THE DEGRADATION OF ITALY (867-962)
These triumphs were due to the brilliant vigour of Pope Nicholas; but
that triumphant position could not last, it was fictitious. The Papacy
needed the support of a strong secular power, and when the Carlovingian
Empire dissolved, it had nothing to rest on, neither genius nor military
force, and fell into deep degradation.
To illustrate that degradation one episode will suffice; but there must
first be a word of prologue. The Papacy, as has been said, occupied an
anomalous position. From this sprang many troubles. As soon as the
pressure of Imperial authority was removed, the Papacy tended to become
the prize of municipal politics, and different parties in Rome (if the
turbulent mobs may be called so) struggled to get possession of it. One
party, with interests centred on local matters, indifferent to the
greatness of the Papacy and its European character, and willing to have
the Pope a mere local ruler, directed its efforts to getting rid of all
Imperial and foreign control. The opposite party, with conflicting
interests, wished for Imperial control, and constituted a kind of
Imperial party, less from any large views, than in the hope of deriving
advantages from Imperial support. Strife between the two parties was the
normal condition, and often ended in riot and civil war. In this state
of affairs, a certain Pope Formosus (891-896), who belonged to the
Imperial faction, went so far as to invite the German king to come down
to Rome and be crowned Emperor. The king actually came and was crowned,
but accomplished little or nothing, except to arouse bitter hostility in
his enemies. When Formosus died, his successor was elected from the
opposite faction. The new Pope held a synod of cardinals and bishops,
and before them, the highest Christian tribunal in the world, he
summoned, upon the charge of violating the canons of the Church, the
dead Formosus, whose body had lain in its grave, for months. The body
was dug up, dressed in pontifical robes, and propped upon a throne.
Counsel was assigned to it. The accusation was formally read, and the
Pope himself cross-questioned the accused, who was convicted and
deposed. His pontifical acts were pronounced invalid. His robes were
torn from him, the three fingers of the right hand, which in life had
bestowed the episcopal blessing, were hacked off, and the body was
dragged through the streets and flung into the Tiber.
This incident sheds light on mediaeval Rome, and on the character of the
people with whom the Popes had to live. All the Popes, good, bad, and
indifferent, whether they were struggling with the Empire on great
cosmopolitan questions, or were trying to unite Christendom against
Islam, always had to keep watch on the brutal, ignorant, bloody Roman
people, who took no interest in great questions, and were always ready
to rob, burn, and murder with or without a pretext.
Now that we have brought the Frankish Empire to its dissolution, and the
Papacy to its degradation, we must leave the two wrecks for the moment,
and stop in these dark years at the end of the ninth century to see how
Italy herself has fared. The Italian world was out of joint,
intellectually, morally, politically. There can hardly be said to have
been a government. For a generation the poor, shrunken Empire had been
but a shadow, and when the last Carlovingian died, its parts tumbled
asunder. Local barons ruled everywhere. The Imperial title, which
represented nothing, and conveyed no power, seemed, however, to have
some vital principle of its own, some ghostly virtue; at least sundry
kings and dukes thought so and fought for it; but until the coming of
Otto the Great it remained a shadow. North of the Alps duchies and
provinces united into kingdoms; but the peninsula remained split up into
discordant parts. The valley of the Po was divided into various duchies,
peopled by a mixed race of Latins and Lombards, whom the pressure of the
conquering Franks had welded together. South of the Po lay the Imperial
marquisate of Tuscany. Across the middle of the peninsula stretched the
awkward strip of domain from Ravenna to Rome, inhabited by a race of
comparatively pure Latin blood. This domain, included in the _Donations_
of Pippin and of Charlemagne, nominally subject to the Papacy under the
suzerainty of the Empire, was really in the possession of petty nobles,
who knew no law except force and craft. South of this so-called papal
domain lay the duchy of Spoleto and the Lombard duchy of Benevento, and
farther south a few principalities, such as Naples, Amalfi, and Salerno,
and finally in the heel and toe of Italy were the last remains of the
Greek Empire. To the northeast, on its islands, lay the little fishing
and trading city, Venice.
The Italians, as we had better call them now that Barbarian and Latin
blood has well commingled, were in a most unenviable condition. Most of
those who tilled the soil were serfs, and went with the land when it was
sold; some were scarce better than slaves, others were only bound to
render service of certain kinds or on certain days, either with their
own hands or with beasts. Their lot depended on the humours of the
overseers of great estates. Slaves were worse off because they had no
personal rights, but they were always decreasing in number despite a
slave trade, for there was a strong religious sentiment against slavery,
and it was common for dying men to liberate their slaves. In the cities
people were better off, for the artisans were free men, and by banding
together in guilds (which had existed ever since the old Roman days)
secured for themselves a more prosperous condition. But the only
thriving places were the cities of the coast, Venice, Genoa, Pisa,
Amalfi, where trade was already beginning to lay the foundations of
future greatness.
These glimmerings of commerce were the only lights along the whole
horizon. Everything else seemed to share the blight that had fallen on
the Empire and the Papacy. The clergy, whose duty it was to maintain
learning, failed utterly. Even in the happiest days of the Carlovingian
Empire, Charlemagne had found it necessary to enact blunt rules for
their guidance. "Let the priests, according to the Apostles' advice,
withdraw themselves from revellings and drunkenness; for some of them
are wont to sit up till midnight or later, boozing with their
neighbours; and then these men, who ought to be of a religious and holy
deportment, return to their churches drunken and gorged with food, and
unable to perform the daily and nightly office of praise to God, while
others sink down in a drunken sleep in the place of their revels.... Let
no priest presume to store provisions or hay in the church."[6]
Learning, supposed to be committed to their charge, went out like a
spent candle. Books were almost forgotten, except perhaps here and
there, in Pavia or Verona, where a grammarian still invoked Virgil to
prosper his muse; or where in an episcopal city, like Ravenna, some
chronicler wrote a history of the bishopric. The theory of historic
truth on which these chroniclers acted gives an inkling of the mediaeval
attitude towards facts. Father Agnello, a priest of Ravenna, one of
these chroniclers, says himself: "If you, who read this History of our
Bishopric, shall come to a passage and say, 'Why didn't he narrate the
facts about this bishop as he did about his predecessors,' listen to the
reason. I, Andrea Agnello, a humble priest of this holy church of
Ravenna, have written the history of this Bishopric from the time of St.
Apollinaris for eight hundred years and more, because my brethren here
have begged me and compelled me. I have put down whatever I found the
Bishops had undoubtedly done, and whatever I heard from the oldest men
living, but where I could not find any historical account, nor anything
about their lives in any way, then, in order to leave no blanks in the
holy succession of bishops, I have made up the missing lives by the help
of God, through your prayers, and I believe I have said nothing untrue,
because those bishops were pious and pure and charitable and winners of
souls for God."[7]
The monks were no better than the secular clergy. The monasteries had
grown large, for many men had joined in order to escape military
service, or to obtain personal security, or an easier life, or greater
social consideration; they had also grown rich, for many sinners on
their deathbeds had given large sums, in hope to compound for their
sins. Naturally monastic vows were often broken. Moreover, the little
good that monks and priests did they undid by their encouragement of
superstition. They first frightened the poor peasants out of their wits
by portraying the horrors of hell, and then preached the magical
properties of the sacraments and of saints' bones, until the ordinary
man, feeling himself the sport of superhuman agencies, abandoned all
self-confidence and surrendered himself to priestly control as his sole
hope of safety in this world or the next.
Oppressed by anarchy, by division, by a degenerate church, by a gross
clergy, and by waxing ignorance, Italy might seem to have had its cup
of evil full. There was but one further ill that could be added, a new
Barbarian invasion. It came. The triumphant Saracens, having overrun
Spain and raided France in the west, having cooped up the Byzantine
Empire in the east, now threatened to plant their victorious banners in
the very heart of Christendom. As early as Charlemagne's last years they
sacked a coast town scarce forty miles from Rome. In 827 they invaded
Sicily, invited by a partisan traitor. Within ten years they had made
themselves masters of almost all the island, except a few strongholds
which managed to hold out for half a century. The beaten Byzantines
retired to the mainland; but they did not get beyond the reach of the
victorious Saracens, who raided all the Italian coast as far as the
Tiber. Troops of marauders hovered round Rome and harried the
country-side, robbing and pillaging at will. One band advanced to the
very gates of the city, and sacked St. Peter's and St. Paul's, both
outside the walls and undefended (846). All the southern provinces were
overrun, half of their towns became Saracen fortresses. It seemed as if
Italy were to undergo the fate of Spain and become a Mohammedan Emirate.
The danger to Rome roused the country. A Christian league was effected
between the Imperial forces in Italy, the Pope, and the coast cities of
the south,--Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi. Pope Leo himself blessed the
fleet, and the Christians beat the infidels in a great sea-fight not far
from the Tiber's mouth (849). Some of the prisoners were brought to Rome
and set to work on the walls which Pope Leo was building round the
Vatican hill to protect St. Peter's; and Rome, imitating the days of
Scipio Africanus, celebrated another triumph over Africa. The fighting
was kept up all over the south. The Greek Emperor made common cause with
his fellow Christians, and the immediate danger of conquest was
arrested; but throughout this dismal ninth century, and all the tenth,
southern Italy continued to suffer from Saracen marauders. The tales
told of their cruelty are fearful, and match our tales of Indian raids
in the old French-English war. Separate villages and lonely monasteries
suffered most. Some good came out of the evil, however, for the
chroniclers relate how the abbots and their terrified brethren spent
days and nights fasting and in prayer.
Such was the condition of Italy when the Imperial Carlovingian line came
to an end. The omnipresence of anarchy was a permanent argument for the
need of an Imperial restoration. But the country did not know how to go
to work to restore the Empire. At first various claimants asserted
various titles, and Italian dukes and neighbouring kings fought one
another like bulls, but none were able to establish any stable power. In
the midst of these ineffectual struggles one real effort was made.
Arnulf, king of the Germans, who regarded himself as the true successor
of the great Frankish house and of right Imperial heir, marched down
into Italy at the invitation of Pope Formosus, as we have seen, and
assumed the Imperial crown (896). The expedition was barren of
consequences, but it gives us another glimpse of the anomalous nature of
the Papacy, and the different views entertained of it on the two sides
of the Alps. The German king wished to be Emperor, and felt that an
Imperial coronation at Rome by the Pope was essential. To him and to his
German subjects the papal invitation was of high authority. When he
reached Rome, however, the seat of the Papacy, he found the gates barred
and the walls manned by rebellious citizens, who had locked the Pope in
the Castle of Sant' Angelo, and had seized the government of the city.
Arnulf easily carried the defences by storm and liberated the Pope. The
incident illustrates the contrast between Teutonic respect and Roman
disobedience, and describes the papal situation as it was half the time
throughout the Middle Ages. Honoured and reverenced by the pious
ultramontanes, the Popes were insulted, robbed, imprisoned, and deposed
by their immediate subjects. This local disobedience, or, as it should
be called, Roman republicanism, was often the insignificant cause of
papal actions of far-reaching effect. The Popes were never strong enough
of themselves to suppress these republican sentiments and ambitions;
they needed support from some power, Italian or foreign. As they would
not endure the idea of an Italian kingdom, they adopted the alternative
of calling in a foreign power. This was the constant papal policy.
Another instance of Roman republicanism, or disobedience (as one
chooses), throws further light on the nature of this thorn in the papal
side. Not long after Arnulf's expedition, two women, Theodora and
Marozia, mother and daughter, played a great part not only in Roman but
also in Italian politics. These two women ruled the city and appointed
the Popes. They were bold, comely, much-marrying women, choosing
eligible husbands almost by force; both were wholly Roman in the
fierceness, vigour, and sensuality of their characters. They were very
capable, and, in part directly, in part through their husbands and
others, exercised control for some thirty years; and when the daughter
disappeared from history, her son, Alberic, took the title, Prince and
Senator of all the Romans, and ruled in her stead.
Thus the last hope of Italians helping themselves perished; for if the
Papacy was powerless, there was no help elsewhere in Italy. The
usurpation of these viragoes and of Alberic differs in details from the
usurpation of the later republicans, and of the Colonna, Orsini, and
other barons, who shall appear hereafter in papal history, but for
general effect on papal affairs and through them on European affairs,
all these usurpations were very similar. The usurpers, in diverse
characters, represent that third player in the fencing match, who,
though by no means an ally of the Empire, frequently rushed in and
struck up the Pope's guard, and continued to interfere for hundreds of
years, until the Popes of the Renaissance finally established their
temporal power in the city of Rome.
By the middle of the tenth century the disintegration of Italy had
become so bad that it caused its own cure. It was obvious that something
must be done. The Saracens, strongly established in Sicily, were a
standing menace towards the south. From the north wild bands of
Hungarians burst across the Alps and harried the land in barbaric raids
as far as Rome. Feudal anarchy prevailed everywhere. Monks and clergy
were, to say the least, no help. Even the Papacy, the only stable power,
had become the appanage of a Roman family. There was but one way out of
this chaos. The Roman Empire must be restored. The Latin people never
believed that it was extinct but merely lying latent, requiring some
happy application of might and right to set it going again on its
majestic course. Charlemagne, in his day, had supplied the might. That
might had faded away. Where was its substitute to be found? Pope
Formosus and King Arnulf had already suggested the only possible
answer,--in the eastern portion of the Frankish Empire, the kingdom of
Germany. That kingdom, composed of the great duchies of Bavaria, Swabia,
Franconia, Saxony, and Lorraine, had become tolerably compact; it was
strong at home, and was eager for glory and power abroad. Its ambitious
king, Otto, of the Saxon line, was the man to undertake to follow
Charlemagne's example. It was too late to hope to restore the
Carlovingian Empire in its former boundaries, but with Germany to give
strength and Rome to contribute title, there would be the two necessary
elements for a renewal of the Roman Empire.
The immediate pretext of Otto's coming down into Italy was highly
romantic. A lovely lady, the widow of one Italian pretender to the
throne of Italy, was pestered with offers of marriage from another
pretender. She refused, and was locked up in a tower by the Lake of
Garda, where memories of Catullus and Lesbia still faintly lingered. She
contrived to escape, and sent piteous messages for help to the great
Otto, then a widower. Discontented factions in the north, and others
suffering from oppression, including the Pope who had been rudely roused
to the need of Imperial support, also sent messengers asking him to
come. Otto came, took Pavia, and acted as King of Italy. He married the
lovely widow, and wished to go to Rome to receive the Imperial crown;
but Alberic, lord of Rome, would not give permission. Otto went back to
Germany and bided his time. In ten years Alberic died leaving a young
son, who, although only seventeen years old, inherited enough of his
father's power to get himself elected Pope, John XII. Pope John,
however, found himself encompassed by powerful enemies both in Rome and
out. He too was obliged to recognize the absolute necessity of Imperial
restoration, and called upon Otto for aid. The German king came, and was
crowned by the Pope, Emperor of the Romans, in St. Peter's basilica, on
the second day of February, 962. This coronation was the beginning of a
new phase in the Roman Empire. In this phase that Empire is known as the
Holy Roman Empire, although it was merely a union of Germany, Italy, and
Burgundy.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] _Italy and her Invaders_, Hodgkin, vol. viii, p. 289.
[7] _Le cronache italiane del medio evo descritte_, Balzani
(translated).