domains by
war: robber-knights infested the highways and the rivers: the misery
of the weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong, were such as had
not been seen for centuries. Things were even worse than under the
Saxon and Franconian Emperors; for the petty nobles who had then been
in some measure controlled by their dukes were now, after the
extinction of the great houses, left without any feudal superior. Only
in the cities was shelter or peace to be found. Those of the Rhine had
already leagued themselves for mutual defence, and maintained a
struggle in the interests of commerce and order against universal
brigandage. At last, when Richard had been some time dead, it was felt
that such things could not go on for ever: with no public law, and no
courts of justice, an Emperor, the embodiment of legal government, was
the only resource. The Pope himself, having now sufficiently improved
the weakness of his enemy, found the disorganization of Germany
beginning to tell upon his revenues, and threatened that if the
electors did not appoint an Emperor, he would. Thus urged, they chose,
in A.D. 1272, Rudolf, count of Hapsburg, founder of the house of
Austria[255].
[Sidenote: Change in the position of the Empire.]
From this point there begins a new era. We have seen the Roman Empire
revived in A.D. 800, by a prince whose vast dominions gave ground to
his claim of universal monarchy; again erected, in A.D. 962, on the
narrower but firmer basis of the German kingdom. We have seen Otto the
Great and his successors during the three following centuries, a line
of monarchs of unrivalled vigour and abilities, strain every nerve to
make good the pretensions of their office against the rebels in Italy
and the ecclesiastical power. Those efforts had now failed signally
and hopelessly. Each successive Emperor had entered the strife with
resources scantier than his predecessors, each had been more
decisively vanquished by the Pope, the cities, and the princes. The
Roman Empire might, and, so far as its practical utility was
concerned, ought now to have been suffered to expire; nor could it
have ended more gloriously than with the last of the Hohenstaufen.
That it did not so expire, but lived on six hundred years more, till
it became a piece of antiquarianism hardly more venerable than
ridiculous--till, as Voltaire said, all that could be said about it
was that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire--was owing
partly indeed to the belief, still unshaken, that it was a necessary
part of the world's order, yet chiefly to its connection, which was by
this time indissoluble, with the German kingdom. The Germans had
confounded the two characters of their sovereign so long, and had
grown so fond of the style and pretensions of a dignity whose
possession appeared to exalt them above the other peoples of Europe,
that it was now too late for them to separate the local from the
universal monarch. If a German king was to be maintained at all, he
must be Roman Emperor; and a German king there must still be. Deeply,
nay, mortally wounded as the event proved his power to have been by
the disasters of the Empire to which it had been linked, the time was
by no means come for its extinction. In the unsettled state of
society, and the conflict of innumerable petty potentates, no force
save feudalism was able to hold society together; and its efficacy for
that purpose depended, as the anarchy of the recent interregnum
shewed, upon the presence of the recognized feudal head.
[Sidenote: Decline of the regal power in Germany as compared with
France and England.]
That head, however, was no longer what he had been. The relative
position of Germany and France was now exactly the reverse of that
which they had occupied two centuries earlier. Rudolf was as
conspicuously a weaker sovereign than Philip III of France, as the
Franconian Emperor Henry III had been stronger than the Capetian
Philip I. In every other state of Europe the tendency of events had
been to centralize the administration and increase the power of the
monarch, even in England not to diminish it: in Germany alone had
political union become weaker, and the independence of the princes
more confirmed. The causes of this change are not far to seek. They
all resolve themselves into this one, that the German king attempted
too much at once. The rulers of France, where manners were less rude
than in the other Transalpine lands, and where the Third Estate rose
into power more quickly, had reduced one by one the great feudataries
by whom the first Capetians had been scarcely recognized. The English
kings had annexed Wales, Cumbria, and part of Ireland, had obtained a
prerogative great if not uncontrolled, and exercised no doubtful sway
through every corner of their country. Both had won their successes by
the concentration on that single object of their whole personal
activity, and by the skilful use of every device whereby their feudal
rights, personal, judicial, and legislative, could be applied to
fetter the vassal. Meantime the German monarch, whose utmost efforts
it would have needed to tame his fierce barons and maintain order
through wide territories occupied by races unlike in dialect and
customs, had been struggling with the Lombard cities and the Normans
of South Italy, and had been for full two centuries the object of the
unrelenting enmity of the Roman pontiff. And in this latter contest,
by which more than by any other the fate of the Empire was decided, he
fought under disadvantages far greater than his brethren in England
and France. William the Conqueror had defied Hildebrand, William Rufus
had resisted Anselm; but the Emperors Henry the Fourth and Barbarossa
had to cope with prelates who were Hildebrand and Anselm in one; the
spiritual heads of Christendom as well as the primates of their
special realm, the Empire. And thus, while the ecclesiastics of
Germany were a body more formidable from their possessions than those
of any other European country, and enjoying far larger privileges, the
Emperor could not, or could with far less effect, win them over by
invoking against the Pope that national feeling which made the cry of
Gallican liberties so welcome even to the clergy of France.
[Sidenote: Relations of the Papacy and the Empire.]
After repeated defeats, each more crushing than the last, the imperial
power, so far from being able to look down on the papal, could not
even maintain itself on an equal footing. Against no pontiff since
Gregory VII had the monarch's right to name or confirm a pope,
undisputed in the days of the Ottos and of Henry III, been made good.
It was the turn of the Emperor to repel a similar claim of the Holy
See to the function of reviewing his own election, examining into his
merits, and rejecting him if unsound, that is to say, impatient of
priestly tyranny. A letter of Innocent III, who was the first to make
this demand in terms, was inserted by Gregory IX in his digest of the
Canon Law, the inexhaustible armoury of the churchman, and continued
to be quoted thence by every canonist till the end of the sixteenth
century[256]. It was not difficult to find grounds on which to base
such a doctrine. Gregory VII deduced it with characteristic boldness
from the power of the keys, and the superiority over all other
dignities which must needs appertain to the Pope as arbiter of eternal
weal or woe. Others took their stand on the analogy of clerical
ordination, and urged that since the Pope in consecrating the Emperor
gave him a title to the obedience of all Christian men, he must have
himself the right of approving or rejecting the candidate according to
his merits. Others again, appealing to the Old Testament, shewed how
Samuel discarded Saul and anointed David in his room, and argued that
the Pope now must have powers at least equal to those of the Hebrew
prophets. But the ascendancy of the doctrine dates from the time of
Pope Innocent III, whose ingenuity discovered for it an historical
basis. It was by the favour of the Pope, he declared, that the Empire
was taken away from the Greeks and given to the Germans in the person
of Charles[257], and the authority which Leo then exercised as God's
representative must abide thenceforth and for ever in his successors,
who can therefore at any time recall the gift, and bestow it on a
person or a nation more worthy than its present holders. This is the
famous theory of the Translation of the Empire, which plays so large a
part in controversy down till the seventeenth century[258], a theory
with plausibility enough to make it generally successful, yet one
which to an impartial eye appears far removed from the truth of the
facts[259]. Leo III did not suppose, any more than did Charles
himself, that it was by his sole pontifical authority that the crown
was given to the Frank; nor do we find such a notion put forward by
any of his successors down to the twelfth century. Gregory VII in
particular, in a remarkable letter dilating on his prerogative,
appeals to the substitution by papal interference of Pipin for the
last Merovingian king, and even goes back to cite the case of
Theodosius humbling himself before St. Ambrose, but says never a word
about this 'translatio,' excellently as it would have served his
purpose.
Sound or unsound, however, these arguments did their work, for they
were urged skilfully and boldly, and none denied that it was by the
Pope alone that the crown could be lawfully imposed[260]. In some
instances the rights claimed were actually made good. Thus Innocent
III withstood Philip and overthrew Otto IV; thus another haughty
priest commanded the electors to choose the Landgrave of Thuringia
(A.D. 1246), and was by some of them obeyed; thus Gregory X compelled
the recognition of Rudolf. The further pretensions of the Popes to the
vicariate of the Empire during interregna the Germans never
admitted[261]. Still their place was now generally felt to be higher
than that of the monarch, and their control over the three spiritual
electors and the whole body of the clergy was far more effective than
his. A spark of national feeling was at length kindled by the
exactions and shameless subservience to France of the papal court at
Avignon[262]; and the infant democracy of industry and intelligence
represented by the cities and by the English Franciscan Occam,
supported Lewis IV in his conflict with John XXII, till even the
princes who had risen by the help of the Pope were obliged to oppose
him. The same sentiment dictated the reforms of Constance, but the
imperial power which might have floated onwards and higher on the
turning tide of popular opinion lacked men equal to the occasion: the
Hapsburg Frederick the Third, timid and superstitious, abased himself
before the Romish court, and his house has generally adhered to the
alliance then struck.
FOOTNOTES:
[251] I quote from the Liber Augustalis printed among Petrarch's works
the following curious description of Frederick: 'Fuit armorum
strenuus, linguarum peritus, rigorosus, luxuriosus, epicurus, nihil
curans vel credens nisi temporale: fuit malleus Romanae ecclesiae.'
As Otto III had been called 'mirabilia mundi,' so Frederick II is
often spoken of in his own time as 'stupor mundi Fridericus.'
[252] 'Quà entro è lo secondo Federico.'--_Inferno_, canto x.
[253] The interregnum is by some reckoned as the two years before
Richard's election; by others, as the whole period from the death of
Frederick II or that of his son Conrad IV till Rudolf's accession in
1273.
[254] Surnamed, from his scientific tastes, 'the Wise.'
[255] Hapsburg is a castle in the Aargau on the banks of the Aar, and
near the line of railway from Olten to Zürich, from a point on which a
glimpse of it may be had. 'Within the ancient walls of Vindonissa,'
says Gibbon, 'the castle of Hapsburg, the abbey of Königsfeld, and the
town of Bruck have successively arisen. The philosophic traveller may
compare the monuments of Roman conquests, of feudal or Austrian
tyranny, of monkish superstition, and of industrious freedom. If he be
truly a philosopher, he will applaud the merit and happiness of his
own time.'
[256] _Corpus Iuris Canonici_, Decr. Greg. i. 6, cap. 34,
_Venerabilem_: 'Ius et authoritas examinandi personam electam in regem
et promovendam ad imperium, ad nos spectat, qui eum inungimus,
consecramus, et coronamus.'
[257] 'Illis principibus,' writes Innocent, 'ius et potestatem
eligendi regem [Romanorum] in imperatorem postmodum promovendum
recognoscimus, ad quos de iure ac antiqua consuetudine noscitur
pertinere, præsertim quum ad eos ius et potestas huiusmodi ab
apostolica sede pervenerit, quæ Romanum imperium in persona magnifici
Caroli a Græcis transtulit in Germanos.'--Decr. Greg. i. 6, cap. 34,
_Venerabilem_.
[258] Its influence, however, as Döllinger (_Das Kaiserthum Karls des
Grossen und seiner Nachfolger_) remarks, first became great when this
letter, some forty or fifty years after Innocent wrote it, was
inserted in the digest of the canon law.
[259] Vid. supra, pp. 52-58.
[260] Upon this so-called 'Translation of the Empire,' many books
remain to us: many more have probably perished. A good although far
from impartial summary of the controversy may be found in Vagedes, _De
Ludibriis Aulæ Romanæ in transferendo Imperio Romano_.
[261] 'Vacante imperio Romano, cum in illo ad sæcularem iudicem
nequeat haberi recursus, ad summum pontificem, cui in persona B. Petri
terreni simul et cœlestis imperii iura Deus ipse commisit, imperii
prædicti iurisdictio regimen et dispositio devolvitur.'--Bull _Si
fratrum_ (of John XXI, in A.D. 1316), in _Bullar. Rom._ So again:
'Attendentes quod Imperii Romani regimen cura et administratio tempore
quo illud vacare contingit ad nos pertinet, sicut dignoscitur
pertinere.' So Boniface VIII, refusing to recognize Albert I, because
he was ugly and one-eyed ('est homo monoculus et vultu sordido, non
potest esse Imperator'), and had taken a wife from the serpent brood
of Frederick II ('de sanguine viperali Friderici'), declared himself
Vicar of the Empire, and assumed the crown and sword of Constantine.
[262] Avignon was not yet in the territory of France: it lay within
the bounds of the kingdom of Arles. But the French power was nearer
than that of the Emperor; and pontiffs many of them French by
extraction sympathized, as was natural, with princes of their own
race.