The Christians of Spain after the Mahometan conquest, who were known by the name of Mustaraba, or Mozarabes, enjoyed the free exercise of their religion, although on condition of paying a heavy monthly poll-tax. They generally lived on friendly terms with their Mussulman masters; many of them held office under the caliphs, and monks and clergy who understood both the Arabic and the Latin languages were employed in diplomatic correspondence.

But, notwithstanding these relations, the difference of religion was a continual source of trouble. The Mahometan mobs often abused Christians in the streets; they shouted out blasphemies against the Christian name, while all retaliation was forbidden by law under very severe penalties. If a marriage took place between persons professing the two religions, the general law against apostasy from Islam made it death for the Mahometan party to embrace Christianity; and the questions which in such marriages naturally arose as to the religion of the issue produced very serious difficulties. Moreover, the hostility of the Mussulmans towards the Christians who dwelt among them was excited by the persevering efforts of those who in other parts of the peninsula carried on a war of independence; while these efforts served also to raise among the Christians under the Mahometan rule a desire to do something for the more public assertion of their faith.

The Christians were divided into two parties. The one of these was bent on preserving peace with their rulers, as far as possible, and enjoying the toleration which was allowed them. The other party regarded this acquiescence as unworthy; they thought that their brethren had been corrupted by intercourse with the Moslems into a blamable laxity of opinions. They declared that the offices of Mahometan courts could not be held without compliances unbecoming a Christian; that those who occupied such offices were obliged to refrain from openly signing themselves with the cross, and from other outward manifestations of their faith; that they were obliged to speak of the Saviour in such terms as might not be offensive to the unbelievers. They complained that the Christian youth preferred the cultivation of “Chaldean” to that of ecclesiastical literature; that they were more familiar with Arabic than with Latin.

About the middle of the ninth century a persecution of the Christians broke out at Cordova under the reign of Abderrahman II. The first sufferer was a monk named Perfectus, who, having fallen in with some Mahometans in the neighborhood of the city, was questioned by them as to the opinion which Christians entertained of the prophet. He attempted to evade the question, on the ground that he was unwilling to offend them; but, as they continued to urge him, and assured him that no offence would be taken, he said that Mahomet was regarded by Christians as one of the false prophets foretold in Scripture; and he remarked on some parts of his history as being scandalous, and as proving the falsehood of his pretensions. The Arabs, in consideration of the promise which they had given, restrained their anger for the time; but when Perfectus next appeared in public, he was seized, was dragged before a judge, on a charge of blasphemy against the prophet, and was executed. The next victim was a merchant, who had given no provocation; but the third, a young monk named Isaac, courted his fate. He went before the judge of the city, professing an inclination to embrace the religion of the Koran, and begging for some instruction in its doctrines; and when these were explained to him he denounced their falsehood with great vehemence. The execution of Isaac was followed by an outburst of fanatical zeal. Clergymen, monks, nuns, and laity rushed to the Mahometan tribunals, reviling the prophet as an impostor, an adulterer, a sorcerer, and declaring that his followers were in the way to perdition. And, besides those who voluntarily thrust themselves on death, many children of mixed marriages were delated by their Mahometan relations as apostates, although they had probably been brought up from the first in the religion of the Christian parent.

By this wild zeal of the weaker party the Moslems were naturally exasperated. Public outrages against Christians increased; any one who showed himself in the street was insulted, pelted with filth, or stoned: the Mahometans shrank from touching the very garments of Christians, as if it were pollution. The sound of church-bells excited them to a tempest of cursing and blasphemies; and at funerals of Christians the populace followed the corpse with outcries, begging that God would have no mercy on the deceased.

Abderrahman now enacted new laws, of increased severity. The bodies of those who were executed were to be burnt, lest their brethren should convert them into relics. Yet the caliph, wishing, if possible, to quell the excitement by peaceable means, requested the cooperation of the primate Recanfrid, archbishop of Toledo, who issued an order that no Christian should present himself before a Mahometan judge unless he were cited to do so. This order was received with indignation and defiance by the more zealous party, headed by Saul, bishop of Cordova; and Recanfrid, in pursuance of his policy, proceeded to imprison some refractory ecclesiastics—among them a monk and priest of Toledo named Eulogius, who had been very conspicuous in his opposition. From prison Eulogius wrote letters, intended to animate the resolution of his friends; with the fervor of a Tertullian he exhorts all who have any worldly ties to cast them aside and boldly to confess the faith, in the assurance of rejoining their martyred brethren in bliss. A council was held under the archbishops of Toledo and Seville, and determined that no one ought voluntarily to provoke death by his religion. By those who agreed with the spirit of this council the evils which had happened were charged on Eulogius and his associates. They ascribed the conduct of the sufferers to pride, and questioned their right to the name of martyrs—citing against them texts of Scripture, with the canons and practice of the early church. Some went so far as to declare that there was no opportunity of martyrdom at the hands of the Arabs, since these were not idolaters, but worshipped the one true God and acknowledged his laws.

Eulogius and Peter Alvar were the leading spirits of their party. They both (and more especially Alvar, who was an ecclesiastic of Cordova) write in an exalted strain of enthusiasm. Eulogius sets aside the distinction which had been drawn between heathens and Mahometans by saying that the Mahometans deny the Son of God and persecute the faithful. Alvar argues from the prophecies that Mahomet is the forerunner of Antichrist. The sufferings of the Christians, he says, had not been drawn down on them by the violence of zealots—for the first victims had done nothing to provoke their fate—but by the sins of the whole community. He will allow no compliance with circumstances, no forbearance to force the Christian profession on the notice of the infidels. He maintains that our Lord’s charge to His disciples, “when persecuted in one city to flee into another”, is inapplicable in the present case, since the object of that charge was that the disciples should spread the Gospel more widely—not that they should hide it. He would have Christians to press the truth on the Moslems for the purpose of making them “debtors to the faith”—not (as it would seem) out of love for them, but in order to render their unbelief inexcusable.

Abderrahman was succeeded in 852 by his son Mohammed, who carried the proceedings against the Christians further. On the first day of his reign the new king dismissed all who held any offices about the court or in the public service. He ordered that all churches which had been lately built should be destroyed, and prohibited all display in the ritual or in the furniture of the older churches which were allowed to stand. The persecution continued for many years. Eulogius himself, who had been elected to the see of Toledo, was arrested in 859 in consequence of having aided a young female convert, named Leocritia, to escape from her parents, who were bigoted Mahometans; and, after having firmly resisted the importunities of some Arabs who, out of respect for his sanctity and learning, endeavored to persuade him to save his life by slight concessions, he was put to death. Four days later, Leocritia also suffered.

During this long persecution many of the more lukewarm Christians openly apostatized to the religion of Islam. The heats on both sides at length died away, and the old relations of the parties were restored. A German abbot, who went on an embassy to Cordova in 954, represents the Christians as living peaceably with their masters, and as thankful for the toleration which they enjoyed; nay, if the information which he received may be trusted, it would appear that they had carried their compliance so far as to submit to the rite of circumcision.

 

ENGLAND—THE DANES.

 

England, like France, was harassed and desolated by the ravages of the Northmen. Their first appearance on the coasts was in the year 767; the first descent which was severely felt was in 832; and from that time their invasions were incessant. Devon and Wales felt their fury as well as the eastern coasts; when the attention of the English was concentrated on one point, a fresh band of enemies appeared in an opposite quarter; and they penetrated into the very heart of the country. And here, as in France, the wealth and the defenselessness of the monasteries pointed these out as the chief objects of attack. The chronicles of the time abound in frightful details of their wasting with fire and sword the sanctuaries of Croyland, Medeshamstede (Peterborough), Bardney, and Ely; of Repton and Coldingham; of Lindisfarne, from which a little band of monks carried off the relics of St. Cuthbert over the mountains of Northumbria, in continual fear of the ravagers by whom they were surrounded on every side. At length, in 878, after the victory gained by Alfred over Guthrun at Ethandune, a large territory in the east of England, north of the Thames, was ceded to the Danes, on condition of their professing Christianity, and living under equal laws with the native inhabitants; but the peace thus obtained was only for a time.

Of the lustre of Alfred’s reign it is needless to speak to readers who may be presumed to know in any degree the history of their country. Alfred succeeded his father in 871, at the age of twenty-two, and held the throne for thirty years. His character may have been idealized in some respects, that it might fulfill the conception of a perfect sovereign; and institutions have been ascribed to him which are in truth derived from other sources. Yet historical reality exhibits to us this “darling of the English”—“Alfred the Truthteller”—as the deliverer, the lawgiver, and the wise ruler of his country, as a hero, and as a saint. It sets before us his efforts to revive the public spirit which had become all but extinct during the long calamities of the Danish invasions; his zealous and successful labours to repair in mature years the defects of his early education; his exertions for the restoration of learning among the clergy, which had fallen into melancholy decay, and for the general instruction of the people; his encouragement of learned men, whether natives,—as his biographer Asser, Plegmund, Werfrith, and Neot,—or foreigners whom he invited to impart to the English a culture which was not to be found at home—as Grimbald of Reims, and John of Old Saxony; his care to enrich the vernacular literature by executing or encouraging versions or paraphrases of religious and instructive works—portions of Scripture, writings of Boethius, Gregory the Great, Orosius, and Bede. It shows us that these labours were carried on under the continual tortures of disease, and amidst the necessities of providing for the national defense; it dwells on his habits of devotion, and on the comprehensive interest in the affairs of Christendom which induced him even to send a mission to the shrine of St. Thomas in India. Small as his kingdom was, he raised it to a high place among the nations; and among great sovereigns no character shines brighter or purer than his. Alfred died in 900 or 901.

 

MORAVIA

 

The conversion of Bulgaria, which has been related in the history of the dissensions between the Greek and Latin churches, led to that of the Slavonic inhabitants of Greece and of the Mainotes. The Croats were evangelized by missionaries from Rome; while the victories of Basil, about the year 870, were followed by the labours of Greek missionaries in Servia.

Christianity had been introduced into Moravia by the arms of Charlemagne, who, in 801, according to his usual system, compelled the king to receive baptism. Since that time, attempts had been made to extend the knowledge of the Gospel among the Moravians under the auspices of the archbishops of Salzburg and the bishops of Passau, who employed a regionary bishop for the purposed. But these attempts had little effect; the princes of the country had relapsed into heathenism, the Christians were few, and their religion was very rude. A new and more effectual movement arose out of an embassy which Radislav, king of Moravia, sent into Bulgaria, for the purpose of obtaining aid against Louis of Germany. His nephew Swatopluk or Zwentibold, who was employed on this mission, became a convert to the new faith of the Bulgarians; and on his return he was joined by the queen, who was herself a Christian, in urging it on her husband’s attention. An application for Christian teachers was made to the emperor Michael; and two missionaries, Constantine and his brother Methodius—perhaps the same Methodius whose skill as an artist had produced so great an effect at the Bulgarian court—were sent from Constantinople into Moravia.

Constantine—better known under the name of Cyril, which he is said to have assumed towards the end of his life, in obedience to a vision—was a priest and monk, and is designated as a philosopher. He was a native of Thessalonica, and, from the mixture of the Greek and Slave populations in his own country, had probably been acquainted from his early years with a dialect of the Slavonic. He had preached among the Chazars of the Ukraine and the Crimea, who in 843 had applied for instructors from Constantinople, on the ground that they were distracted between the rival pretensions of Judaism, Mahometanism, and Christianity—a mixture of religions which was found in the same regions by a Mussulman traveller seventy years later. The success of his labours among the Chazars is described as complete, and the impression of them was strengthened by his refusal of all recompense except the release of such Christians as were captives in the country; but some of his biographers appear to regard as more important his discovery of a body supposed to be that of St. Clement of Rome, who was said to have been banished by Trajan to the Chersonese, and to have been there martyred. The fame of the mission to the Chazars had reached the Moravian king, who especially requested that Cyril might be sent to him; and in 863 the brothers proceeded into Moravia, taking with them the relics of St. Clement. Their preaching was marked by a striking difference from the ordinary practice of the time—that, whereas the Greek and Latin missionaries usually introduced their own tongues as the ecclesiastical language among barbarian nations, Cyril and Methodius mastered the language of the country, and not only used it in their addresses to the people, but translated the liturgy and portions of the Scriptures into it—Cyril, after the example of Ulfilas, having either invented a Slavonic alphabet, or improved that which before existed. By this innovation the success of the mission was greatly forwarded. Radislav received baptism, his subjects were rapidly converted, churches were built for Christian worship, and the reverence in which the missionaries were held appears from the fact that in Moravia the clergy were styled by a name which signifies princes.

After a time a report of these proceedings reached pope Nicolas, who thereupon summoned Cyril and Methodius to appear before him. The Moravians were now more closely connected with the west than with the east; in the difference between the churches of Rome and Constantinople, Cyril, who had formerly been an opponent of Photius, was not inclined to side with the patriarch, whose deprivation probably took place about the time when the papal letter was written; and a refusal of compliance would have thrown the pope on the side of the Germans, from whom Radislav was in imminent danger. The brethren, therefore, resolved to continue their work under such conditions as were possible, rather than to abandon it, and obeyed the summons to Rome, where they arrived shortly after the death of Nicolas. The body of St. Clement, which is said to have wrought many miracles, produced a great sensation among the Romans, and the orthodoxy of the missionaries was proved to the satisfaction of Adrian II, who gratified Radislav’s desire for the independence of the Moravian church by consecrating Methodius as archbishop of the Moravians. Cyril is said to have been also consecrated to the episcopate, but died at Rome, where he was buried in the church of St. Clement.

Radislav, after a struggle of many years against Louis of Germany, was at length betrayed by his nephew Swatopluk into the hands of his enemy, by whom he was dethroned and blinded in 870. Swatopluk succeeded to the crown, and greatly extended the bounds of the Moravian kingdom, which now included a large portion of modern Austria and Hungary. Over all this territory Methodius exercised authority, after some differences with Swatopluk, whom it is said that he once found it necessary to excommunicate; and, as his sphere extended, many Christians who had received the Gospel from the Latin church placed themselves under him. This excited the jealousy of the Germans, who appear to have obtained in 873 a mandate from John VIII, forbidding him to employ a barbarous tongue in the service of the church. Methodius, however, persisted, and, in consequence of a renewed complaint, to which it was now added that he taught some erroneous doctrines, he was cited to Rome in 879. The pope in his letter forbade the use of the Slavonic in the liturgy, although he allowed that until further order it might be used in preaching, forasmuch as the Psalmist charges all people to praise the Lord, and that St. Paul says, “Let every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord”.

Methodius repaired to Rome, where he succeeded in justifying his orthodoxy before a synod—perhaps not without some concession as to the points of difference between his native church and that of the west. And his arguments in favor of the Slavonic tongue were so successful that, on returning to Moravia, he bore a letter from John to Swatopluk, in which the pope approves of the alphabet invented by Cyril, and sanctions the use of the Slavonic liturgy, on the ground that the Scriptural command, “Praise the Lord, all ye nations”, shows that the praises of God are not to be confined to three languages (Hebrew, Greek, and Latin), but that He who formed these languages formed all others also, for His own glory. It is, however, ordered that, as a mark of greater honor, the Gospel shall be read in Latin before being read in the vernacular, and also that the king or any nobleman may, if he think fit, have the service of his private chapel in Latin.

In the same letter it was stated that Methodius was confirmed in his archbishopric, with exclusive jurisdiction over the Moravian church. The pope adds that he has consecrated as bishop an ecclesiastic named Wiching, who had been recommended to him by Swatopluk, and begs the king to send another presbyter who may be raised to the same degree, in order that the primate, having two bishops under him, may be able to perform his functions without external help. By this arrangement it was intended that the Moravian church should be rendered entirely independent of Germany.

From Moravia the Gospel was introduced among the neighboring and kindred people of Bohemia. Fourteen Bohemian chiefs had appeared before Louis of Germany at Ratisbon in 845, and had been baptized by their own desire. But of this conversion, which was most likely a mere political artifice, no effects are recorded; and Bohemia was heathen many years later, when the duke, Borziwoi, visited the Moravian court. Swatopluk received him with honor, but at dinner assigned him and his followers a place on the floor, as being heathens. Methodius, who sat at the king’s table, addressed Borziwoi, expressing regret that so powerful a prince should be obliged to feed like a swineherd. The duke asked what he might expect to gain by becoming a Christian; and, on being told that the change would exalt him above all kings and princes, he was baptized with his thirty companions. His wife, Ludmilla, embraced the Gospel on worthier motives, and earned the title of martyr and saint.

Methodius continued to be much annoyed by the Germans, who saw in the sanction of the Slavonic tongue an insuperable barrier against their influence in Moravia. It would seem also that Swatopluk became unfavorable to him, and that Wiching, who was a German by birth, and a man of intriguing character, instead of cooperating with the archbishop, and rendering him the obedience which had been enjoined in the pope’s letter to the king, set up claims to independence of all but the papal authority. The last certain notice of Methodius is a letter of the year 881, in which John VIII encourages him, and assures him that he had given no such privileges as were pretended to Wiching (whose name, however, is not mentioned). The death of Methodius has been said to have taken placeat Rome, and has been variously dated, from 881 to 910; but it seems more probable that he died in Moravia about the year 885.

Wiching, after the death of Methodius, persecuted the clergy who maintained the Slavonic liturgy, and, with the aid of Swatopluk’s soldiery, compelled them in 886 to seek a refuge in Bulgaria, where it is presumed that they must have adhered to the Greek communion. On the death of Swatopluk, in 894, the kingdom was distracted by a war between his sons, while Arnulf of Germany pressed on it from without. Wiching had in 892 gone over to Arnulf, who appointed him his chancellor, and bestowed on him the bishoprick of Passau; but from this dignity he was deposed on his patron’s death. In 900, the German jealousy was provoked afresh by the measures which pope John IX took for providing Moravia with a localized hierarchy instead of its former missionary establishment. Hatto, archbishop of Mentz, and Theotmar of Salzburg, with their suffragans, loudly remonstrated against the change; but the strife was ended by the fall of the Moravian kingdom in 908.

The conquests of Charlemagne had brought the Franks into close neighborhood with the northern nations, which were now so formidable to the more civilized inhabitants of other countries. Charlemagne, it is said, refrained from placing his territory beyond the Elbe under any of the bishoprics which he erected, because he intended to establish in those parts an archiepiscopal see which should serve as a center for the evangelization of the north. He built a church at Hamburg, and committed it to a priest who was exempt from episcopal jurisdiction; but the prosecution of the scheme was broken off by the emperor’s death. The attention of his son, however, was soon drawn by other circumstances towards Nordalbingia. Policy, as well as religion, recommended the conversion of the Northmen; for, so long as the Saxons were only separated by the Elbe from those who adhered to the religion of their forefathers, there was a continual temptation for them to renounce the Christianity which had been forced on them, and with it the subjection of which it was the token.

Disputes as to the throne of Denmark between Harold and Godfrid led both parties to seek the countenance of Louis the Pious. The emperor was struck with the importance of using this circumstance as an opening for the introduction of Christianity among the Danes; and Ebbo, archbishop of Reims, was willing to withdraw for a time from the enjoyment of his dignity, that he might extend the faith among these barbarians. With the consent of Louis, the archbishop went to Rome, where he obtained a commission from Paschal, authorizing himself and Halitgar, afterwards bishop of Cambray, to preach the Gospel to the northern nations, and directing them to refer all difficult questions to the apostolic see. The mission was resolved on by the diet of Attigny (the same diet which witnessed the penance 392 of Louis) in 822; and in that year Ebbo and his companions set out in company with some ambassadors of Harold, Welanao (now Münschdorf, near Itzehoe) being assigned by the emperor for their head-quarters. Little is known of their proceedings, but it appears that they preached with much success, and that Ebbo represented the spiritual and the temporal benefits of Christianity to Harold so effectually as to induce him to appear in 826 at Ingelheim, with his queen and a large train of attendants, and to express a desire for baptism, which they received in the church of St. Alban at Mentz (Mayence). Louis was sponsor for Harold, Judith for the queen, Lothair for their son, and the members of their train found sponsors of suitable rank among the Franks. The emperor now resolved to send a fresh mission to the Danes; but the barbarism of the Northmen, their strong hostility to Christianity, and the savage character of their paganism, with its sacrifices of human victims, deterred all from venturing on the hazards of such an expedition, until Wala of Corbie named Anskar, one of his monks, as a person suited for the work.

Anskar, “the apostle of the north”, was born about the year 801, and at an early age entered the monastery of Corbie, where he studied under Adelhard and Paschasius Radbert. He became himself a teacher in the monastery, and, after having for a time held a like office in the German Corbey, resumed his position in the parent society. From childhood he had been remarkable for a devout and enthusiastic character. He saw visions, and it is said by his biographer that all the important events of his life were foreshown to him either in this manner or by an inward illumination, so that he was even accustomed to wait for such direction as to the course which he should take. The death of his mother, when he was five years old, affected him deeply, and he was weaned from the love of childish sports by a vision in which she appeared in company with some bright female forms. He felt himself entangled in mire, and unable to reach them, when the chief of the band, whom he knew to be the blessed Virgin, asked him whether he wished to rejoin his mother, and told him that, if so, he must forsake such vanities as are offensive to the saints. His worldly affections were afterwards further subdued by the tidings of Charlemagne’s death, which deeply impressed on him the instability of all earthly greatness. In another vision, he fancied that his spirit was led out of the body by two venerable persons, whom he recognized as St. Peter and St. John. They first plunged him into purgatory, where he remained for three days in misery which seemed to last a thousand years. He was then conducted into a region where the Divine glory, displayed in the east, streamed forth on multitudes of adoring saints in transcendent brightness, which was yet not dazzling but delightful to the eye; and from the source of inaccessible majesty, in which he could discern no shape, he heard a voice of blended power and sweetness—“Go, and thou shalt return to Me with the crown of martyrdom”. At a later time, the Saviour appeared to him, exhorted him to a full confession of his sins, and assured him that they were forgiven. The assurance was afterwards repeated to him, and in answer to his inquiry, “Lord, what wouldest thou have me to do?” he was told, “Go, and preach to the Gentiles the word of God”.

When the northern mission was proposed to Anskar, he at once declared his readiness to undertake it. He adhered to his resolution, although many endeavored to dissuade him, while Wala disclaimed the intention of enforcing the task on him by his monastic obligation to obedience; and his behavior while preparing himself for the work by retirement and devotion had such an effect on Autbert, a monk of noble birth and steward of the monastery, that he offered himself as a companion.

The missionaries could not prevail on any servant to attend them. On joining Harold they were treated with neglect by him and his companions, who, as Anskar’s biographer says, did not yet know how the ministers of God ought to be honored. But when they had sailed down the Rhine as far as Cologne, the bishop of that city, Hadebold, out of compassion, bestowed on them a vessel with two cabins, and as Harold found it convenient to take possession of one of these, he was brought into closer intercourse with the missionaries, who soon succeeded in inspiring him with a new interest in their undertaking. They fixed the centre of their operations at Hadeby, on the opposite bank of the Schley to Sleswick, and laboured among both the Christians and the heathens of the Danish border. Anskar established a school for boys—the pupils being partly given to him, and partly bought for the purpose of training them up in the Christian faith. But Harold had offended many of his adherents by doing homage to Louis and by his change of religion; they were further alienated when, in his zeal for the advancement of his new faith, he destroyed temples and even resorted to persecution; and the opposite party took advantage of the feeling. Harold was expelled, and retired to a county in Frisia which the emperor had bestowed on him; and Anskar was obliged to leave Hadeby. Autbert had already been compelled by severe illness to relinquish the mission, and died at Corbie in 829.

A new opening soon presented itself to Anskar. It would appear that some knowledge of the Gospel had already reached Sweden—partly, it is said, by means of intercourse which the inhabitants of that remote country had carried on with the Byzantine empire. In 829 the court of Louis was visited by ambassadors from Sweden, who, in addition to their secular business, stated that their countrymen were favorably disposed towards Christianity, and requested the emperor to supply them with teachers. Louis bethought himself of Anskar, who agreed to undertake the work—regarding it as a fulfillment of his visions. His place with Harold was supplied by another; and Wala assigned him a monk named Witmar as a companion. The vessel in which the missionaries embarked was attacked by pirates, who plundered them of almost everything, including the presents designed by Louis for the Swedish king. But they were determined to persevere, and, after many hardships, made their way to the northern capital, Birka or Sigtuna, on the lake Mälar. The king, Biorn, received them graciously, and, with the consent of the national assembly, gave them permission to preach freely. Their ministrations were welcomed with delight by a number of Christian captives, who had long been deprived of the offices of religion; and among their converts was Herigar, governor of the district, who built a church on his estate. After having labored for a year and a half, Anskar and his companion returned with a letter from Biorn to Louis, who was greatly pleased with their success, and resolved to place the northern mission on a new footing, agreeably to his father’s intentions. An archiepiscopal see was to be established at Hamburg, and Anskar was consecrated for it at Ingelheim by Drogo of Metz, with the assistance of Ebbo and many other bishops. He then repaired to Rome, where Gregory IV bestowed on him the pall, with a bull authorizing him to labor for the conversion of the northern nations, in conjunction with Ebbo, whose commission from Paschal was still in force. Louis conferred on him the monastery of Turholt  (Thouroult, between Bruges and Ypres), to serve at once as a source of maintenance and as a resting-place more secure than the northern archbishopric.

Ebbo, although diverted from missionary work by his other (and in part far less creditable) occupations, had continued to take an interest in the conversion of the north, and appears at this time to have made a second expedition to the scene of his old labors. But as neither he nor Anskar could give undivided attention to the Swedish mission, it was now agreed that this should be committed to a relation of Ebbo named Gauzbert, who was consecrated to the episcopate and assumed the name of Simon. To him Ebbo transferred the settlement at Welanao, with the intention that it should serve the same purposes for which Turholt had been given to Anskar.

Anskar entered with his usual zeal on the new sphere which had been assigned to him. He built at Hamburg a church, a monastery, and a college. According to the system which he had followed at Hadeby, he bought a number of boys with a view to educating them as Christians; some of them were sent to Turholt, while others remained with him. But after a time Hamburg was attacked by a great force of Northmen, under Eric, king of Jutland. The archbishop exerted himself in encouraging the inhabitants to hold out until relief should arrive; but the assailants were too strong to be long resisted; the city was sacked and burnt, and Anskar was obliged to flee. He had lost his church, his monastery, and his library, among the treasures of which was a magnificent bible, the gift of the emperor; some relics bestowed on the church by Ebbo were all that he was able to rescue. Yet, reduced as he was to necessity, he repeated Job’s words of resignation—“The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord”. Leutbert bishop of Bremen, who had before looked on the new archbishopric with jealousy, refused to entertain him, and he was indebted for a refuge to the charity of a widow named Ikia, of Bamsloh, where he gradually collected some of his scattered followers. About the same time Gauzbert was expelled from Sweden by a popular rising, in which his nephew Notbert was killed.

To add to Anskar’s distress, his monastery of Turholt, being within that portion the empire which fell to Charles the Bald on the death of Louis, was bestowed by the new sovereign on a layman. His monks, finding no means of subsistence, were obliged to leave him: but he found a patron in Louis of Germany, who founded a monastic establishment for him at Ramsloh, and resolved to bestow on him the bishopric of Bremen, which fell vacant by the death of Leutbert. Anskar was himself unwilling to take any active part in the matter, lest he should be exposed to charges of rapacity, and some canonical objections arose; but these were overcome with the consent of the bishops who were interested. The union of the dioceses was sanctioned by the council of Mayence (the same at which Gottschalk was condemned) in 848; and, sixteen years after it had virtually taken effect, it was confirmed by Nicolas I, who renewed the gift of the pall to Anskar, and appointed him legate for the evangelization of the Swedes, the Danes, the Slavons, and other nations of the north.

In the meantime Anskar had been actively employed. Repeated political missions from Louis of Germany had made him known to the Danish king Horic or Eric, who had long been one of the most formidable chiefs of the northern devastators, and had led the force which burnt and plundered Hamburg. Anskar gained a powerful influence over the king, who, although it does not appear that he was himself baptized, granted the missionaries leave to preach throughout his dominions, and to build a church at Sleswick. The work of conversion went on rapidly. Danish traders who had received baptism at Hamburg or Dorstadt now openly professed Christianity, and Christian merchants from other countries ventured more freely into Denmark, so that Eric found the wealth of his kingdom increased by the consequences of the toleration which he had granted. Many of the converts, however, put off their baptism until they felt the approach of death; while it is said that some heathens, after their life had been despaired of, and after they had invoked their own gods in vain, on entreating the aid of Christ were restored to perfect health.

After the withdrawal of Gauzbert, Sweden remained for seven years without any Christian teacher, until Anskar sent into the country a priest and hermit named Ardgar, who preached with great effect—his efforts, it is said, being powerfully seconded by judgments which befell all who had been concerned in the expulsion of Gauzbert. Herigar had throughout remained faithful, notwithstanding all that he had to endure from his unbelieving countrymen; and on his deathbed he was comforted by the ministrations of Ardgar. But Ardgar longed to return to his hermitage, and after a time relinquished his mission. Gauzbert, now bishop of Osnaburg, whom Anskar requested to resume his labours in Sweden, declined, on the ground that another preacher would be more likely to make a favorable impression on the people than one whom they had already ejected from their country. Anskar himself, therefore, resolved to undertake the work—being encouraged by a vision in which his old superior Adelhard appeared to him. He was accompanied by envoys from Eric to king Olof, of Sweden, and bore a letter of warm recommendation from the Danish king. But on landing in Sweden he found the state of things very unpromising. A short time before this a Swede had arisen in the national assembly, declaring that he was charged with a communication from the gods, who had bidden him tell his countrymen that, if they wished to enjoy a continuance of prosperity, they must revive with increased zeal the ancient worship, and must exclude all other religions. “If”, the celestial message graciously concluded, “you are not content with us, and wish to have more gods, we all agree to admit your late king Eric into our number”. A great effect had followed on this: a temple had been built to Eric, and was crowded with worshippers; and such was the excitement of the people that Anskar’s friends advised him to desist from his enterprise, as it could not but be fruitless and might probably cost him his life. He was, however, resolved to persevere. He invited the king to dine with him, and, having propitiated him by gifts, requested permission to preach. Olof replied that, as some former preachers of Christianity had been forcibly driven out of the country, he could not give the required licence without consulting the gods, and obtaining the sanction of the popular assembly; “for”, says Anskar's biographer, “in that nation public affairs are determined less by the king’s power than by the general consent of the people”. A lot was cast in an open field, and was favorable to the admission of the Christian teachers. The assembly was swayed by the speech of an aged member, who said that the power of the Christians’ God had often been experienced, especially in dangers at sea; that many of his countrymen had formerly been baptized at Dorstadt; why then, he asked, should they refuse, now that it was brought to their own doors, that which they had before sought from a distance? The assembly of another district also decided for the admission of Christianity; and the feeling in favor of the new religion was strengthened by miracles performed on an expedition which Olof undertook to Courland. Converts flocked in, churches were built, and Anskar found himself at liberty to return to Denmark, leaving Gumbert, a nephew of Gauzbert, at the head of the Swedish mission.

During the archbishop’s absence, Eric had fallen in a bloody battle with a pagan faction, which had used his encouragement of Christianity as a pretext for attacking him. The most powerful of Anskar’s other friends had shared the fate of their king; the greater part of Denmark was now in the hands of the enemy; and Eric II, who had succeeded to a part of his father’s territory, was under the influence of Hovi, earl of Jutland, who persuaded him that all the late misfortunes were due to the abandonment of the old national religion. The church at Sleswick was shut up, its priest was expelled, and the Christians were cruelly persecuted. Anskar could only betake himself to prayer for a change from this unhappy state of things, when he unexpectedly received a letter from the young king, professing as warm an interest in the Gospel as that which his father had felt, and inviting the missionaries to resume their labors. Hovi had fallen into disgrace, and was banished. The progress of Christianity was now more rapid than ever. The church at Sleswick was for the first time allowed to have a bell; another church was founded at Ripe, the second city of Denmark, on the coast opposite to Britain, and Rimbert, a native of the neighborhood of Turholt, who had grown up under Anskar’s tuition, was appointed its pastor.

Anskar’s labors were continued until the sixty-fourth year of his age, and the thirty-fourth of his episcopate. Although the progress of the Swedish mission was retarded by the death or the withdrawal of some who were employed in it, he was able to provide for its continuance, chiefly by means of clergy of Danish birth, whom he had trained up in the seminary at Ramsloh. Amidst his trials and disappointments he frequently consoled himself by remembering the assurance which Ebbo, when bishop of Hildesheim, had expressed to him, that God would not fail in his own time to crown the work with success. The biographer Rimbert dwells with delight on his master’s strict adherence to the monastic customs, which he maintained to the last; on his mortifications, which he carried to an extreme in youth, until he became aware that such excesses were a temptation to vain glory, and how, when no longer able to bear them, he endeavored to supply the defect by alms and prayers; on his frequent and fervent devotion; on his charitable labors, his building of hospitals, redemption of captives, and other works of mercy. Among the results of his exertions, it deserves to be remembered that in 856 he persuaded the leading men of Nordalbingia to give up the trade which they had carried on in slaves. In addition to works of a devotional kind, he wrote a Life of Willehad, the first bishop of Bremen, and a journal of his own missions, which is known to have been sent to Rome in the thirteenth century, and, although often sought for in vain, may possibly still exist there. He is said to have performed some miraculous cures, but to have shunned the publication of them, except among his most intimate friends; and when they were once spoken of in his hearing, he exclaimed, “If I were worthy in the sight of my Lord, I would ask Him to grant me one miracle—that He would make me a good man!”

In his last illness Anskar was greatly distressed by the apprehension that his sins had frustrated the promise which had been made to him of the martyr’s crown. Rimbert endeavored to comfort him by saying that violent death is not the only kind of martyrdom; by reminding him of his long and severe labors for the Gospel, and of the patience with which he had endured much sickness—especially the protracted sufferings of his death­bed. At length, as he was at mass, the archbishop, although fully awake, had a vision in which he was reproved for having doubted, and was assured that all that had been promised should be fulfilled. His death took place on the festival of the Purification, in the year 865.

When asked to name a successor, Anskar declined to do so on the ground that he was unwilling, by preferring one before others, to add to the offence which he might probably have given to many during his lifetime. But on being questioned as to his opinion of Rimbert, he answered—“I am assured that he is more worthy to be an archbishop than I am to be a sub-deacon”. To Rimbert, therefore, the see of Hamburg was committed on Anskar’s death; and for nearly a quarter of a century he carried on the work in the spirit of his master, for the knowledge of whose life we are chiefly indebted to his reverential and affectionate biography. Rimbert died in 888.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER V.

 

FROM THE DEPOSITION OF CHARLES THE FAT TO THE DEATH OF POPE SYLVESTER II.

A.D. 887-1003.

 

 

We now for the first time meet with a long period—including the whole of the tenth century—undisturbed by theological controversy. But we must not on this account suppose that it was an era of prosperity or happiness for the church. Never, perhaps, was there a time of greater misery for most of the European nations; never was there one so sad and so discreditable for religion. The immediate necessities which pressed on men diverted their minds from study and speculation. The clergy in general sank into the grossest ignorance and disorder; the papacy was disgraced by infamies of which there had been no example in former days.

Soon after the beginning of this period the Byzantine church was agitated by a question which also tended to increase its differences with Rome. Leo the Philosopher, the pupil of Photius, after having had three wives who had left him without offspring, married Zoe, with whom he had for some time cohabited. According to the Greek historians, the union was celebrated by one of the imperial chaplains before the birth of a child; and, when Leo had become father of an heir, he Zoe to the rank of empress. The marriage would, in any circumstances, have been scandalous, for even second marriages had been discountenanced by the church, and a fourth marriage was hitherto unknown in the east. The patriarch Nicolas, therefore, deposed the priest who had blessed the nuptials; he refused to admit the imperial pair into the church, so that they were obliged to perform their devotions elsewhere; and he refused to administer the Eucharist to Leo, who thereupon banished him to the island of Hiereia. The account given by the patriarch himself is somewhat different—that the son of Leo and Zoe was born before their marriage; that he consented to baptize the child only on condition of a separation between the parents; that Leo swore to comply, but within three days after introduced Zoe into the palace with great pomp, went through the ceremony of marriage without the intervention of any priest, and followed it up by the coronation of his wife. Nicolas adds that he entreated the emperor to consent to a separation until the other chief sees should be consulted, but that some legates from Rome, who soon after arrived at Constantinople, countenanced the marriage, and that thus Leo was emboldened to deprive and to banish him. Euthymius, an ecclesiastic of high character, who was raised to the patriarchate, restored the emperor to communion, but resisted his wish to obtain a general sanction of fourth marriages, although it was supported by many persons of consideration. On the death of Leo, his brother Alexander, who succeeded together with the young son of Zoe, Constantine Porphyrogenitus, not only restored Nicolas, but gave him an important share in the government, while Euthymius on his deposition was treated with barbarous outrage by the clergy of the opposite party, and soon after died. Alexander himself died within a year, when Zoe became powerful in the regency, and urged her son to insist on the acknowledgment of her marriage. But she was shut up in a convent by Romanus Lecapenus, who assumed the government as the colleague of Constantine, and in 920 the rival parties in the church were reconciled. An edict was published by which, for the future, third marriages were allowed on certain conditions, but such unions as that of which the emperor himself was the offspring were prohibited on pain of excommunication. At Rome, however, fourth marriages were allowed, and on this account an additional coolness arose between the churches, so that for a time the names of the popes appear to have been omitted from the diptychs of Constantinople.

The Greek Church continued to rest on the doctrines and practices established by the councils of former times. The worship of images was undisturbed. The empire underwent frequent revolutions, marked by the perfidy, the cruelty, the ambition regardless of the ties of nature, with which its history has already made us too familiar; but the only events which need be here mentioned are the victories gained over the Saracens by Nicephorus Phocas (A.D. 963-969) and by his murderer and successor John Tzimisces (A.D. 969-976). By these princes Crete and Cyprus were recovered, and the arms of the Greeks were carried even as far as Bagdad. And, although their more distant triumphs had no lasting effect, the empire retained some recompense for its long and bloody warfare in the possession of Antioch, with Tarsus, Mopsuestia, and other cities in Cilicia.

In the west, the age was full of complicated movements, which it is for the most part most difficult to trace, and impossible to remember. After the deposition of Charles the Fat, the only representatives of the Carolingian line were illegitimate—Arnulf, a son of the Bavarian Carloman, and Charles, styled the Simple, the offspring of Louis the Stammerer by a marriage to which the church refused its sanction. Arnulf assumed the government of Germany, which he held from 887 to 899. He ruled with vigor, carried on successful wars with the Obotrites and other Slavonic nations of the north, and broke the terror of the Northmen by a great overthrow on the Dyle, near Louvain, in 891. He also weakened the power of the Moravians; but in order to this he called in the aid of the Hungarians or Magyars, and opened a way into Germany to these formidable barbarians. No such savage enemy of Christendom had yet appeared. They were a people of Asiatic origin, whose language, of the same stock with the Finnish, bore no likeness to that of any civilized or Christian nation. The writers of the time, partly borrowing from the old descriptions of Attila’s Huns, with whom the Magyars were fancifully connected, speak of them as monstrous and hardly human in form, as living after the manner of beasts, as eating the flesh and drinking the blood of men, the heart being particularly esteemed as a delicacy. Light in figure and accoutrements, and mounted on small, active horses, they defied the pursuit of the Frankish cavalry, while even in retreat their showers of arrows were terrible. They had already established themselves in the territory on the Danube which for some centuries had been occupied by the Avars. They had threatened Constantinople, and had laid both the eastern empire and the Bulgarians under contribution. They now passed into Germany in seemingly inexhaustible multitudes, overran Thuringia and Franconia, and advanced as far as the Rhine. Almost at the same moment the northern city of Bremen was sacked by one division of their forces, and the Swiss, monastery of St. Gall by another. A swarm of them laid Provence desolate, and penetrated to the Spanish frontier, although a sickness which broke out among them enabled Raymond, marquis of Gothia, to repel them. Crossing the Alps, they rushed down on Italy. Pavia, the Lombard capital, and then the second city of the peninsula, was given to the flames, with, its forty-four churches, while the Magyars glutted their cruelty and love of plunder on the persons and on the property of the inhabitants. The invaders made their way even to the extremity of Calabria, while the Italians, regarding them as a scourge of God, submitted without any other attempt at defense than the prayers with which their churches resounded for deliverance “from the arrows of the Hungarians”

The Saracens also continued to afflict Italy. A force of them from Africa established itself on the Garigliano (the ancient Liris), and from its fortified camp continually menaced Rome. In another quarter, a vessel with about twenty Saracens from Spain was carried out of its course by winds, and compelled to put to land near Fraxinetum. They fortified themselves against the inhabitants of the neighborhood, and, after having subsisted for a time on plunder, they invited others from Spain to join them, so that the handful of shipwrecked strangers was gradually recruited until it became a formidable band. They carried on their ravages far and wide, seized on pilgrims, stripped them of all they had, and compelled those who were able to raise largo sums by way of ransom. Some of them even crossed the Mount of Jupiter (now the Great St. Bernard) and established another settlement at St. Maurice. But the garrison of Fraxinetum was at length surrounded and exterminated by William duke of Aquitaine.

After the death of Arnulf, the Germans were broken up into five principal nations—the Franconians, the Saxons, the Swabians, the Bavarians, and the Lotharingians of the debatable land between France and Germany, which was sometimes attached to the one country and sometimes to the other—being either transferred by its inhabitants, or annexed by force or by intrigue. These nations were generally under the government of dukes; the fear of the Magyars and of the Slaves was the bond which united them in one common interest. Otho of Saxony was regarded as their leader; and on his death, in 912, they chose Conrad of Franconia as king of Germany. Conrad found Henry, the son of Otho and duke of Saxony, his chief opponent; but on his deathbed, in 919, a desire to prevent discord among the Germans prevailed over all other feelings, and he charged his brother Eberhard, who himself might fairly have claimed the succession, to carry to Henry the ensigns of royalty—the holy lance, the crown and mantle, the golden bracelets and the sword. In compliance with Conrad’s wish, Henry the Fowler (so styled from the occupation in which he is said to have been engaged when the announcement of his intended dignity reached him) was elected king by the Franconians and Saxons, and the other nations accepted the choice. Henry reigned from 920 to 936, with a reputation seldom equalled for bravery, prudence, moderation, justice, and fidelity. He recovered Lotharingia for Germany, triumphed over the Northern Slaves and the Bohemians, took from the Northmen the country between the Eider and the Schley, and erected the marquisate of Sleswick as a bulwark for the security of Germany on that side. But still more important were his wars with the Hungarians. On an expedition, which was marked by their usual barbarous ravages, one of their most important chiefs—perhaps, as has been conjectured, the king himself—fell into the hands of Henry, who refused to release him except on condition of peace, for which it was agreed that the Germans should pay gifts by way of annual acknowledgment. The peace was to last for nine years. Henry employed the time in preparations for war, and, on its expiration, returned a scornful defiance to an embassy of the Magyars. He twice defeated the barbarians; and in 955 their power was finally broken by his son Otho the First in the great battle of the Lechfeld, near Augsburg. By this defeat the Hungarians lost that part of their territory which may be identified with the modern province of Austria, and were reduced to the limits of Pannonia. On the deposition of Charles the Fat, Odo or Eudes, count of Paris, and son of Robert the Strong, assumed the royal title in France, and held it for ten years, during which he kept up a continual and sometimes successful struggle against the Northmen. At his death, in 898, Charles the Simple, who had in vain attempted to assert his title against Odo, became his successor; and the illegitimate continuation of the Carolingian line lasted (although not without interruption) until 987, when, on the death of Louis V, Hugh Capet, duke of France, a great nephew of Odo, was elected by an assembly at Senlis, hailed as king by the army at Noyon, and anointed by Adalbero, archbishop of Reims, whose possession of that city gave him the chief influence in disposing of the crown. But the royalty of France was little more than nominal. The power of Odo at first reached only from the Meuse to the Loire; the later Carolingians possessed little more than the rock of Laon, while the real sovereignty of the country was in the hands of the great feudatories, whose power had now become hereditary. At the end of the ninth century France was divided into twenty-nine distinct principalities; at the accession of Hugh Capet, the number, exclusive of the independent kingdom of Aries, had increased to fifty-five, and some of these were larger than his own dominions. Hugh, indeed, for the title of king, and for the hope that the royal power might in time become a reality, even sacrificed something of his former strength, by giving up the benefices which he had held to the clergy, and by bestowing fiefs on the nobles. Fortresses multiplied throughout the land; raised originally during the Norman invasions for the purposes of defense and security, they had become dangerous to the royal power and oppressive to the people. Charles the Bald, at the diet of Pistres, in 864, had forbidden the erection of such strongholds, and had ordered that those which existed should be demolished; but after the dismemberment of the kingdom there was no power which could enforce this law. The nobles everywhere raised their castles, and surrounded themselves with troops of soldiers; and the effects were soon visible both for evil and for good. The martial spirit, which had decayed from the time of Louis the Pious, revived; the dukes and counts, each with an army of his own, encountered the Northmen in fight, or turned against each other in private war the strength which they had gained by the degradation of the crown. And both in France and in Italy the lords of castles betook themselves to plunder, as an occupation which involved nothing discreditable or unworthy of their position.

Notwithstanding the victories of Odo and of Arnulf, the Northmen for a time continued to infest France in all quarters—penetrating even to the very heart of the country. In 911 Charles the Simple, by the treaty of St. Clair on the Epte, ceded to them the territory between that river and the sea, together with Brittany, and bestowed his daughter Gisella on their leader, Rollo, on condition of his doing homage and embracing the Christian faith. In the following year Rollo was baptized at Rouen, by the name of Robert, when, on each of the seven days during which he wore the baptismal garment, he bestowed lands on some church or monastery, as a compensation for the evils which they had suffered at the hands of his countrymen. Ignominious as the cession to the Northmen may appear, it had a precedent in that which the great Alfred had made after victory. The French king lost nothing by it, since the part of Neustria which was given up was actually in possession of the invaders; while, by professing to include Brittany in the gift, he may have hoped to turn the arms of his new liegemen against a population which had already established itself in independence. And in the result, the admission of the Northmen was speedily justified. They settled down in their new possessions; they laid aside their barbarous manners, and, under the teaching provided by the care of Hervé, archbishop of Reim (who, at the request of the archbishop of Rouen, drew up regulations for the treatment of them), their paganism was soon extirpated. They married wives of the country; in two generations the Norse tongue had disappeared, and it was among the offspring of the Scandinavian pirates that French for the first time took the rank of a cultivated and polished language. The country, which had long been desolated by their ravages, recovered its fertility; churches and monasteries rose again out of ruins; strangers of ability and skill in all kinds of arts were encouraged to settle in Normandy; and in no long time it became the most advanced province of France as to orderly government, industry, and literature.

 

ITALY

 

Italy suffered severely during this period, not only from the attacks of the Hungarians and of the Saracens, but from the contests of its own princes. On the deposition of Charles the Fat, the Italians were unwilling to acknowledge a foreign ruler. Guy duke of Spoleto, and Berengar duke of Friuli, both connected through females with the Carolingian family, contended for the kingdom of Italy and for the imperial crown, which was conferred on each of them by popes. Arnulf of Germany (A.D. 896) and other princes were also crowned at Rome as emperors; but the first revival of the empire as a reality was in the person of the German Otho the Great (A.D. 961), from whom the dignity was transmitted to his son and to his grandson of the same name. The Italian and German kingdoms were united in the Othos, and this subjection of Italy to a distant sovereign produced an effect important for its later history. The inhabitants of the towns, who had already been obliged to fortify themselves with walls and to organize a militia for defense against the Saracen and Hungarian invaders, now found that they were thrown still more on their own resources. Each city, consequently, isolated itself, contracted, its interests within its own immediate sphere, and established a magistracy on the ancient model—the germ of the mediaeval Italian republics.

The clergy and monks shared largely in the calamities of the age. In all the kingdoms which had belonged to the Carolingian monarchy, it was usual for princes to take for themselves, or to assign to their favorites, the temporalities of religious houses. Queens and other ladies enjoyed the revenues of the greater monasteries, without being supposed to contract any obligation to duty on that account. In many instances the impropriation of benefices passed as an inheritance in noble families. Great lords seized on bishoprics, gave them to their relatives, or even disposed of them to the highest bidder. In 990 a count of Toulouse sold the see of Cahors, and about the same time a viscount of Beziers bequeathed the bishoprics of that city and of Agde as portions to his daughters. Sometimes mere children were appointed to sees. Thus, in 925, on the death of Seulf of Reims, Herbert, count of Vermandois, who was even suspected of having shortened the archbishop’s days by poison, seized the temporalities for himself, and compelled the clergy and people to elect his son Hugh, a child not yet five years old. The election was confirmed by king Rodolph, and by pope John X, and the boy prelate was committed to Guy, bishop of Auxerre, for education, while a bishop was appointed to administer the see. In 932, on a political change, which threw the possession of Reims into the hands of another party, a monk named Artald was nominated as archbishop, received consecration, and was invested with the pall by John XI; but Hugh, on attaining manhood, asserted his title, gained possession of Reims by means of his father’s troops, and was consecrated to the archbishopric. The contest was carried on for many years; for Artald, as well as Hugh, was a man of family, was supported by stout retainers, and was backed by political power. At one time Artald would seem to have given up his pretensions on condition that he should be provided for by the immediate gift of an abbey, and by the promise of another see; but he was afterwards reinstated by Louis d'Outremer, and the question as to the archbishopric of Reims was discussed by councils at Verdun and at Mousson, at Ingelheim, Laon, and Treves. Hugh disregarded all citations to appear; but at Mousson and at Ingelheim, where two legates of Agapetus II were present, a rescript bearing the pope’s name was produced in his behalf. The councils, however, set aside this document, as being a mere peremptory mandate for the restoration of Hugh, obtained by false representations, and unsupported by argument or canonical  authority. Artald exhibited a papal letter of opposite tenor; and the council sentenced his rival to excommunication until he should repent. Artald held possession of the see until his death, in 961, and Hugh, who hoped then to enter on it without opposition, found himself defeated by the influence of Bruno archbishop of Cologne, brother of Otho the Great, and of Gerberga, queen dowager of France, through whom Bruno virtually exercised the regency of the kingdom. It is said that Hugh died of anxiety and vexation.

But the condition of the papacy is the most remarkable feature in the history of this time. From the beginning to the end of the period, it is the subject of violent contests between rival factions. Formosus, bishop of Portus, who had been employed by Nicolas as legate in Bulgaria, was charged by John VIII with having used his position to bind the king of that country to himself, instead of to the Roman see; with having attempted to obtain the popedom, and having entered into a conspiracy against both the pope and Charles the Bald. For these offences he was excommunicated by a synod at Rome, and by that which was held under John, at Troyes, and was compelled to swear that he would never return to Rome, or aspire to any other than lay communion. The next pope, Marinus, released him both from the excommunication and from his oath; and Formosus was raised in 891 to the papacy, which he held for five years. His successor, Boniface VI, after a pontificate of fifteen days, made way for Stephen VI, who, in the contentions of the rival pretenders to the empire, had taken an opposite side to Formosus; and it would seem that this political enmity was the motive of the extraordinary outrages which followed. By Stephen’s command, the body of Formosus was dragged from the grave, was arrayed in robes, placed in the papal chair, and brought to trial on a charge of having been uncanonically translated from a lesser see to Rome—a charge which, as there had already been a precedent for such translation in the case of Marinus, it was thought necessary to aggravate by the false addition that Formosus had submitted to a second consecration. A deacon was assigned to the dead pope as advocate, but it was useless to attempt a defense. Formosus was condemned, the ordinations conferred by him were annulled, his corpse was stripped of the pontifical robes, the fingers used in benediction were cut off, and the body, after having been dragged about the city, was thrown into the Tiber. But the river, it is said, repeatedly cast it out, and, after the murder of Stephen, in 897, it was taken up and again laid in St. Peter’s, where, as it was carried into the church, some statues of saints inclined towards it with reverence, in attestation of the sanctity of Formosus. A synod held in the following year under John IX rescinded the condemnation of Formosus, and declared that his translation was justified by his merits, although it ought not to become a precedent. It stigmatized the proceedings of the council under Stephen, ordered the acts of it to be burnt, and excommunicated those who had violated the tomb.

A rapid succession of popes now took place. Elections are followed within a few months or weeks or days by deaths which excite suspicion as to the cause; in some cases violence or poison appears without disguise. With Sergius III, in 904, began the ascendency of a party which had attempted to seat him in St. Peter’s chair after the death of Theodore II in 897-8, but was not then strong enough to establish him. Its head was Adalbert, marquis of Tuscany, who was leagued with a noble and wealthy Roman widow named Theodora. Theodora had a daughter of the same name, and another named Mary or Marozia—both, like herself, beautiful, and thoroughly depraved. For upwards of fifty years these women held the disposal of the Roman see, which they filled with their paramours, their children, and their grandchildren. Sergius, who held the papacy till 911, is described as a monster of rapacity, lust, and cruelty—as having lived in open concubinage with Marozia, and having abused the treasures of the church for the purpose of securing abettors and striking terror into enemies. The next pope, Anastasius III, died in 913, and when the papacy again became vacant in the following year, by the death of Lando, the power of the “Pornocracy” is said to have been scandalously displayed in the appointment of a successor. A young ecclesiastic of Ravenna, named John of Tossignano, when on a mission from his church to Rome, had attracted the notice of Theodora, had been invited to her embraces, and through her influence had been appointed to the bishopric of Bologna. Before consecration he was advanced to the higher dignity of Ravenna, and, as she could not bear the separation from him, she now procured his elevation to St. Peter’s chair. Disgraceful as were the means by which his promotion had been earned, John X showed himself an energetic, if not a saintly pope. He crowned Berengar as emperor—probably with a view of breaking the power of the nobles; he applied both to him and to the Greek emperor for aid against the Saracens; and, at the head of his own troops, with some furnished by Berengar, he marched against their camp on the Garigliano, and, by the aid of St. Peter and St. Paul (as it is said), obtained a victory which forced them to abandon that post of annoyance and terror to Rome. But his spirit was probably too independent for the party which he was expected to serve, and they resolved to get rid of him. In 928, some adherents of Guy, duke of Tuscany, the second husband of Marozia, surprised the pope in the castle of St. Angelo; his brother Peter, who was particularly obnoxious to the faction, was murdered before his eyes, and John himself was either starved or suffocated in the castle of St. Angelo.

John XI, who became pope in 931, is said by Liutprand to have been a son of Marozia by pope Sergius, while others suppose him to have been the legitimate offspring of her marriage with Alberic, marquis of Camerino. This pope was restricted to the performance of his ecclesiastical functions, while the government of Rome was swayed by Marozia’s third husband, Hugh the Great, king of Arles, and afterwards by her son, the younger Alberic, who expelled his stepfather, and kept his mother and the pope prisoners in his palace. For twenty-two years Alberic, with the title of prince and senator of all the Romans, exercised a tyrannical power, while the papal chair was filled by a succession of his creatures whom he held in entire subjection. On the death of Agapetus II in 956, the Tuscan party considered that it would not be safe to entrust the papacy to anyone who might divide its interest; and Octavian, son of Alberic, a youth of eighteen, who two years before had succeeded to his father’s secular power, was advised to take the office for himself. Perhaps some such step had been contemplated by his father, as Octavian was already in ecclesiastical orders. As pope he assumed the name of John XII—this being the first instance of such a change; but his civil government was still carried on under his original name.

The tyranny and aggressions of Berengar II pressed heavily on the Italians; the pope and many other persons of importance, both ecclesiastics and laity, entreated Otho the Great to come to their deliverance. Otho accepted the invitation; he was crowned with great pomp at Monza, as king of Italy, and proceeded onwards to Rome. On the way he took an oath to defend the territory of St. Peter, and to uphold all the privileges of the pope; and it has been said that he executed a charter, by which the donations of his predecessors to the Roman see were confirmed, with large additions, while the imperial right of ratifying the elections to the papacy was maintained. At Rome, Otho received the imperial crown from the hands of the pope, and he exacted from the chief inhabitants an oath that they would never join with Berengar or with his son Adalbert.

But no sooner had the emperor left Rome than John—perhaps in disgust at finding that Otho was determined to assert for himself something very different from the merely titular dignity to which the pope had hoped to limit time—threw himself into the interest of Adalbert, who, on Otho’s appearance in Italy, had sought a refuge among the Saracens of Fraxinetum. Otho, on hearing of this, sent to inquire into the truth of the matter; the answer was a report that the pope lived in the most shameful debauchery, so that female pilgrims were even afraid to visit Rome, lest they should become the victims of his passions; that he scandalously neglected his duties of every kind; and that he had attached himself to Adalbert because he knew that the emperor would not countenance him in his disgraceful courses. Otho remarked that the pope was but a boy, and would amend under the influence of good examples and advice; he attempted to negotiate with him, and John promised to reform his way of life, but in the meantime received Adalbert with welcome into Rome. The emperor returned to the city, and at his approach the pope and Adalbert fled, carrying off all that they could lay their hands on.

The Romans bound themselves by an oath never to choose a pope without the emperor’s consent, and prayed for an investigation into the conduct of John. For this purpose a council of Italian, French, and German bishops was assembled at St. Peter’s in the presence of Otho and of many lay nobles. The emperor expressed surprise that John did not appear in order to defend himself. The Roman clergy, who all attended the meeting, were for condemning him at once; evidence, they said, was needless in the case of iniquities which were notorious even to Iberians, Babylonians, and Indians—the pope was no wolf in sheep’s clothing, but one who showed his character without disguise; but Otho insisted on inquiry. Bishops and clergymen of the Roman province then deposed that the accused had been guilty of offences which are heaped together without any discrimination of their comparative magnitude. He had consecrated the Eucharist without communicating; he had ordained in a stable, and at irregular times; he had sold episcopal ordination,—in one case to a boy of ten; his sacrilegious practices were notorious; he had been guilty of murder, of arson, of revolting cruelties,—of adultery, incest, and every kind of incontinence. He had cast off all the decencies of the ecclesiastical character; he had publicly hunted, and had dressed himself as a soldier, with sword, helmet, and cuirass; he had drunk wine to the love of the devil; he was in the habit, while gaming, of calling on Jupiter, Venus, and other demons for aid; he omitted the canonical hours, and never signed himself with the cross. Otho, who could not speak Latin, cautioned the accusers, by the mouth of Liutprand, not to bring charges out of envy, as was usual against persons of eminent station; but both clergy and laity, “as one man”, imprecated on themselves the most fearful judgments in this world and hereafter, if all, and worse than all, that they had said were not true; and at their entreaty the emperor wrote to John, desiring him to answer for himself. The pope only replied by threats of excommunication against all who should take part in the attempt to set up a rival against him. The emperor spoke of this as boyish folly, and sent a second letter, which the messengers were unable to deliver, as John was engaged in hunting. Otho thereupon exposed the treachery with which the pope had behaved, after having invited him into Italy for the purpose of aiding against Berengar and Adalbert. John was deposed, and Leo, chief secretary of the see, a man of good character, but not yet in orders, was chosen in his room.

But a conspiracy was already formed against the Germans, by means of the deposed pontiff’s agents. Even while Otho remained at Rome, with only a few of his soldiers to guard him, an insurrection took place, and, after the emperor’s departure, John regained possession of the city. Another council  was held, which deposed Leo from all clerical orders, annulled his ordinations, and, borrowing the language of Nicolas I against the synod of Metz, declared the late synod infamous; and the temporary triumph of the Tuscan party was signalized by a cruel vengeance on the hands, the eyes, the tongues, and the noses of their opponents. Otho was on the point of again returning to expel John, when the pope died in consequence of a blow which he received on the head while in the act of adultery—from the devil, according to Liutprand, while others are content to suppose that it was from the husband whom he had dishonoured. The Romans, forgetting their late oath, chose for his successor an ecclesiastic named Benedict; but the emperor reappeared before the city, starved them into a surrender, and reinstated Leo VIII. A council was held, at which Benedict gave up his robes and his pastoral staff to Leo.

The pope broke the staff in the sight of the assembly; the antipope was degraded from the orders above that of deacon, which, at the emperor’s request, he was allowed to retain, and was banished to Hamburg. Benedict, who appears to have been a man of high personal character, met with great veneration in the place of his exile, and died there in the following year.

John XIII, the successor of Leo, was consecrated with the emperor’s approbation, in October 965; but within three months he was driven from Rome and imprisoned in Campania by a party which had become very powerful, and aimed at establishing a government on the republican model, under the names of the ancient Roman magistracy, in hostility alike to German emperors and to the papacy. In consequence of this revolution, Otho found himself obliged again to visit Rome.

The pope was restored; the republican consuls were banished to Germany; the twelve tribunes were beheaded; others of the party were blinded or mutilated; the body of the prefect who had announced the decree of banishment to John was torn from the grave; his successor in the prefecture was paraded about the city, crowned with a bladder and mounted on an ass. So great was the sensation excited by the report of these severities, that, when Liutprand was sent to Constantinople to seek a Greek princess in marriage for the heir of the empire, Nicephoras Phocas reproached him with his master’s “impiety”, and alleged it as a reason for treating the ambassador with indignity. Liutprand boldly replied that his sovereign had not invaded Rome as a tyrant, but had rescued it from the disgraceful oppression of tyrants and prostitutes; that he had acted agreeably to the laws of the Roman emperors, and, had he neglected so to act, he would himself have been “impious, unjust, cruel, and tyrannical”.

Crescentius, who is said (but probably without ground) to have been a grandson of pope John X, by one of the Theodoras, became the chief of the republican party, and governed Rome with the title of consul. His character has been extolled as that of a hero and a patriot; yet there is not sufficient evidence to show that his patriotism arose from any better motive than selfish ambition. In 974, when the sceptre of Otho the Great had passed into the hands of a young and less formidable successor, Crescentius decoyed pope Benedict VI into the castle of St. Angelo, where he was put to death. While the pope was yet alive, Boniface VII was set up by the Crescentian party, but was obliged to give way to Benedict VII, who was established by the Tusculan interest, and held the see until 983. Otho II, who survived him but a short time, nominated to the papacy Peter, bishop of Pavia, who, out of reverence for the supposed apostolic founder of the Roman church, changed his name to John XIV. But Boniface, who in his flight had carried off much valuable property of the church, and had converted it into money at Constantinople, returned to Rome, seized John, and shut him up in St. Angelo, where he is supposed to have been made away with, either by hunger or by poison; and the intruder, in concert with Crescentius, held the papacy until his death, which took place within a year. His body was then dragged about the streets and treated with indignity, until some of the clergy charitably gave it burial.

The next pope, John XIV, is described as a man of much learning; but it is said that his clergy detested him for his pride, and the biographer of Abbo of Fleury tells us that the abbot, on visiting Rome, found him “not such as he wished him to be, or such as he ought to have been”, but “greedy of base gain, and venal in all his actions”. John was held in constraint by Crescentius, who would not allow any one to approach him without paying for permission, and seized not only the property of the church, but even the oblations. At length, unable to endure this growing oppression, the Pope requested the intervention of Otho III, then a youth of sixteen; but as Otho was on his way to Rome, in compliance with this invitation, he was met at Ravenna by messengers who announced the pope’s death, and, probably in the name of a party among the Romans who were weary of the consul’s domination, requested that the king (although he had not yet received the imperial crown) would nominate a successor. The choice of Otho fell on his cousin and chaplain Bruno, a young man of twenty-four, who was thereupon formally elected; and the first German pope (as he is usually reckoned) assumed the name of Gregory V.

Gregory crowned his kinsman as emperor on Ascension-day 996, and, wishing to begin his pontificate with clemency, obtained the Pardon of Crescentius, whom Otho had intended to send into exile. But scarcely had the emperor left Rome when Crescentius made an insurrection, and expelled Gregory. After an interval of eight months, the consul set up an antipope, John, bishop of Piacenza, by birth a Calabrian and a subject of the Greek empire, who had been chaplain to Otho’s mother, the Byzantine princess Theophano, and had been godfather both to the emperor and to Gregory. The tidings of the Roman insurrection recalled Otho from an expedition against the Slaves. He was met by Gregory at Pavia, advanced to Rome, and besieged Crescentius in St. Angelo. The German writers in general state that he forced the consul to a surrender, while the Italians assert that he got him into his power by a promise of safety. If such a promise was given, it was violated. The consul was beheaded; his body was exposed on a gallows, hanging by the feet, and twelve of his chief partisans were put to death. The antipope John, who had shown an intention of placing Rome under the Byzantine empire, was cruelly punished, although Nilus, a hermit of renowned sanctity, who had almost reached the age of ninety, had undertaken a toilsome journey from Rossano in Calabria, to intercede for him. He was blinded, deprived of his nose and tongue, stripped of his robes, and led through the city riding on an ass, with the tail in his hand; after which, according to some authorities, he was banished to Germany, while others say that he was thrown from the Capitol. The varieties of statement as to the authors of his punishment are still greater: one annalist relates that he was blinded and mutilated by some persons who feared lest Otho should pardon him; some writers state that Otho and Gregory concurred in the proceedings; while, according to others, the emperor was softened by the prayers of Nilus, and the cruelties exercised on the antipope were sanctioned by his rival alone.

 

ARNULF OF REIMS.

During the pontificate of John XV the see of Reims had become the subject of a new contest, more important than that between Artald and Hugh. On the death of archbishop Adalbero, in the year 989, Arnulf, an illegitimate son of one of the last Carolingian kings, requested Hugh Capet to bestow it on him, promising in return to serve him faithfully in all ways. The new king granted the petition, chiefly with a view to detach Arnulf from the interest of his uncle Charles, duke of Lorraine, the heir of the Carolingian line. The archbishop, at his consecration, took an oath of fealty to Hugh, imprecating the most fearful curses on himself if he should break it. He even received the Eucharist in attestation of his fidelity, although some of the clergy present protested against such an application of the sacrament. But when the arms of Charles appeared to be successful, the gates of Reims were opened to him, and his soldiers committed violent and sacrilegious outrages in the city. The archbishop was carried off as if a prisoner, and sent forth a solemn anathema against the robbers who had profaned his church; it was, however, suspected that he had a secret understanding with his uncle, and the suspicion was speedily justified by his openly joining Charles at Laon. But Laon was soon betrayed into the hands of Hugh by its bishop, Adalbero; the king got possession of his rival’s person, and imprisoned him at Orleans, where Charles died within a few months; and a council of the suffragans of Reims was held at Senlis, A.D. 990, for the examination of their metropolitan’s conduct. Letters were then sent to Rome both by Hugh and by the bishops, detailing the treachery of Arnulf, with the wretched state into which his province had fallen, and asking how this “second Judas” should be dealt with. But the pope was influenced by a partisan of Arnulf, who presented him with a valuable horse and other gifts; while the envoys of the opposite party, who made no presents either to John or to Crescentius, stood three days at the gates of the papal palace without being allowed to enter.

But Hugh now found himself strong enough to act without the pope. In June 991, a synod was held at the monastic church of St. Basle, near Reims, under Siguin, archbishop of Sens. The president proposed that, before proceeding to the trial of Arnulf, an assurance of indulgence for the accused should be obtained from the king, since, if his treason were a cause of blood, it would be unlawful for bishops to judge it. Some members, however, remarked that the suggested course was dangerous; if bishops declined such inquiries, princes would cease to ask for ecclesiastical judgments, would take all judicature into their own hands, and would cite the highest ecclesiastics before their secular tribunals; and, in deference to these objections, the proposal appears to have been dropped. Siguin detailed the proceedings which had taken place; the pope, he said, had left the bishops of France a year without any answer to their application, and they must now act for themselves. All who could say anything in favor of the accused were enjoined, under pain of anathema, to come forward; whereupon Abbo, abbot of Fleury, and others produced passages from the Isidorian decretals, to show that the synod had no right to judge a bishop —the trial of bishops being one of those “greater causes” which belong to the pope alone. To this it was answered that all had been done regularly; that application had been made to the pope, but without effect.

Arnulf of Orleans, who was regarded as the wisest and most eloquent of the French bishops, spoke very strongly against the Roman claim to jurisdiction. He did not hint, nor does he appear to have felt, any suspicion of the decretals; but in opposition to their authority he proved by an array of genuine canons, councils, and papal writings, that for the decision of local questions provincial synods were sufficient; and he cited the principles of Hincmar as to appeals. The requirements of the decretals, he said, had already been satisfied by the reference which both the king and the bishops had vainly made to Rome. He denied the power of the Roman pontiff by his silence to lay to sleep the ancient laws of the church, or by his sole authority to reverse them; if it were so, there would really be no laws to rely on. He enlarged on the enormities of recent popes, and asked how it was possible to defer to the sentence of such monsters—destitute as they were of all judicial qualities, of knowledge, of love, of character—very antichrists sitting in the temple of God, who could only act as lifeless idols. It would, (he said) be far better, if the dissensions of princes would permit, to seek a decision from the learned and pious bishops of Belgic Gaul and Germany than from the venal and polluted court of Rome.

Arnulf of Reims was brought before the council, and protested his innocence of the treachery imputed to him; but he gave way when confronted with a clerk who had opened the gates of the city to the besiegers, and who now declared that he had acted by the archbishop’s orders. On the last day of the synod, when the king appeared with his son and colleague Robert, Arnulf prostrated himself before them, and abjectly implored that his life and members might be spared. He was required to surrender the ensigns of his temporalities to the king, and those of his spiritual power to the bishops, and to read an act of abdication modelled on that by which Ebbo had resigned the same dignity a century and a half before. The degraded archbishop was then sent to prison at Orleans, and Gerbert, who had taken no part in the proceedings against him, was chosen as his successor.

This eminent man was born of humble parentage in Auvergne about the middle of the century, and was admitted at an early age into the monastery of Aurillac, where he made extraordinary proficiency in his studies. He had already visited other chief schools of France, when Borel, count of Barcelona, arrived at Aurillac on a devotional pilgrimage, and gave such a report of the state of learning in Spain as induced the abbot to send Gerbert with him on his return to that country. In Spain Gerbert devoted himself especially to the acquirement of mathematical and physical science, which was then almost exclusively confined to the schools of the Saracens; but it is uncertain whether his knowledge was derived immediately from the Moslem teachers of Seville and Cordova, or from Christians who had benefited by their instruction. In 968 he visited Rome in company with his patron Borel, and was introduced to Otho the Great. He then went into France, and became master of the cathedral school at Reims; and on a second visit to Italy, in company with the archbishop Adalbero, he obtained the abbacy of Bobbio through the interest of the empress Adelaide. But he found the property of the abbey dilapidated by his predecessor; he was involved in contentions with the neighboring nobles, who insisted on his confirming grants of the monastic lands which had been wrongfully made to them; while the monks were insubordinate, and his connection with the Germans served to render him generally unpopular. His position became yet worse on the death of Otho, which took place within a year from the time of his appointment; and, after having in vain attempted to obtain support from the pope, he resolved to leave Bobbio, although he still retained the dignity of abbot. “All Italy”, he wrote on this occasion to a friend, “appears to me a Rome; and the morals of the Romans are the horror of the world”.

Gerbert resumed his position at Reims, where he raised the school to an unrivalled reputation, and effectively influenced the improvement of other seminaries. The study of mathematics, the Arabian numerals, and the decimal notation were now for the first time introduced into France. The library of the see was enriched by Gerbert’s care with many transcripts of rare and valuable books; while his mechanical genius and science were displayed in the construction of a clock, of astronomical instruments, and of an organ blown by steam—apparently the first application of a power which has in later times produced such marvelous effects. He also took an important part in the political movements and intrigues of the time, acting as secretary to Adalbero, who, from his position as archbishop of Reims, exercised a powerful influence in affairs of state. Adalbero had fixed on him as his own successor in the archbishopric; but Gerbert’s humble birth was unable to cope with the pretensions of Arnulf, which, as he asserts, were supported by simoniacal means. He therefore acquiesced in his defeat, and retained the office of secretary under his successful rival. For a time he adhered to Arnulf in labouring for the interest of Charles of Lorraine; but he saw reason to change his course, formally renounced the archbishop’s service, and wrote to the archbishop of Treves that he could not, for the sake of either Charles or Arnulf, endure to be any longer a tool of the devil, and lend himself to the maintenance of falsehood against truth. Hugh Capet gladly welcomed the accession of so accomplished a partisan, and employed him as tutor to his son Robert.

The council of St. Basle wrote to the pope in a tone of great deference, excusing itself for having acted without his concurrence, on the ground that he had so long left unanswered the application which had been made to him. But John had already sent northward as his legate an abbot named Leo, who had reached Aix-la-Chapelle when he was informed of Arnulf’s deposition. On this the legate returned to Rome, and John issued a mandate to the bishops who had been concerned in the council, ordering them to appear at Rome for the trial of Arnulf’s case, and in the meantime to reinstate the archbishop, and to abstain from the exercise of ecclesiastical functions. The French bishops, in a synod held at Chela (Chelles, seemingly between Paris and Meaux), resolved to maintain the decisions of St. Basle; the king wrote to John, assuring him that nothing hail been done in breach of the papal rights, and offering to meet him at Grenoble, if the pope should wish to investigate the affair; while Gerbert protested to John that he had done no wrong, and exerted himself, by correspondence in all directions, to enlist supporters on his side. His tone as to the pretensions of Rome was very decided: thus he tells Siguin of Sens that God’s judgment is higher than that of the Roman bishop, and adds, that the pope himself, if he should sin against a brother, and should refuse to hear the church’s admonitions, must, according to our Lord’s own precept, be counted “as a heathen man and a publican”; he declaims on the hardship of being suspended from the offices of the altar, and urges the archbishop to disregard the pope’s prohibition.

John, without making any public demonstration for a time, endeavored, by the agency of monks, to excite discontent among the people of France, so as to alarm the new sovereign. Gerbert found his position at Reims extremely uneasy. Some of his most powerful friends were dead. He tells his correspondents that there is a general outcry against him—that even his blood is required; that not only his military retainers, but even his clergy, have conspired to avoid his ministrations, and to abstain from eating in company with him. In this distress he was cheered by receiving a letter from Otho III, then in his fifteenth year. Gerbert gladly accepted the invitation, and in the end of 994 repaired to the German court, where he found an honorable refuge, and became the young prince’s tutor and favorite adviser. In this position, where new hopes were set before his mind, he could afford to speak of his archbishopric with something like indifference. He writes to the empress Adelaide (widow of Otho the Great) that, as the dignity was bestowed on him by bishops, he will not resign it except in obedience to an episcopal judgment; but he will not persist in retaining it if that judgment should be against him. In 995 the pope again sent Leo into France. The legate put forth a letter to Hugh and his son, by way of answer to Arnulf of Orleans, and others who had taken part in the council of St. Basle. He meets the charges of ignorance against Rome by citing passages of Scripture, in which it is said that God chooses the foolish things of this world in preference to the wise. In reply to the charges of venality, he alleges that our Lord himself and His apostles received such gifts as were offered to them. The bishops, by their conduct towards the Roman church, had cut themselves off from it; their behavior to their mother had been like that of Ham to Noah. Arnulf of Orleans, “with his apostate son, whoever he may be”, had written such things against the holy see as no Arian had ever ventured to write. The legate cites the expressions of reverence with which eminent men of former times had spoken of Rome: if, he says, the chair of St. Peter had ever tottered, it had now reestablished itself firmly for the support of all the churches. He reflects on the irregularity of the proceedings against Arnulf, and on the cruelty with which he was treated; and he excuses the pope’s neglect of the first application in the matter on the ground of the troubles which were at that time caused by Crescentius.

A council, scantily attended by bishops from Germany and Lotharingia, was held under Leo at Mousson in June 995. The bishops of France had refused to appear either at Rome or at Aix; Gerbert alone, who had already removed to the German court, was present to answer for himself. In a written speech he defended the steps by which he had (reluctantly, as he said) been promoted to the see of Reims, together with his behavior towards Arnulf. He declared himself resolved to pay no heed to the prohibition by which the pope had interdicted him from divine offices—a mandate (he said) which involved much more than his own personal interest; but, at the request of the archbishop of Treves, he agreed, for the sake of example, to refrain from celebrating mass until another synod should be held. Arnulf was restored to his see by a synod held at Reims in 995; but he was detained in prison for three years longer.

Robert I of France, who succeeded his father in October 996, a prince of a gentle and devout, but feeble character, had married as his second wife Bertha, daughter of Conrad king of Burgundy, and widow of a count of Chartres. The union was uncanonical, both because the parties were related in the fourth degree, and because Robert had contracted a “spiritual affinity” with the countess, by becoming sponsor for one of her children; yet the French bishops had not hesitated to bless it, for in the marriages of princes the rigor of ecclesiastical law often bent to political expediency. Robert, however, felt that, on account of this vulnerable point, it was especially his interest to stand well with Rome; and he dispatched Abbo of Fleury as an envoy to treat with the pope in a spirit of concession as to the case of Arnulf. The abbot took the opportunity of obtaining privileges for his monastery from the new pope Gregory V; he returned to France with a pall for Arnulf; and in 998 the archbishop was released, and was restored to his see, which had been miserably impoverished during the long contest for the possession of it.

But if Robert supposed that his consent to this restoration would induce the pope to overlook the irregularity of his marriage, he soon found that he had been mistaken. A synod held at Rome in 998 required him and his queen, on pain of anathema, to separate, and to submit to penance; and it suspended the bishops who had officiated at the nuptials from communion until they should appear before the pope and make satisfaction for their offence. As to the sequel, it is only certain that Robert yielded, and that the place of Bertha was supplied by a queen of far less amiable character. Peter Damiani, in the following century, relates that Bertha gave birth to a monster with the head and neck of a goose; that the king and the queen were excommunicated by the whole episcopate of France; that the horror of this sentence scared all men from them, with the exception of two attendants; that even these cast the vessels out of which Robert or Bertha had eaten or drunk into the fire, as abominable; and that thus the guilty pair were terrified into a separation. But the terror to which Robert really yielded was more probably a dread of the spiritual power of Rome, and of the influence which, by uttering an interdict against the performance of religious offices, it might be able to exercise over his subjects; or it may be that, as is stated by the contemporary biographer of Abbo, he gave way to the persuasions of that abbot, who performed the part of Nathan in convincing him of his sin.

These triumphs of the papacy were very important for it, following as they did after a time during which there had been little communication with France, while at home the papal see had been stained and degraded by so much of a disgraceful kind. They assured the popes that they had lost no power by the change of dynasty which had been effected without their sanction. And if, as has been supposed, the sternness with which Gregory insisted on the separation of Robert and Bertha, was instigated by the wish of Otho to humiliate the French king, “it is one of many proofs that the rise of the papacy to a superiority over all secular princes was mainly promoted by their attempts to use it as a tool in their jealousies and rivalries against each other”.

The victory over the French episcopate was also important in consequence of the position which the popes took in the affair. They had already gained from the French church as much as was requisite for the admittance of their jurisdiction in the particular case—that a metropolitan of France should not be deposed without the concurrence of the pope. This had been allowed by Hincmar himself; it had even been the subject of a petition from the council of Troyes in 867; it was acknowledged by Hugh Capet and his bishops until the pope’s neglect of their application provoked the inquiry whether they might not act without him. But, not content with this, the popes and their advocates claimed that right of exclusive judgment over all bishops which was asserted for the papacy by the false decretals; and the result was therefore far more valuable for the Roman see than it would have been if the popes had only put forth such claims as were necessary for the maintenance of their interest in the case which was immediately before them.

The German pope died in February 999. It was a time of gloomy apprehensions. The approach of the thousandth year  from the Saviour’s birth had raised a general belief that the second advent was close at hand; and in truth there was much which might easily be construed as fulfilling the predicted signs of the end—wars and rumors of wars, famines and pestilences, fearful appearances in the heavens, faith foiling from the earth, and love waxing cold. In the beginning of the century, the council of Trosley (Troli, near Soissons) had urged the nearness of the judgment-day as a motive for reformation; and preachers had often insisted on it, although their opinion had met with objectors in some quarters. The preamble, “Whereas the end of the world draweth near”, which had been common in donations to churches or monasteries, now assumed a new and more urgent significance; and the belief that the long expectation was at length to be accomplished, did much to revive the power and wealth of the clergy, after the disorders and losses of the century. The minds of men were called away from the ordinary cares and employments of life; even our knowledge of history has suffered in consequence, since there was little inclination to bestow labour on the chronicling of events, when no posterity was expected to read the records. Some plunged into desperate recklessness of living; an eclipse of the sun or of the moon was the signal for multitudes to seek a hiding-place in dens and caves of the earth; and crowds of pilgrims flocked to Palestine, where the Saviour was expected to appear for judgment.

In the room of Gregory, Otho raised to the papacy the man who had hitherto been its most dangerous opponent—Gerbert. Gerbert’s learning and abilities had procured for him a great ascendency over the mind of his imperial pupil, from whom, in the preceding year, he had received the archbishopric of Ravenna. On attaining the highest dignity in the church, he assumed the name of Sylvester II—a name significant of the relation in which he was to stand to a prince who aimed at being a second Constantine. For Otho, who lost his father at the age of three, had been trained by his Greek mother, and by his Italian grandmother, Adelaide, to despise his own countrymen as rude, to value himself on the Byzantine side of his extraction, and to affect the elegancies of Greek and Roman cultivation. He introduced into his court the ceremonies of Constantinople; on revisiting Germany, he carried with him a number of noble Romans, with a view of exhibiting to his countrymen a refinement to which they had been strangers; he even entertained the thought of making Rome the capital of his empire.

The new pope, in order, as it would seem, to reconcile his present position with his earlier career, granted to Arnulf of Reims the pall and all the other privileges which had been connected with the see. It was thus made to appear as if Arnulf had been guilty, and as if his restoration were an act of grace on the part of the rival who had formerly been obliged to give way to him. Arnulf held the archbishopric until the year 1123.

Sylvester’s pontificate was not eventful. He had the mortification of being foiled by Willigis, archbishop of Mayence, a man of great influence, both from his position as primate of Germany and from his abilities as a politician. The contest is said to have arisen out of the pride of the emperor’s sister Sophia, who, being about to enter the nunnery of Gandersheim, disdained to receive the veil from any prelate of less than metropolitan dignity. Willigis was therefore invited to officiate at Gandersheim, and not only did so, but even held a synod there. Osdag, bishop of Hildesheim, within whose diocese the convent was situated, complained of these invasions, and for a time the matter was accommodated in his favor; but Willigis again interfered with the rights of the bishop’s successor, Bernward, and a synod held at Rome, in the presence of the pope and of the emperor, decided that Bernward should exercise the rights of diocesan over the community, but left the further settlement of the case to a synod which was to be assembled in Germany, under the presidency of a papal legate. This assembly met in 1001, at Palithi or Polde in Saxony. The archbishop, seeing that its feeling was against him, assumed a tone of insolent defiance towards the legate, broke up the session by means of his disorderly adherents, and had disappeared when the council reassembled on the following day. As the influence of Willigis appeared to render a fair trial hopeless in Germany, it was resolved to summon all the bishops of that country to attend a council in Italy; but, although the papal citation was seconded by the emperor, who needed the aid of their followers for the reinforcement of his army, so powerful were their fears of the primate that hardly any of them appeared. The pope found himself obliged to adjourn the consideration of the question; and on the death of Otho, which followed soon after, the power of Willigis was so much enhanced by the importance attached to his voice in the choice of a new emperor, that Sylvester did not venture to prosecute the matter. In 1007 the controversy was determined in favour of the see of Hildesheim; but by the authority of the emperor Henry, and without the aid of Rome. It was, however, again revived, and was not finally settled until 1030, when Aribo, archbishop of Mayence, acknowledged to Godehard, of Hildesheim, that his pretensions against the diocesan jurisdiction had been unfounded.

The pilgrims who flocked to the Holy Land were subjected to much oppression and annoyance by its Mussulman rulers, and frequent complaints of their sufferings were brought into western Christendom. By these reports Sylvester was excited to issue a letter addressed in the name of Jerusalem to the universal church, beseeching all Christians to sympathize with the afflictions of the holy city, and to aid it by gifts, if they could not do so by arms. The letter was not without effect in its own time, for some enterprises were in consequence undertaken against the Saracens; but the great movement of the crusades, of which it may be regarded as the first suggestion, was reserved for a later generation.

The young emperor appears to have fallen in a morbid state of melancholy. He had been lately shaken by the deaths of his cousin Gregory V, of his aunt Matilda, abbess of Quedlinburg, who in his absence carried on the government of Germany, and of other relations, which left him without any near kindred except two young sisters, who had both entered the cloister. He may, perhaps, have been touched by regret for the cruelties which had been committed in his name against the republicans of Rome; perhaps, also, the millenary year may have aided in filling his mind with sad and depressing thoughts. After having secluded himself for fourteen days, which he spent in prayer and fasting, he was persuaded by Romuald, the founder of the Camaldolite order, to undertake a penitential pilgrimage to Monte Gargano; he visited the hermit Nilus, near Gaeta, where he displayed the deepest humility and contrition; and, after his return to Rome, finding himself still unable to rest, he set out on a long journey through his dominions beyond the Alps. At Gnesen, in Poland, he knelt as a penitent before the tomb of Adalbert, bishop of Prague, who had been known to him, and perhaps little regarded by him, in earlier days, but had since found the death of a martyr in Prussia, and was now revered as a saint. At Aix-la-Chapelle, the emperor indulged his gloomy curiosity by opening the tomb of Charlemagne; and in 1001 he once more arrived at Rome, where he founded in the island of the Tiber a church in honor of St. Adalbert, whom he had already honored by a like foundation at Aix.

An insurrection took place, and Otho was besieged in his palace. It is said that from the walls he indignantly reproached the Romans for their unworthy requital of the favors which he had shown them, even to the prejudice of his own countrymen; that he received the Eucharist with the intention of sallying forth, but was restrained by the exertions of his friends.

The short remainder of his days was spent in restless movements and in penitential exercises, while he cherished the intention of raising his feudatories for the punishment of the Romans; but his projects were cut short by death at Paterno, a castle near Mount Soracte, and within sight of the ungrateful city, on Jan. 24, 1002. Although the German chroniclers in general attribute his end to small-pox, a later story, of Italian origin, has recommended itself to some eminent writers—less perhaps by its probability than by its romantic character. Stephania, it is said, the beautiful widow of Crescentius, provoked by her husband’s wrongs and her own to a desire of deadly vengeance, enticed the young emperor to her embraces, and by means of a pair of gloves, administered to him a subtle poison, which dried up the sources of his strength, and brought him to the grave at the age of twenty-two. In Otho became extinct the Saxon line which had ruled over Germany from the time of Henry the Fowler, and which for three generations had filled the imperial throne.

Within little more than a year, Sylvester followed his pupil to the grave. On him, too, it is said that the vengeance of Stephania wreaked itself by a poison which destroyed his voice, if it did not put an end to his life. But a more marvelous tale is related by the zealous partisans of the see which he had so strongly opposed in its assumptions, and which he had himself at length attained. To the authentic accounts of his acquirements and of his mechanical skill they add that he dealt in unhallowed arts, acquired from a book which he had stolen from one of his Saracen teachers. He understood, it is said, the flight and the language of birds; he discovered treasures by magic; he made a compact with the devil for success in all his undertakings; he fabricated, under astral influences, a brazen head, which had the power of answering questions affirmatively or negatively. To his question, “Shall I be apostolic pontiff?” it answered “Yes”. When he further asked, “Shall I die before I sing mass in Jerusalem?” the reply was “No”. But as is usual in such legends, the evil one deluded his victim; the Jerusalem in which Gerbert was to die was the Roman basilica of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 CHAPTER VI.

 

FROM THE DEATH OF POPE SYLVESTER II TO THE DEPOSITION OF GREGORY VI

A.D. 1003-1046.

 

 

The unexpected death of Otho III left his wide dominions without an heir, nor had any successor been provided. After much negotiation, Henry, duke of Bavaria, descended from a brother of Otho the Great, was chosen as king of Germany—chiefly through the influence of archbishop Willigis, by whom he was crowned at Mayence. Henry, who is usually styled the Second, had been intended by his parents for the ecclesiastical state, and was a prince of very devout character, so that he attained the honor of canonization, which was conferred also on his wife Cunegunda; but his piety was not of a kind to unfit him for the active duties of his position. He governed with ability and vigor, in the midst of much opposition and many difficulties, until the year 1024. In illustration of the mixture of saint and statesman in him, we are told that on one occasion he appeared before Richard, abbot of St. Vanne’s, at Verdun, in his Lotharingian dominions, and expressed a resolution to become a monk. The abbot, after some consideration, admitted him as a member of his own community, and immediately charged him, by his vow of monastic obedience, to return to the administration of the empire which had been committed to him by God.

The Italians, on the death of Otho, hastily set up a king of their own, Harduin, marquis of Ivrea. But his power was controlled by the quarrels of various parties, which were too much bent on the advancement of their own private interests to combine in any policy for their common country. While the nobles of Italy were desirous of national independence, as being most favorable to their class, the prelates and clergy in general preferred the rule of a German sovereign, as less likely to interfere with their own power than that of a nearer neighbor. Harduin incurred the detestation of the clergy, not only by such oppressions as were usual, but by acts of savage personal violence against bishops who refused to comply with his will. To these causes of disagreement was added the rivalry between the two chief cities of northern Italy—Milan, the residence of the later Roman emperors, and Pavia, the capital of the Lombard kingdom. That Harduin had been set up at Pavia ensured him the opposition of the Milanese, headed by their archbishop, Arnulf, who in 1004 invited Henry into Italy. Harduin found himself deserted by most of his adherents, who flocked to the German standard. Henry was crowded as king of Italy at Pavia; but the popular abhorrence of the Germans displayed itself, as usual, in the form of an insurrection. On the very night after the coronation, the king found himself besieged in his palace. The Germans, in order to divert the attack, set fire to the neighboring houses. Henry’s troops, who were at some distance from the city, were recalled by the sight of the flames, and the rising was suppressed; but a great part of Pavia had been destroyed, and the king recrossed the Alps with a feeling of disgust and indignation against his Italian subjects. Harduin renewed his pretensions, but in 1012 was compelled by a second expedition of Henry to abdicate; and, after a vain attempt to recover his power, he ended his days in a monastery—the last Italian of the middle ages who pretended to the crown of Lombardy.

In the meanwhile the Roman factions had taken advantage of the difficulties in which the Germans were involved. John, a son or brother of Crescentius, for some years governed Rome with the title of patrician, as the head of a republican administration. It would seem that to him three popes, who filled the chair from 1004 to 1012, were indebted for their elevation. But 439 on the death of the last of these, Sergius IV, which followed closely on that of the patrician, the disposal of the papacy was disputed by another party, headed by the counts of Tusculum, who, like the Crescentians, were descended from the notorious Theodora, her daughter Marozia having married their ancestor Alberic. The Tusculan party set up a pope named Benedict, whom they contrived to maintain against all opposition. Gregory, the popular or Crescentian pope, was expelled from the city, and set off to implore the aid of Henry. The king was not unwilling to have a pretext for going to Rome, where he was received with the greatest honors, and was made advocate of the church, which he swore faithfully to protect. But the visit resulted in the establishment not of Gregory, but of his rival Benedict, from whom Henry received the imperial crown.

Benedict VIII enjoyed greater power than his immediate predecessors, who had been subordinate to the Crescentian family. His energy was displayed in opposition both to the Greeks (with whom the Crescentian party had been connected) and to the Saracens. He induced the Pisans to attack the infidels in Sardinia, where the Christian inhabitants were oppressed and persecuted; and the expedition resulted in the conquest of the island. When a Saracen chief sent Benedict a sack full of chestnuts, with a message that he would return at the head of a like number of warriors, the pope sent it back filled with grains of millet, telling the Saracen that, if he were not content with the evil which he had already done, he should find an equal or greater multitude of men in arms ready to oppose him. In 1020 Benedict went into Germany, ostensibly for the consecration of the church of St. Stephen at Bamberg; but the journey had also the more secret object of asking for aid against the Saracens; and he persuaded the emperor once more to lead his troops into Italy, where Henry delivered Rome from its danger by the overthrow of the enemy.

A new power had lately appeared in the south of Italy. The Normans, after their conversion, had caught up with peculiar enthusiasm the passion for pilgrimages which was then so general. Companies of them—usually armed, for defense against the dangers of the way—passed through France and Italy, and, after visiting Monte Gargano, which was famous for an appearance of the archangel Michael, they took ship from the southern harbors of the peninsula for the Holy Land. Early in the eleventh century, a body of about forty Norman pilgrims, who had returned from the east in a vessel belonging to Amalfi, happened to be at Salerno when the place was attacked by a Saracen force. The prince, Guaimar, was endeavoring to raise the means of buying off the infidels; but the Normans, after giving, vent to their indignation at the cowardice of the inhabitants, begged him to furnish them with arms, sallied forth against the enemy, and by their example roused the spirit of the Greeks to resistance. The prince rewarded their aid with costly presents, and offered them inducements to remain with him; they declined the invitation, but, at his request, undertook to make his circumstances known in their own country. The sight of the rich and unknown fruits of the south, of the silken dresses and splendid armor which they carried home, excited the adventurous spirit of the Normans. A chief named  Osmond Drengot, who was on uneasy terms with his duke in consequence of having slain a nobleman who enjoyed the prince’s favor, resolved to go into Italy with his family. He waited on the pope, who advised him to attack the Greeks of Apulia, and, before reaching Monte Gargano, the band was increased to the number of about a hundred warriors. These adventurers entered into the service of the neighboring princes and republics, mixed in their quarrels, and aided them, although not with uniform success, against the Saracens and the Greeks. They were reinforced by outlaws of the neighborhood, and by fresh migrations of their countrymen; they obtained grants from Henry and from the government of Naples, founded and fortified the town of Aversa, in 1029, and established themselves as an independent power, with a territory which was divided into twelve counties—their chief bearing the title of duke of Apulia. But they soon displayed the habits of robbers, and were at war with all around them. Churches and monasteries were especial sufferers from their rapacity.

Both Henry and Benedict died in 1024. The Tusculans filled the papacy with a brother of the deceased pope, named John, in whose favor they bought the suffrages of the Romans with a large sum of money—a proceeding which the strength which they had by this time acquired would perhaps have rendered unnecessary, but for the circumstance that John was a layman. As Henry was childless, the empire was again without an heir. The choice of the electors fell on Conrad of Franconia, who was descended from a daughter of Otho the Great, and is styled the Salic, probably in order to signify that he sprang from the noblest race of the Franks. A difficulty was raised by some bishops on the ground that Conrad had contracted a marriage within the fifth degree; he was even required to renounce either his wife or the dignity to which he had been chosen. But he firmly refused to consent to a separation, and his queen was crowned at Cologne by the archbishop, Piligrin, who, after having joined in the opposition, requested that he might be allowed to perform the ceremony. The election of Conrad was justified by a course of government which occasioned the saying that his throne stood on the steps of Charlemagne.

It was now considered that the kingdom of Italy depended on Germany, and that the German sovereign was entitled to the empire, but was not actually emperor until his coronation at Rome. In 1026, Conrad was crowned as King of Italy at Milan, by the archbishop, Heribert. He was met by the pope at Como, and, after having suppressed a formidable insurrection at Ravenna, he received the imperial crown at Rome, on Easter-day, 1027. The ceremony was rendered more imposing by the presence of two kings—Canute of England and Denmark, who had undertaken a pilgrimage, and returned with a grant of privileges for the English church; and Rodolph of Provence, to whose dominions Conrad succeeded in 1032, by virtue of a compact which had been made between the king and the late emperor. From Rome Conrad proceeded into the south, where he received the oath of fealty from the local princes, bestowed fresh grants on the Normans, and took measures for organizing a resistance to the Greeks.

On the death of John XIX, in 1033, the Tusculan party appointed to the popedom his cousin Theophylact, a boy of ten or twelve years of age. But this extravagant stretch of their power resulted in its overthrow. The young pope, who styled himself Benedict IX, appeared to be intent on renewing the worst infamies of the preceding century; his shameless debaucheries, although they have been questioned, are established on the testimony of one of his successors—Desiderius, abbot of Monte Cassino, who in 1086 ascended the papal chair as Victor III.

Conrad had chiefly owed his Italian kingdom to the influence of Heribert archbishop of Milan, who had opposed the attempt of the nobles to set up a French rival, Odo of Champagne. The archbishop relied on the interest which he had thus established, and, elated by his spiritual dignity, by his secular power, and by the success which had attended his undertakings, he behaved with great violence in the commotions of the country. These had become very serious. While the nobles cried out against the bishops, their own retainers, or valvassors, rose against them; bloody conflicts took place, and Conrad, at Heribert’s invitation, again went into Italy for the purpose of investigating the cause of the troubles. The nobles charged the archbishop with having deprived many of them of their fiefs, and with having excited their vassals to insurrection; and Heribert, instead of attempting to clear himself, addressed the emperor with such insolence that an order was given for his arrest. No Italian would dare to touch him; but the Germans were less scrupulous, and he was carried off as a prisoner. The national feeling of the Italians was shocked by such an act against so eminent a prince of the church; even the archbishop’s enemies shared in the general indignation and alarm, while his partisans, by means of the clergy and monks, industriously agitated the multitudes. Long trains of penitents in sackcloth and ashes swept solemnly through the streets, and filled the churches with their litanies, imploring St. Ambrose to deliver his flock. The guardians to whose care Heribert had been committed allowed him to escape; he returned to Milan, and held out the city against the emperor, who, finding himself unable to take it, desolated the surrounding country. Conrad found it convenient to ally himself with pope Benedict, who had lately been expelled by the Romans, and whom, in other circumstances, he would have avoided with disgust; an anathema was uttered against Heribert for his rebellion, and the pope sanctioned the nomination of one of the imperial chaplains to the see of Milan. But both clergy and people adhered to the archbishop, who now offered the crown of Italy to Odo of Champagne. The tempting proposal induced Odo to relinquish an expedition which he had made into Conrad’s Lotharingian territory, and to set out towards the Alps; but he was intercepted and killed by Gozzelo, duke of Lorraine, and the emperor became undisputed master of Lombardy. The pope, in reward for his services, was conducted to Rome and reinstated in his office by Conrad; and the vices which he had before displayed were now rendered more odious by the addition of tyrannical cruelty towards those who had opposed him.

After having again visited the south of Italy, the emperor returned to Germany, with health shaken by a sickness which had been fatal to many of his followers. Heribert found means of once more establishing himself in Milan, was reconciled with Conrad’s successor, Henry III, and held the see, although not without much disquiet from the contentions between the nobles and the popular party, until his death in 1045. In the spring of 1039, Conrad died at Utrecht. The last months of his life had been spent in visiting various parts of his dominions; and at Arles, in the autumn of 1038, he republished a law which he had before promulgated at Milan, and which became the foundation of the feudal law of Europe — that the inferior vassals, instead of being removable at the will of their lords, should possess a hereditary tenure, which was to be forfeited only in case of felony established by the judgment of their equals.

In 1044 Benedict was again driven from Rome, and John, bishop of Sabino, was set up in his room, under the name of Sylvester III. After three months, however, Benedict was able to expel his rival; and—induced, according to one account, by love for the daughter of a nobleman who refused to allow the marriage except on condition of his vacating the papacy—he sold his interest in it to John Gratian, a presbyter who enjoyed a high reputation for austerity of life. But Benedict was disappointed in his love, and resumed his pretensions to the see, so that Rome was divided between three popes—“three devils”, as they are styled by an unceremonious writer of the century— each of them holding possession of one of the principal churches—St. John Lateran, St. Peter’s, and St. Mary Major. Benedict was supported by the Tusculan party, and Sylvester by a rival faction of nobles, while Gratian, who had assumed the name of Gregory VI, was the pope of the people. The state of things was miserable; revenues were alienated or intercepted, churches fell into ruin, and disorders of every kind prevailed.

That Gregory was regarded with ardent hope by the reforming party in the church appears from a letter written on his elevation by Peter Damiani, a person who became very conspicuous in the later history of the time. But it is said that the urgency of circumstances obliged him to devote himself to expeditions against the Saracens and the robber chiefs who impoverished the Roman treasury by plundering pilgrims of the gifts intended for it; and that on this account the Romans provided him with an assistant for the spiritual functions of his office.

The scandalous condition of affairs cried aloud for some remedy, and Peter, archdeacon of Rome, went into Germany to request the intervention of Henry III, the son and successor of Conrad. The king resolved to set aside all the claimants of the apostolic chair, and, before setting out for Italy, he gave a token of the course which he intended to pursue by citing before him and depriving Widgers, who had been encouraged by the disorders of Rome to thrust himself into the archbishopric of Ravenna. At Parma he assembled a council, but, as no pope was present, the investigation into the pretensions of the rivals was adjourned. Gregory met the king at Piacenza, and by his desire convened a second council at Sutri. The other claimants of the papacy were cited, but did not appear; Benedict, who had retired to a monastery, was not mentioned in the proceedings; Sylvester was declared to be an intruder, was deposed from the episcopate and the priesthood, and condemned to be shut up in a cloister. Gregory, who presided over the council, and had perhaps shared in inviting Henry’s interference, was then, to his astonishment, desired to relate the circumstances of his elevation. With the simplicity which is described as a part of his character, he avowed the use of bribery (which was perhaps too notorious to be denied); but he said that as, in consideration of his repute, large sums of money had been bestowed on him, which he had intended to expend on pious objects, he had been led to employ a part of them in this manner by a wish to rescue the holy see from the tyranny of the nobles, from its calamities and disgrace. Some members of the council suggested to him that the use of such means was unwarrantable. At these words a new light broke in on the pope; he acknowledged that he had been deceived by the enemy, and requested the bishops to advise him. According to one account, they answered that he would do better to judge himself: whereupon he confessed himself unworthy of the papacy, and stripped off his robes in the presence of the council. Other writers state that he was warned to anticipate a deprivation by resigning; while, according to a third statement, he was deposed. The papacy was vacant; and Henry proceeded to fill it with a pope of his own selection.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VII

 

THE BRITISH CHURCHES - MISSIONS OF THE TENTH AND ELEVENTH CENTURIES.

 

 

The most remarkable subject in the religious history of England between the death of Alfred and the Norman conquest is the struggle between the monks and the secular clergy. The distaste for monachism which had grown up among the Anglo-Saxons has been mentioned in a former chapter. The long-continued invasions of the Danes contributed to the decline of the system, not only by laying waste a multitude of religious houses and butchering or dispersing their inmates, but by compelling men to study almost exclusively the arts of self-preservation and self-defence. Thus the monastic life became extinct in England; and when Alfred attempted to revive it by founding a monastery for men at Athelney and one for women at Shaftesbury, it was found that, although Shaftesbury prospered under the government of one of the king’s own daughters, no Englishman of noble or free birth could be persuaded to embrace the monastic profession; so that Alfred was obliged to stock his establishment at Athelney with monks and children from abroad.

In some of the religious houses which had suffered from the Danish ravages, a new class of inmates established themselves. Perhaps (as has been suggested) many of them were persons who had belonged to those inferior orders of the clergy which were not bound to celibacy. Such persons may, in the scarcity of other clerks, have been raised by bishops to the higher degrees without being required to forsake their wives; and the practice thus begun may have been extended to a general neglect of enforcing celibacy on the ministers of the church. From this and other causes it came to pass that the monasteries were occupied by a married clergy, among whom, without too literally understanding the gross accusations of their enemies, we may reasonably believe that there was much of irregularity and of worldly-mindedness. The monastic life, properly so called, was no longer followed; the Englishmen who wished to lead such a life either withdrew to lonely hermitages or betook themselves to foreign monasteries, among which that of Fleury on the Loire—lately reformed by Odo of Cluny, after having fallen into an utter decay of discipline—was the most favorite resort. Such was the state of things when Dunstan entered on his career of reform.

Dunstan was born about the year 925, of noble parentage, in the neighborhood of Glastonbury—a place which enjoyed a peculiar veneration, not only on account of the legends which made it the scene of the first preaching of Christianity in Britain by Joseph of Arimathea, but also from later associations. The fame of St Patrick was fabulously connected with Glastonbury; it was even said to be his burying-place and it was much frequented by Irish, some of whom lived there in the practice of strict devotion, although not bound by any monastic rule, and drew a large number of pupils from the surrounding country. Under these masters Dunstan became a proficient in the learning of the time, and acquired extraordinary accomplishments in calligraphy, painting, sculpture, music, mechanics, and the art of working in metals, so that his skill and ingenuity brought on him the charge of magic. His earlier history abounds in details of rigid asceticism, in tales of strange miracles, of encounters with devils, and of fierce mental conflicts. Having been introduced at the court of king Edmund, he received from the king the church of Glastonbury, with a grant of new privileges; and he erected a magnificent abbey, which he filled with Benedictine monks—the first of their kind who had been seen in England for two hundred years. Dunstan acquired high office and powerful influence in the state. We are familiar from childhood with some version of the story of his contest with Edwy “the All-fair”—how on the coronation-day he forcibly dragged the king from the society of Ethelgiva, and compelled him to rejoin the boisterous festivity of his nobles; the expulsion of the monks by Edwy from Glastonbury and Abingdon, the only monasteries which then belonged to them; the exile of Dunstan, and his triumphant return as a partisan of the king’s brother Edgar, who forced Edwy to a partition of the kingdom, and soon after became sovereign of the whole. Under Edgar, Dunstan enjoyed an unlimited power. In 958 he obtained the bishopric of Worcester, to which in the following year that of London was added; and in 960 he was advanced to the primacy of Canterbury, as successor of his friend and supporter Odo. He received the pall at Rome from John XII, and, with the approbation of the pope and of the king, he began a reform of the clergy. Edgar, whose cooperation was exacted as a part of the penance incurred by his having carried off a novice or pupil from the nunnery of Wilton, is said to have inveighed at a council in the severest terms against the corruptions of the seculars. The sees of Worcester and Winchester were filled with two of the archbishop’s most zealous partisans—Oswald, a nephew of the late primate, and Ethelwold, abbot of Abingdon, who was styled “the father of monks”, and was a confidential adviser of the king. Seculars were ejected wherever it was possible; all preferment was exclusively bestowed on the regulars; monks were brought from Fleury and other foreign monasteries, to fill the places of the expelled clergy, and to serve as examples to the  English of the true monastic life. The canons of Winchester are described by Ethelwold’s biographer as sunk in luxury and licentiousness; they refused to perform the offices of the church, and it is said that, not content with marrying, they indulged themselves in the liberty of changing their wives at pleasure. The bishop, armed with a special authority from the pope, John XIII, summoned them to appear before himself and a commissioner from the king. Throwing down on the floor a number of monastic cowls, he required the clergy either to put on these or to quit their preferments. Three only complied, and the rest were dismissed with pensions from the property of the church. The reformation of Worcester was effected by means of another kind. Oswald, with a company of monks, established in the city a service which rivalled that of the cathedral. The people flocked to the new comers; and the canons of the cathedral, finding themselves deserted, were reduced to acquiesce in the bishop’s measures. In other parts of his diocese, however, Oswald purged the monasteries by a forcible expulsion of the married clergy, and established monks in their room. During the reign of Edgar, forty-seven monasteries were founded, restored, or recovered from the secular clergy. The monks were governed by a rule modified from that of St Benedict, and chiefly derived from Fleury.

Under the next king, Edward the Martyr, a reaction appeared to be threatened. Some noblemen expelled the regulars from monasteries situated on their lands, and reinstated the seculars with their wives and children. Councils were held for the consideration of the matter. At Winchester, Dunstan is said to have gained a victory by means of a crucifix which uttered words forbidding the proposed changed. At Calne, where the cause of the seculars was eloquently pleaded by a Scotch or Irish bishop named Beornhelm, Dunstan solemnly told the assembly that he committed the cause of his church to God—on which, it is said, the floor of the hall in which the council was assembled immediately gave way; some were killed and many were severely hurt; while the archbishop and the friends who surrounded him were saved by the firmness of the beam over which they stood. The story of the speaking crucifix appears to be a fiction; the other may be explained without the supposition either that a miracle was wrought in behalf of Dunstan, or that he deliberately contrived a fraud which involved the death or bodily injury of his opponents. The regular clergy got the victory for the time, but it was very imperfectly carried out. With the exception of Worcester and Winchester, no cathedrals were reformed. Dunstan, although he lived to made no attempt to introduce a change at Canterbury—whether it were that he was afraid to venture on such a work, or that reform appeared less necessary there than elsewhere and his coadjutor Oswald, on being translated to the archbishopric of York, held that see for twenty years (972-992) without disturbing the seculars of his province. The renewal of the Danish invasions diverted the general attention from such matters. Canterbury was transferred to monks by archbishop Aelfric, in 1003; but the other cathedrals remained in possession of the seculars until the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, and throughout the kingdom the triumph of the one or of the other party depended on their strength in each locality. At the council of Eanham, in 1009, it was laid down that all marriage of the clergy is improper; but the council seems to have practically contented itself with attempting to suppress the greater evils which had arisen from such prohibitions—that clerks took more than one wife at a time, or discarded one for another. The secular clergy of England continued to marry, and their issue was regarded as legitimate.

 

IRELAND.

 

In common with other western countries, Ireland suffered severely from the ravages of the Northmen, and in resistance to these enemies the clergy frequently took to arms. Favored by the discords of the native chiefs, the Danes made extensive settlements in Ireland; their princes were established at Dublin, Limerick, and Waterford—the last of these a town altogether of their own foundation. Various tribes of Northmen contended for the possession of Dublin. But the power of the strangers was weakened by their internal feuds, and was at length irrecoverably broken at the great battle of Clontarf, fought on Good Friday 1014, where Brian Boru, king of all Ireland, fell at the age of eighty-eight in leading on his countrymen to victory. Dublin, Waterford, and Limerick, however, still remained in possession of the Danes.

The Danes (or Ostmen) of Dublin were gradually converted to Christianity. They would not, however, receive bishops from the Irish, but sought consecration for their pastors from the English church, with which their own race had become closely connected. And it was by means of this Danish intercourse with England that Ireland was for the first time brought into connection with the Roman church.

 

SCOTLAND.

 

The obscurity which hangs over the church-history of Scotland during this period has been lamented by all who have made that history the special subject of their inquiries. The ancient chronicles have perished, and the story, instead of resting, as elsewhere, on the satisfactory evidence of contemporary narratives, must be sought out and pieced together by the laborious industry and the doubtful guesses of the antiquary. Scotland was much infested by the Danes, who succeeded in establishing themselves in the country to such a degree that a large Scandinavian element may to this day be traced among its population. In 806 they attacked Iona, where sixty-eight of the monks were slain; and it appears that, in consequence of the dangers to which St. Columba’s island sanctuary was exposed, Kenneth III in 849 translated the patron’s relics, and removed the seat of the Scottish primacy, to Dunkeld, From that time the abbots of Dunkeld exercised the same authority over the church which had before been vested in the abbots of Iona; but the abbot of Iona continued to be the head of the Columbite order of monks. About 905 it is believed that Dunkeld itself became unsafe, and that the primacy was translated to St. Andrews; and in this more permanent seat it acquired a character more nearly resembling the primacy of other countries, by being vested in the bishops of St. Andrews, who were styled “Episcopi Scotorum”, while the other bishops of the kingdom were subject to them in the same manner as they had formerly been to the successors of Columba in Iona and Dunkeld.

In the absence of certain information, writers of Scottish history have freely indulged in fables and wild conjectures. Nor has the national fondness for claiming eminent men as our countrymen been limited to those cases in which the ambiguous term Scotus might give some plausibility to the claim—such as that of the philosopher John, whose other designation, Erigena, has been interpreted as meaning a native of Ayr! Thus it has been attempted, in opposition to clear historical evidence, to maintain that Alcuin was a Scotsman; that Einhard the biographer of Charlemagne was a Scot whose real name was Kineard; that Raban Maur was a Scot, and a monk of Melrose; and even one of the more critical writers, although he grants the English birth of Alcuin, yet imagines that in the same age there was another Albinus, a native of Scotland, to whom he ascribes the authorship of the Caroline Books.

It is unnecessary here to go into a controversy which has been waged as to a class of ecclesiastics styled Culdees, in whom a precedent has been sought for the Presbyterian form of church-government. Their name, which signifies servants of God—a designation specially restricted to monks,— is first found in Ireland; and the Culdees of Scotland appear to have been in reality a species of monks, representing the ancient Irish order of St. Columba, although with a discipline which, like that of the English monasteries, had been relaxed in consequence of the Danish invasions. But so far were they from rejecting the episcopal polity, that in many cases they were attached to cathedrals, (as in the archiepiscopal church of York); and in some places, as at St. Andrews, they claimed a share in the election of the bishops. At St. Andrews they retained until the twelfth century the Scottish or Irish ritual, which had been used at York until the time of Alcuin—celebrating their services in a retired corner of the church; but, notwithstanding this and other peculiarities, the contentions which are recorded between such societies and bishops related, not to any difference in religion, but to questions of property or privileges.

 

RUSSIA

 

The Greek church in this period extended its communion by the conversion of a nation destined to play an important part in later history the Russians.

The ruling tribe of Russia were Scandinavians, or Northmen, who, while their kinsmen infested the countries of the west, carried their adventurous arms into the vast territory which lies to the south-east of their original seats. The first mention of them in history is under the year 839, when some Russians, who had been sent to Constantinople, accompanied the eastern emperor’s ambassadors to the court of Louis the Pious. In 864 the Russian monarchy was founded by Rurik. The northern conquerors gradually enlarged their boundaries; their race intermingled with the older inhabitants of the country, and their Teutonic language was forgotten. They became known to the Greeks by commerce carried on across the Euxine, and by repeated attempts which they made to get possession of Constantinople. Some of Rurik’s companions, leaving him in possession of his conquests, proceeded to the eastern capital, where they entered into the imperial service; and the Varangian guard, which was thus formed, was recruited by adventurers of kindred race from England and the Scandinavian countries.

The story of the first introduction of Christianity into Russia is embellished by fable. According to the Greek writers, Basil the Macedonian, on concluding a peace with the Russians, sent a bishop and other missionaries into their country. The bishop, in the presence of the Russian prince and nobles, dwelt on the evidence borne by miracles to the truth of the Gospel revelation. They listened attentively, but answered that they would not believe unless they might themselves witness a miracle. The  bishop warned them not to tempt God; but, as they had been especially struck by the story of the three youths delivered from the furnace, he proceeded to show a miracle of a similar kind. At his prayer, the book of the Gospels was cast into a fire, and after many hours it was taken out uninjured.

Photius, in his letter to the oriental patriarchs, states that the fierce and barbarous Russians had been converted by the Greek church. But his language greatly overstates any effect which the Christian teachers had at that time produced among them; and although his predecessor Ignatius is said to have consecrated a bishop for Russia, and to have taken measures for spreading the Gospel in that country, paganism was, in the middle of the following century, again all but universal among the Russians.

In 955, Olga, widow of the Grand-Prince Igur, and regent of Russia, appeared with a large train at Constantinople, where she was received with much honour by Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and was baptised. It is uncertain whether she had undertaken the expedition in consequence of some Christian instruction which had reached her in her own land, or whether, having gone to Constantinople with a view to secular business, she there received impressions which led her to seek for admission into the church. Olga, who at baptism took the name of Helena, endeavored, after her return to Novogorod, to spread her new faith among her subjects. Her son, Svatoslaff, however, withstood her attempts to convert him, alleging that his nobles would despise him if he should change his religion.

Vladimir, the son and successor of Svatoslaff, was importuned, it is said, by the advocates of rival religions of Judaism, of Islam, and of Greek and Latin Christianity. He saw reason for rejecting the Jewish and Mahometan systems, and, in order that he might be able to decide between the two forms of Christianity, he sent commissioners to observe the religion of Germany, of Rome, and of Greece. When at Constantinople, they were deeply impressed by the magnificent building of the patriarchal church, and by the solemn, majestic, and touching character of the Eucharistic service which they witnessed; they told the Greeks who were with them that daring the performance of the rite they had seen winged youths circling through the church and chanting the Trisagion. By the report of these envoys Vladimir was determined to adopt the Christianity of the Greeks. In 988, having taken the city of Korsun from the empire, he made proposals for the hand of a Greek princess, Anna, sister of the emperor Basil II and of Theophano, wife of Otho II. To the difficulties raised on the ground of religion, he answered that he was willing to become a Christian. His resolution was shaken by a temporary blindness, which he ascribed to the vengeance of the gods against his apostasy; but at Anna’s urgent request he consented to be baptized, and his change of religion was justified by the recovery of his sight as he received the imposition of the bishop of Korsun’s hands. The marriage took place forthwith, and Korsun either was restored to the empire, or became the dowry of Vladimir's bode. According to Russian writers, Vladimir, who at baptism had taken the name of Basil, renounced the laxity of his former life for a strict observance of conjugal fidelity, and of other Christian duties; and both he and Anna are numbered among the saints of their church. The Latins, however, assert that his actions did no credit to his new profession.

On his return to Kief the grand-prince ordered the idol of Perun, the chief Russian god, to be dragged through the streets at a horse’s tail, and thrown into the Dnieper. Many of the Russians burst into tears at the sight; but, when a proclamation summoned them to repair to the river next day, on pain of being regarded as rebels, the dutiful people argued that, if the proposed change of religion were not good, the prince and nobles would not recommend it. A general baptism of the population took place. “Some”, says Nestor, “stood in the water up to their necks, others up to their breasts, holding their young children in their arms; the priests read the prayers from the shore, naming at once whole companies by the same name”. Bishoprics were now established, churches were built on the Byzantine model by Greek architects, relics were imported, schools were opened, and children were obliged to attend them, although it is said that the mothers wept, and were as much afraid to send their children for instruction as if they had been sending them to death. The Scriptures, in Cyril’s Slavonic version, were introduced a fact which, in defiance of chronology, has been turned into the statement that Cyril himself laboured as a missionary among the Russians.

On the death of Vladimir, in 1015, the division of his dominions among his twelve sons, and the bloody family discords which ensued, interfered with the progress of the Gospel. But Yaroslaff, who at length became the sole ruler of the country, A.D. 1019, zealously carried on the work. He caused translations of some edifying Greek books to be made for the benefit of his subjects, encouraged the composition of original religious works, and even himself took part in the literary labor. The ‘Nomocanon’, or collection of ecclesiastical laws, by Photius, was introduced as the rule of discipline. The clergy were exempted from taxes, and from civil duties; but, whereas they had until then been subject to the patriarch of Constantinople, Yaroslaff was careful to place the church on a national footing, with a native Russian for its primate.

 

BOHEMIA

 

Although Bohemia had been reckoned among Christian countries, the Gospel was but very imperfectly established in it. On the death of duke Radislav, in 925, his mother Ludmilla (whose conversion has been already mentioned) undertook the care of his two sous, Wenceslav and Boleslav. But the widow of Radislav, Dragomira, who was a zealous pagan, contrived that Ludmilla should be murdered, a crime to which she was instigated alike by the violence of religious enmity and by a fear of losing her share in the administration. Notwithstanding his mother’s efforts to turn him away from Christianity, Wenceslav was deeply devoted to it. He lived a life of the strictest sanctity, and is supposed to have been on the point of exchanging his crown for the monastic cowl when his reign was violently brought to an end. His brother Boleslav attacked him when on his way to perform his devotions in a church. Wenceslav, being the stronger of the two, disarmed the traitor, threw him to the ground, and uttered the words “God forgive thee, brother!”. But the cries of Boleslav brought his servants to the spot, and, supposing their master to have been attacked, they fell on the duke and slew him.

Boleslav, who is styled “the Cruel”, usurped the government. On the birth of a son, soon after, he was led by a strange mixture of motives to devote the child to a religious life by way of expiation; but for many years he carried on a persecution of his Christian subjects, expelling the clergy, and destroying churches and monasteries. In 950, after a long struggle against the power of Otho I, he was obliged to yield, and the emperor, in granting him a peace, insisted that he should establish freedom of religion, and should rebuild the churches which he had demolished.

During the remaining seventeen years of Boleslav’s reign the church enjoyed peace; but the complete establishment of Christianity was the work of his son Boleslav “the Pious”, who took vigorous measures for the suppression of paganism, and with the consent of the emperor, and that of Wolfgang bishop of Ratisbon, to whose see Bohemia had been considered to belong, founded in 973 the bishopric of Prague. The diocese was to include the whole of Boleslav’s dominions, and was to be subject to the archbishop of Mentz (Mayence), as a compensation for the loss of the suffragan see of Magdeburg, which had lately been erected into an independent archbishopric.

The second bishop of Prague was a Bohemian of noble family, who had studied under Adalbert, archbishop of Magdeburg, and, at receiving confirmation from him, had adopted the prelate’s name instead of the Bohemian Woytiech. The bishop displayed great activity in his office. He persuaded the duke to build churches and monasteries, and, as his German education had rendered him zealous for the Latin usages, he exerted himself to suppress the Greek rites which had been introduced by way of Moravia. He found that much paganism was still mixed with the Christian profession of his flock, and that gross disorders and immoralities prevailed among them; that the clergy lived in marriage or concubinage; that the people practised polygamy, and marriage within the forbidden degrees; that they sold their serfs and captives to Jewish slave dealers, who disposed of them to heathens and barbarians sometimes for the purpose of sacrifice. Adalbert set himself to reform these evils; but the rigor of his character and his somewhat intemperate zeal excited opposition, which was greatly swelled by his attempting to introduce the Roman canons without regard to the national laws, and to assert for the church an immunity from all secular judgments. The feuds of his family were also visited on the bishop, and such was the resistance to his authority that he twice withdrew from Bohemia in disgust, and made pilgrimages to Rome and to Jerusalem. In obedience to a Roman synod, he resumed his see; but he finally left it in 996, and, with the sanction of Gregory V, who gave him the commission of a regionary archbishop, he set out on a missionary expedition to Prussia, where, after ineffectual attempts to convert the barbarous people, he was martyred on the shore of the Frische Haff in April 997.

Boleslav, duke of Poland, who had encouraged the mission, redeemed the martyr’s corpse, and placed it in a church at Gnesen, where, as we have seen, it was with great devotion by Otho III in the year 1000. On that occasion the emperor erected Gnesen into an archbishopric, which he bestowed on one of Adalbert’s brothers. In 1039, while the Polish throne was vacant, and the country was a prey to anarchy, the Bohemians, under Bretislav I, took possession of Gnesen, seized on the vast treasures which had been accumulated around the shrine of Adalbert, and resolved to carry off the body of the saint, whose memory had risen to great veneration in his native country. Severus, bishop of Prague, who had accompanied the army, took advantage of the feeling. He declared that Adalbert had appeared to him in a vision, and had made him swear that the Bohemians, as a condition of being allowed to enjoy the presence of his relics in their own land, would bind themselves to the observance of such laws as he had in his lifetime unsuccessfully attempted to establish among them. The relics were then with great solemnity translated to Prague : but Polish writers assert that the invaders were mistaken in their prize, and that the real body of St. Adalbert still remained at Gnesen.

The Slavonic liturgy, which had been sanctioned by pope John VIII for Moravia, was introduced from that country into Bohemia, and naturally excited opposition on the part of the German clergy who laboured among the Slavonic nations. A letter bearing the name of John XIII, which, in professing to confirm the foundation of the see of Prague, requires the Bohemian church to use the Latin language and rites, is said to be spurious. But the use of the Slavonic liturgy was represented by its opponents as a token of heresy. The abbey of Sazawa, founded in 1038, became the chief school of the native Bohemian monasticism, and maintained the Slavonic form. In 1058 the Slavonic monks were expelled from it by duke Spitihnew; but five years later they were restored by duke Wratislav, who endeavored to obtain from Gregory VII an approbation of their vernacular service-book. The pope, however, in 1080, replied in terms of strong disapprobation. It was, he said, God’s pleasure that Holy Scripture should not be everywhere displayed, lest it might be held cheap and despised, or should give rise to error; the use of the vernacular had been conceded only on account of temporary circumstances, which had now long passed away. Wratislav, who adhered to the emperor Henry IV in his contest with Gregory, continued to sanction the Slavonic ritual at Sazawa; but in 1097 it was again suppressed by his successor, Bretislav II, and the monastery was filled with monks of the Latin rite, who destroyed almost all the Slavonic books. Yet the liturgy thus discountenanced by Rome and its partisans was revived from time to time in Bohemia; and in the convent of Emmaus, at Prague, founded in the fourteenth century by the emperor Charles IV, it was especially sanctioned by pope Clement VI, although with the condition that the use of it should be limited to that place.

In some cases, where people of Slavonic race bordered on the Greek empire, the popes found it expedient to gratify their national feelings by allowing the vernacular service; but elsewhere they endeavored to root it out. Thus, although Alexander II, in 1067, permitted the Slavonic rite in the province of Dioclea, a council held at Spalatro in the following year, under a legate of the same pope, condemned it, on the ground that the Slavonic letters (to which the name of “Gothic” was given) had been invented by Methodius, a heretic, who had written many lying books in the Slavonic tongue against the Catholic faith. The Slavonic liturgy, however, has continued to be used in many churches of Illyria down to the present time, although unhappily its antiquated language has not only become unintelligible to the people, for whose edification it was originally intended, but is said to be little understood even by the clergy who officiate in it.

 

POLAND.

 

It has been supposed that some knowledge of Christianity found its way into Poland from Moravia, and more especially by means of Christian refugees after the ruin of the Moravian kingdom. Yet nothing considerable had been effected towards the conversion of the Poles, when in 965 their duke, Mieceslav, married Dambrowka, a daughter of Boleslav the Cruel of Bohemia. Two years later Dambrowka persuaded her husband to embrace the Christian faith, and he proceeded to enforce it on his subjects under very severe penalties; thus, any one who should eat flesh between Septuagesima and Easter was to lose his teeth. The German chronicler who relates this, Thietmar or Ditmar, bishop of Merseburg, adds that among a people so rude, who needed to be tended like cattle and beaten like lazy asses, means of conversion akin to the severity of their barbaric laws were more likely to be useful than the gentler methods of ordinary ecclesiastical discipline.

The story that the Polish church was organized under the superintendence of a papal legate, with seven bishoprics and two archbishoprics, is now exploded. Posen was the only bishopric in the country, and was subject to the archbishops of Magdeburg, until in 1000 Gnesen was made an archiepiscopal and metropolitan see by Otho III. Although the original Christianity of Poland was derived from Greek sources, the fourth wife of Mieceslav, Oda, daughter of a German marquis, influenced the duke in favor of the Latin system. This princess was active in the encouragement of monks, and in works of piety and charity; and the clergy, in consideration of the benefits which the church derived from her, were willing to overlook the fact that her marriage was a breach of the vows which she had taken as a nun. The establishment of the Latin Christianity was completed under Boleslav, who has been already mentioned as the patron of Adalbert’s mission to Prussia. The popes were careful to draw close the bonds which connected Poland with Rome; and from an early time (although the precise date is disputed), a yearly tribute of a penny was paid by every Pole, with exception of the clergy and nobles, to the treasury of St. Peter.

The title of king, which Boleslav acquired, was probably bestowed on him by Otho III on the occasion of his visit to Gnesen. If, however, the dignity was conferred by the imperial power, the popes, according to a story of doubtful authority, soon found a remarkable opportunity of exhibiting and increasing their spiritual jurisdiction over the new kingdom. After the death of king Mieceslav or Miesco II, in 1034, Poland fell into a miserable state of confusion. Paganism again reared its head; there was much apostasy from the Gospel, bishops and clergy were killed or hunted out, churches and monasteries were burnt, and the Bohemian invasion, already mentioned, was triumphant. The Poles, it is said, at length resolved to offer the crown to Casimir, a son of the late king, who had been driven into banishment; and, after much inquiry, he was discovered in a monastery either that of Cluny or the German abbey of Braunweiler. Casimir had taken the monastic vows, and had been ordained a deacon; and the abbot declared that, although grieved for the misery of Poland, he could not release the prince from these engagements, unless by the pope’s permission. For this, application was made to Benedict IX, by whom, after much entreaty, Casimir was discharged from his ecclesiastical obligations, and was given up to the Poles, with permission to marry and to undertake the government; but the pope stipulated that, in remembrance of their having received a king from the church, every male of the nation should use a certain sort of tonsure, and that other marks of subjection should be shown to the see of St. Peter.

 

NORTH GERMANY

 

During the tenth century the German sovereigns especially Henry the Fowler and Otho the Great labored to provide for the suppression of paganism in the northern part of their dominions. With a view to this, bishoprics were established at Meissen, Merseburg, and elsewhere, and Magdeburg was erected into a metropolitan see. But little impression could be made on the Slavonic tribes in those quarters. A natural prejudice was felt against the Gospel as a religion which offered to them by the Germans; the German missionaries were ignorant of Slavonic; and it is said that the clergy showed greater eagerness to raise money from the people than to instruct them. From time to time extensive insurrections against the foreign power took place, and in these insurrections churches were destroyed and clergy were slain. In 1047, the kingdom of the Wends was established by Gottschalk, who zealously endeavored to promote Christianity among his subjects. He founded churches and monasteries, and, like the Northumbrian Oswald, he himself often acted as interpreter while the clergy preached in a tongue unintelligible to his people. But in 1066 Gottschalk was murdered by the pagans; many Christians were massacred at the same time, among whom the aged John, a native of Ireland and bishop of Mecklenburg, was singled out as a victim for extraordinary cruelties; and Christianity appeared to be extirpated from the country.

 

HUNGARY

 

The history of the introduction of Christianity into Hungary has been the subject of disputes, chiefly arising from the question whether it was effected by the Greek or by the Latin church. It appears, in truth, that the first knowledge of the Gospel came from Constantinople, where two Hungarian princes, Bolosudes and Gyulas, were baptized in the year 948. Bolosudes relapsed into paganism, and, after having carried on hostilities against both empires, he was taken and put to death by Otho the Great in 955. But Gyulas remained faithful to his profession, and many of his subjects were converted by the preaching of clergy who were sent to him from Constantinople, with a bishop named Hierotheus at their head.

The great victory of Otho in 955 opened a way for the labors of the neighboring German bishops among the Hungarians. About twenty years later, Pilligrin, bishop of Passau, reported to pope Benedict VII that he had been entreated by the people of Hungary to assist them; that he had sent clergy and monks, who had baptized about five thousand of them; that the land was full of Christian captives, who had formerly been obliged to conceal their religion, and had only been able to get their children baptized by stealth, but that now the hindrances to the open profession of Christianity were removed; that not only the Hungarians, but the Slavonic tribes of the neighborhood, were ready to embrace the Gospel; and he prayed that bishops might be appointed for the work. This representation of the state of things may probably have been heightened by Pilligrin’s desire to obtain for himself the pall, with the title of archbishop of Lorch, which had been conferred on some of his predecessors, while the rest, as simple bishops of Passau, had been subject to the archiepiscopal see of Salzburg. The pope rewarded him by addressing to the emperor and to the great German prelates a letter in which he bestows on Pilligrin, as archbishop of Lorch, the jurisdiction of a metropolitan over Bavaria, Lower Pannonia, Moesia, and the adjoining Slavonic territories. Yet little seems to have been done in consequence for the conversion of the Hungarians; Wolfgang, who was sent as a missionary to them, met with such scanty success, that Pilligrin, unwilling to waste the energies of a valuable auxiliary in fruitless labors, recalled him to become bishop of Ratisbon.

Geisa, who from the year 972 was duke of Hungary, married Sarolta, daughter of Gyulas, a woman of masculine character, and by her influence was brought over to Christianity. Although the knowledge of the faith had been received by Sarolta’s family from Greece, her husband was led by political circumstances to connect his country with the western church, and he himself appears to have been baptized by Bruno, bishop of Verdun, who had been sent to him as ambassador by Otho I. But Geisa’s conversion was of no very perfect kind. While professing himself a Christian, he continued to offer sacrifice to idols, and, when Bruno remonstrated, he answered that he was rich enough and powerful enough to do both. In 983, or the following year, a bishop named Adalbert probably the celebrated bishop of Prague appeared in Hungary, and baptised Geisa’s son Waik, then four or five years old. The young prince, to whom the name of Stephen was given, became the most eminent worthy of Hungarian history. Unlike his father, he received a careful education. In 997, he succeeded Geisa, and he reigned for forty-one years, with a deserved reputation for piety, justice, bravery, and firmness of purpose. A pagan party, which at first opposed him, was put down; he married a Bavarian princess, Gisela, sister of duke Henry (afterwards the emperor Henry II), and in 1000 he obtained the erection of his dominions into a kingdom from Otho III. In fulfillment of a vow which he had made during the contest with his heathen opponents he earnestly exerted himself for the establishment of Christianity among his subjects. His kingdom, which he extended by the addition of Transylvania and part of Wallachia, (a territory known as Black Hungary), was placed under the special protection of the blessed Virgin. He erected episcopal sees, built many monasteries and churches, and enacted that every ten villas in the kingdom should combine to found and endow a church. Monks and clergy from other countries were invited to settle in Hungary, and it appears that the services which Stephen had done to the church procured for him a commission to act as vicar of the Roman see in his dominions, a privilege which his successors continued to claim. He founded a college for the education of Hungarians at Rome; he built hospitals and monasteries for his countrymen at Rome, Ravenna, Constantinople, and Jerusalem; and such was his hospitality to pilgrims that the journey through Hungary came to be generally preferred to a sea voyage by those who were bound for the Holy Land. The means which Stephen employed to recommend the Gospel and the observance of its duties were not always limited to pure persuasion; thus a free Hungarian who should refuse to embrace Christianity was to be degraded to the condition of a serf; any one who should be found laboring on Sunday was to be stopped, and the horses, oxen, or tools used in the work were to be taken away from him; and any persons who should converse in church were, if of higher station, to be turned out with disgrace; if of “lesser and vulgar” rank, to be publicly flogged into reverence for the sanctity of the place.

Stephen died in 1038. His son Emmerich or Henry, for whom he had drawn up a remarkable code of instructions, had died some years before; and the king bequeathed his dominions to a nephew named Peter, who was soon after dethroned. A period of internal discord followed; and twice within the eleventh century, the paganism which had been repressed so forcibly that king Andrew, in 1048, had even enacted death as the punishment for adhering to it, recovered its ascendency in Hungary so as for a time to obscure the profession of the Gospel.

 

DENMARK

 

Among the nations to which Anskar had preached, Christianity was but very partially adopted. Its progress was liable to be checked by the paganism of some princes; it was liable to be rendered odious by the violent measures which other princes took to enforce it on their subjects; while the barbarism and ignorance of the Northmen opposed a formidable difficulty to its success. Hamburg and Bremen, the sees planted for the evangelization of Nordalbingia and Scandinavia, were repeatedly attacked both by the Northmen and by the Slaves; but the victories of Henry I established the Christian power, and he erected the Mark of Sleswick as a protection for Germany against the northern inroads. The conversions in Denmark had been limited to the mainland; the islands were still altogether pagan, and human victims continued to be offered in Zealand, until Henry obtained from Gorm, who was the first king of all Denmark, that Christians should be allowed freedom of religion throughout the kingdom, and that human sacrifices should cease. Unni, archbishop of Bremen and Hamburg, undertook the work of a missionary in Denmark. His endeavors to make a convert of Gorm were unsuccessful; but he baptised one of the inferior kings named Frode, and found a supporter in Gorm’s son, Harold Blaatand (Blue-tooth or Black-tooth), who had derived some knowledge of the Gospel from the instructions of a Christian mother. The prince, however, was still unbaptized; he retained the cruelty, the rapacity, and the other usual vices of the northern plunderers, and for many years his religious belief was of a mixed kind. In 966 a missionary named Poppo, while enjoying Harold’s hospitality , fell into an argument with some of the guests, who, although they allowed Christ to be God, maintained that there were other Gods of higher dignity and power. In proof of the exclusive truth of his religion, Poppo (it is said) underwent the ordeal of putting on a red-hot iron gauntlet, and wearing it without injury to his hand, until the king declared himself satisfied. From that time Harold attached himself exclusively to Christianity, although he was not baptized until Otho the Great, after defeating him in 972, insisted on his baptism as a condition of peace. The intemperate zeal with which the king now endeavored to enforce the reception of the Gospel provoked two rebellions, headed by his own son Sweyn; and, after a reign of fifty years, Harold was dethroned, and died of a wound received in battle.

Although Sweyn had been brought up as a Christian, and had been baptized at the same time with his father, he persecuted the faith for many years, until, towards the end of his life, when his arms had been triumphant in England, he was there brought back to the religion of his early days. In 1014 he was succeeded by Canute, who, both in England and in his northern dominions, endeavored, by a bountiful patronage of the church, to atone for his father’s sins and for his own. When present at the coronation of Conrad as emperor, he obtained from him a cession of the Mark of Sleswick. Monasteries were founded in Denmark by Canute, and perhaps the payment of Peter’s pence was introduced by him; hospitals for Danish pilgrims were established at Rome and at some stations on the way to it. Three bishops and a number of clergy were sent from England into Denmark; but Unwan, archbishop of Bremen, regarding these bishops as intruders into his province, caught one of them, compelled him to acknowledge the metropolitan rights of Bremen, and sent him to Canute, who thereupon agreed to submit the Danish church to the jurisdiction of that see. Sweyn Estrithsen, who, eight years after the death of his uncle Canute, obtained possession of the Danish throne, although a man of intemperate and profligate life, was very munificent to the church, and did much for the extension of Christianity in the islands of his kingdom. The English missionaries had preached in their native tongue, while at every sentence their words were explained by an interpreter; but Sweyn, to remedy this difficulty for the future, provided that such foreigners as were to labor in the instruction of his subjects should be previously initiated in the Danish language by the canons of Hamburg. Among the memorable events of this reign was the penance to which the king was obliged to submit by William, bishop of Roskield, for having caused some refractory nobles to be put to death in a church a penance imitated from that of Theodosius. Sweyn died in 1076.

 

CHRISTIANITY IN SWEDEN

 

The Christianity planted by Anskar in Sweden was almost confined to the neighborhood of Birka, and for about seventy years after the apostle’s death the country was hardly ever visited by missionaries. Unni, archbishop of Bremen, after the expedition to Denmark which has been mentioned, crossed the sea to Sweden in 935, and labored there until his death in the following year. A mixture of paganism and Christianity arose, which is curiously exemplified in a drinking song still extant, where the praises of the divine Trinity are set forth in the same style which was used in celebrating the gods of Walhalla.

The reign of Olave Stotkonung, who became king towards the end of the tenth century, and died about 1024, was important for the propagation of the Gospel in Sweden. Some German clergy, and many from England, were introduced into the country; among them was Sigfrid, archdeacon of York, who labored among the Swedes for many years. Two of his relations, who had joined him in the mission, were murdered by heathens. The chief murderer escaped, and his property was confiscated; some of his accomplices, who were found, were, at Sigfrid’s intercession, allowed to compound for their crime by payment of a fine; and the funds thus obtained served to found the bishopric of Wexio, to which Sigfrid was consecrated by the archbishop of Bremen. Olave had meditated the destruction of the temple at Upsal, which was the principal seat of the old idolatry; he was, however, diverted from his intention by the entreaties of his heathen subjects, who begged him to content himself with taking the best portion of the country, and building a church for his own religion, but to refrain from attempting to force their belief. On this he removed to Skara, in West Gothland, and founded a see there, to which Thurgot, an Englishman, was consecrated. The ancient Runic characters were superseded among the Swedes by the Latin alphabet, and the influence of Christianity triumphed over the national love of piracy.

But the violence of the measures by which Olave endeavored to advance the Gospel excited a general hatred against him among the adherents of the old religion, and he was obliged to admit his son Emund to a share in the government. Emund, after his father’s death, had a disagreement with the archbishop of Bremen, and set up some bishops independent of that prelate’s metropolitan jurisdiction having obtained consecration for them in Poland. But this arrangement was given up by his second successor, Stenkil, whose mild and wise policy was more favorable to the advancement of the faith than the more forcible proceedings of Olave had been. Under Stenkil, the number of churches in Sweden was increased to about eleven hundred. His death, which took place in 1066, was followed by bloody civil wars, and for a time paganism resumed its ascendency; but in 1075 king Inge forbade all heathen worship, and, although this occasioned his expulsion, while his brother-in-law Soen was set up by the heathen party, Inge eventually recovered his throne, and, after much contention, Christianity was firmly established in the country. According to Adam of Bremen, a contemporary of the king, the scandal produced by the covetousness of too many among the clergy had been the chief hindrance to the general conversion of the Swedes, whom he describes as well disposed to receive the Gospel.

 

NORWAY

 

Among the Norwegians, some converts had been made in the time of Anskar, and the more readily, because the profession of Christianity opened to them the trade of England and of Germany. Yet such converts, although they acknowledged the power of Christ, and believed him to be the God of England, had greater confidence in the gods of Odin’s race, whom they regarded as still reigning over their own laud; and it was not until a century later that a purer and more complete Christianity was introduced into Norway.

Eric “of the Bloody Axe”, whose cruelties had rendered him detested by his subjects, was dethroned in 938 by his brother Haco. The new king had been educated as a Christian in the English court, under Athelstan, and was resolved to establish his own faith among his subjects. Some of his chief adherents were won to embrace the Gospel. He postponed the great heathen feast of Yule from midwinter in order that it might fall in with the celebration of the Saviour’s nativity; and while the other Norwegians were engaged in their pagan rejoicings, Haco and his friends, in a building by themselves, kept the Christian festival. Clergy were brought from England, and some congregations of converts were formed. But when the reception of Christianity was proposed in the national assembly, a general murmur arose. It was said that the rest of Sunday and Friday, which was required by the new faith, could not be afforded. The servants who had attended their masters to the meeting cried out that, if they were to fast, their bodies would be so weakened as to be unfit for work. Many declared that they could not desert the gods under whom their forefathers and themselves had so long prospered; they reminded the king how his people had aided him in gaining the crown, and told him that, if he persisted in his proposal, they would choose another in his stead. Haco found himself obliged to yield. He was forced to preside at the next harvest sacrifice, where he publicly drank to the national gods; and, as he made the sign of the cross over his cup, Sigurd, his chief adviser, told the company that it was meant to signify the hammer of their god Thor. The heathen party, however, were still unsatisfied. Eight of their chiefs bound themselves to extirpate Christianity; they assaulted and killed some of the clergy, and at the following Yule-feast Haco was compelled to submit to further compliances : to drink to the gods without making the sign of the cross, and to prove himself a heathen by partaking of the liver of a horse which had been offered in sacrifice. Feeling this constraint intolerable, he resolved to meet his opponents in arms; but an invasion by Eric’s sons, who had obtained aid from Harold Blaatand of Denmark, induced the Norwegian parties to enter into a reconciliation, and to turn their arms against the common enemy. From that time Haco lived in harmony with his people, not only tolerating their heathenism, but himself yielding in some degree to the influence of a heathen queen. In 963 his nephews renewed their attack, and Haco was mortally wounded. He expressed a wish, in case of recovery, to retire to some Christian land, that he might endeavor by penance to expiate his compliances, which weighed on his conscience as if he had been guilty of apostasy. But when his friends proposed that he should be carried to England for burial, he answered that he was unworthy of it that he had lived as a heathen, and as a heathen should be buried in Norway. His death was lamented by a scald in a famous song, which celebrates his reception into Walhalla, and intimates that, in consideration of the tolerance which he had shown towards the old religion, his own Christianity was forgiven by the gods.

Harold, the son of Eric, who now became master of the kingdom, endeavored to spread Christianity by forcible means. After some commotions, in the course of which the son of Eric was slain, Harold Blaatand added Norway to his dominions, and appointed a viceroy, named Haco, who, unlike his master, was so devoted a pagan that he sacrificed one of his own children. The viceroy exerted himself for the restoration of paganism, and, by the help of the party who adhered to it, established himself in independence of the Danish king. But the oppressed Christians invited to their relief Olave, the son of a petty prince named Tryggve, and Haco was dethroned in 995.

Olave Tryggvesen is celebrated in the northern chronicles as the strongest, the bravest, and the most beautiful of men. After a life of wild adventure, in the course of which he had visited Russia and Constantinople, and had spread terror along the coasts of the western ocean, he had been baptized by a hermit in one of the Scilly Islands, and had been confirmed by Elphege, bishop of Winchester, in the presence of the English king Ethelred. Although his Christian practice was far from perfect (for, among other things, he married his stepmother, and endeavored to obtain a knowledge of the future by the arts of divination), yet his zeal for his religion was unbounded, and manifested itself in exertions for the spreading of the faith, which savoured less of the Christian spirit than of his old piratical habits, and of the despotism which he had seen in Russia and in the eastern empire. Gifts and privileges of various kinds, and even marriage with the king’s beautiful sisters, were held out to the chiefs as inducements to embrace the Gospel; while those who should refuse were threatened with confiscation of property, with banishment, mutilation, tortures, and death. In the most blamable of his proceedings, Olave was much influenced by the counsels of Thangbrand, a German priest from whom he had derived his first knowledge of the Gospel, but whose character was so violent that he did not scruple even to kill those who offended or thwarted him. The king visited one district after another, for the purpose of establishing Christianity. “Wheresoever he came”, says Snorro Sturleson, in describing one of his circuits, “to the land or to the islands, he held an assembly, and told the people to accept the right faith and to be baptized. No man dared to say anything against it, and the whole country which he passed through was made Christian”.

Strange stories are related of the adventures which he encountered in destroying idols and temples, and of the skill and presence of mind with which he extricated himself from the dangers which he often incurred on such occasions. In one place Olave found eighty heathens who professed to be wizards. He made one attempt to convert them when they were sober, and another over their horns of ale; and, as they were not to be won in either state, he set fire to the building in which they were assembled. The chief of the party alone escaped from the flames; but he afterwards fell into the king’s hands, and was thrown into the sea. Another obstinate pagan and sorcerer had a serpent forced down his throat; the creature ate its way through his body, and caused his death. A less unpleasing tale relates Olave’s dealings with a young hero named Endrid, who at length agreed that his religion should be decided by the event of a contest between himself and a champion to be appointed by the king. Olave himself appeared in that character; in a trial which lasted three days, he triumphantly defeated Endrid in swimming, in diving, in archery, and in sword-play; and having thus prepared him for the reception of Christian doctrine, he completed his conversion by instructing him in the principles of the faith. The insular parts of Olave’s dominions were included in his labors for the extension of the Gospel; he forced the people of the Orkneys, of the Shetland, the Faroe, and other islands, to receive Christianity at the sword’s point. In obedience to a vision which he had seen at a critical time, Olave chose St. Martin as the patron of Norway, and ordered that the cup which had been usually drunk in honor of Thor should in future be dedicated to the saint. In 997, he founded the bishopric of Nidaros or Drontheim.

Olave’s zeal for Christianity at length cost him his life. Sigrid, the beautiful widow of a Swedish king, after having resisted the suit of the petty princes of Sweden so sternly that she even burnt one of them in his castle, in order (as she said) to cure the others of their desire to win her hand, conceived the idea of marrying the king of Norway, and with that view visited his court. Olave was inclined to the match; but, on her refusal to be baptized, he treated her with outrageous indignity, which filled her with a vehement desire of revenge. Sigrid soon after married Sweyn of Denmark. Her new husband, and the child of her first marriage, Olave Stotkonung, combined, at her urgent persuasion, in an expedition against Norway, and their force was strengthened by a disaffected party of Norwegians, under Eric, son of that Haco whom Olave had put down. A naval engagement took place, and the fortune of the day was against Olave, His ship, the “Long Dragon”, after a desperate defence, was boarded; on which the king and nine others, who were all that remained of the crew, threw themselves into the sea, in order that they might not fall into the hands of their enemies. Rude and violent as Olave was, he was so beloved by his subjects that many are said to have died of grief for him, and even the heathens cherished his memory. He was believed to be a saint; it was said that he had performed miracles, and that angels had been seen to visit him while at his prayers; and legends represented him as having long survived the disastrous fight. Nearly fifty years later, it is told, a Norwegian named Gaude, who had lost his way among the sands of Egypt, was directed by a dream to a monastery, where, to his surprise, he found an aged abbot of his own country. The old man’s questions were such that the pilgrim was led to ask whether he were himself king Olave. The answer was ambiguous; but the abbot charged Gaude, on returning to Norway, to deliver a sword and a girdle to a warrior who had sought death with Olave but had been rescued from the waves; and to tell him that on the fatal day no one had borne himself more bravely than he. Gaude performed his commission, and the veteran, on receiving the gifts and the message, was assured that the Egyptian abbot could be no other than his royal master.

The progress of the Gospel in Norway was slow during some years after the end of Olave Tryggvesen’s reign. But his godchild Olave, the son of Harold, who became king in 1015, was bent on carrying on the work. Many missionaries were invited from England; at their head was a bishop named Grimkil, who drew up a code of ecclesiastical law for Norway. Although his own character was milder than that of Olave Tryggvesen, the king pursued the old system of enforcing Christianity by such penalties as confiscation, blinding, mutilation, and death, and, like the elder Olave, he made journeys throughout his dominions, in company with Grimkil, with a view to the establishment of the faith. He found that under the pressure of scarcity the people were accustomed to relapse into the practice of sacrificing to their old gods. He often had to encounter armed resistance. At Dalen, in 1025, the inhabitants had been excited by the report of his approach, and on arriving he found 700 exasperated pagans arrayed against him. But, although his own party was only half the number, he put the peasants to flight, and a discussion on the merits of the rival religions ensued. Grimkil “the horned man”, as the heathens called him from the shape of his cap or mitre maintained the cause of Christianity; to which the other party, headed by a chief named Gudbrand, replied that their own god Thor was superior to the Christians’ God, inasmuch as he could be seen. The king spent a great part of the following night in prayer. Next morning at daybreak the huge idol of Thor was brought to the place of conference. Olave pointed to the rising sun as a visible witness to his God, who created it; and, while the heathens were gazing on its brightness, a gigantic soldier, in fulfillment of orders which he had before received from the king, raised his club and knocked the idol to pieces. A swarm of loathsome creatures, which had found a dwelling within its body, and had fattened on the daily offerings of food and drink, rushed forth; and the men of Dalen, convinced of the vanity of their old superstition, consented to be baptized.

The forcible means which Olave used in favor of his religion, the taxes which he found it necessary to impose, and the rigor with which he proceeded for the suppression of piracy and robbery, aroused great discontent among his subjects. Canute of Denmark and England was encouraged to claim the kingdom of Norway; his gold won many of the chiefs to his interest, and Olave, finding himself deserted, fled into Russia, where he was honorably received by Yaroslaff, and was invited to settle by the offer of a province.

But, while hesitating between the acceptance of this offer and the execution of an idea which he had entertained of becoming a monk at Jerusalem, he was diverted by a vision, in which Olave Tryggvesen exhorted him to attempt the recovery of the kingdom which God had given him. The Swedish king supplied him with some soldiers; and on his landing in Norway, multitudes flocked to his standard. Olave refused the aid of all who were unbaptized; many received baptism from no other motive than a wish to be allowed to aid him; and his soldiers marched with the sign of the cross on their shields. On the eve of a battle he gave a large sum of money to be laid out for the souls of his enemies who should fall; those who should lose their lives for his own cause, he said, were assured of salvation. But the forces of the enemy were overpowering, and Olave was defeated and slain.

After a time his countrymen repented of their conduct towards him. It was rumored that he had done miracles in Russia, and on his last fatal expedition his blood had healed a wound in the hand of the warrior who killed him; a blind man, on whose eyes it had been accidentally rubbed, had recovered his sight; and other cures of a like kind were related. A year after his death his body was disinterred by Grimkil, when no signs of decay appeared, and the hair and nails had grown. The remains of the king were removed to the church of St. Clement at Nidaros, which he himself had built, and when, in the following century, a cathedral was erected by the sainted archbishop Eystein (or Augustine) they were enclosed in a magnificent silver shrine, above the high altar. St. Olave was chosen as the patron of Norway; his fame was spread far and wide by a multitude of miracles, and pilgrims from distant countries flocked to his tomb for cure : tribute was paid to him by Norway and Sweden; and churches were dedicated to his honor, not only in the western countries, but in Russia and at Constantinople.

Canute, after becoming master of Norway, encouraged religion there as in his other dominions. By him the first Benedictine monastery in the kingdom was founded near Nidaros. Harold Hardrada, Olave'’ half-brother, a rough and irreligious man, who became king in 1047, had some differences with pope Alexander II, and with Adalbert archbishop of Bremen. The king said that he knew no archbishop in Norway except himself, and obtained ordination for bishops from England and from France; while Adalbert, declaring that he had but two masters, the pope and the emperor, paid no regard to the northern sovereign, and without his consent erected sees in his dominions. Norway, like the rest of western Christendom, submitted to the dominion of Rome.

 

ICELAND

 

Iceland became known to the Norwegians in 86O, when a Norwegian vessel was cast on its coast. In 874, the first Norwegian colonist, Ingulf, settled in the island; and in the following years many of his countrymen resorted to it, especially after the great victory of Harold the Fairhaired at Hafursfiord, in 883, by which a number of petty kings or chiefs were driven from their native land to seek a home elsewhere. The colonists were of the highest and most civilized class among the Northmen, and the state of society in the new community took a corresponding character. The land was parcelled out, and the Icelanders, renouncing the practice of piracy, betook themselves to trade exchanging the productions of their island for the corn, the wood, and other necessaries which it did not afford. A republican form of government was established, and lasted for four hundred years. It had its national and provincial assemblies; its chief was the “lawman”, elected for life, whose office it was to act as conservator of the laws; and with this magistracy the function of priest was joined. The worship of Odin was established, but it would seem that there was an entire freedom as to religion.

It is said that the colonists found in Iceland traces of an Irish mission such as service-books, bells, and pastoral crooks although the natives, having been left without any clergy, had relapsed into paganism. Some of the Norwegians themselves may also have carried with them such mixed and imperfect notions of Christianity as were to be gathered in the intercourse of their roving and adventurous life; but the knowledge of the Gospel was neither spread among the other members of the community nor transmitted to their own descendants. In 981, an Icelander named Thorwald, who had formerly been a pirate, but even then had been accustomed to spend such part of his plunder as he could spare in redeeming captives from other pirates, brought with him to the island a Saxon bishop named Frederick, by whom he had been converted. A church was built, and Frederick’s instructions were well received, although most of his proselytes refused to be baptized being ashamed, it is said, to expose themselves naked at the ceremony, and to wear the white dress which in their country was worn by children only. An influential convert, named Thorkil, before submitting to baptism, desired that it might be administered by way of experiment to his aged and infirm father-in-law; and, as the old man died soon after, Thorkil put off his own baptism for some years.  The worshippers of Odin were roused to enmity by the rough manner in which Thorwald proceeded to spread his religion. After five years he and the bishop were expelled, and took refuge in Norway, where Thorwald, meeting with one of those who had most bitterly opposed him in Iceland, killed him. Frederick, hopeless of effecting any good in company with so lawless an associate, returned to his own country, and it is supposed that Thorwald, after many years of wandering, in the course of which he had visited the Holy Land, founded a monastery in Russia or at Constantinople, and there died.

Olave Tryggvesen, partly, perhaps, from political motives was desirous of establishing the Gospel in Iceland, and, after some earlier attempts to forward its progress, sent Thangbrand, the German priest who has been already mentioned, into the island in 997. The choice of a missionary was unfortunate; Thangbrand, it is said, performed some miracles; but he proceed with his usual violence, and, after having killed one of his opponents, and two scalds who had composed scurrilous verses on him, he was expelled. Olave, on receiving from Thangbraud a report of the treatment which he had met with, was very indignant, and was about to undertake an expedition for the punishment of the Icelanders, when Gissur and Hialte, two natives of the island, obtained his consent to the employment of milder measures for the conversion of their country-men. By the promise of a sum of money (which, however, was rather a lawful fee than a bribe), they secured the cooperation of the lawman Thorgeir, who, after addressing the national assembly in an exhortation to peace and unity, proposed a new law by way of compromise. All the islanders were to be baptized, the temples were to be destroyed, and public sacrifices were to cease; but it was to be allowed to eat horseflesh, to expose children, and to offer sacrifice in private. The proposal was adopted, and Christian instruction gradually prevailed over such remnants of heathenism as the law had sanctioned. St. Olave took an interest in the Christianity of Iceland; he sent an English bishop named Bernard to labour there, and exerted himself to procure the acceptance of Grimkil’s ecclesiastical laws, and the abolition of the practice of exposing children.

Although Iceland was from time to time visited by bishops, the need of a fixed episcopate was felt, and in 1056 the see of Skalholt was erected. Isleif, a son of Gissur, who had been educated at Erfurt and had made a pilgrimage to Rome, was elected a bishop, and, in obedience to an order from the pope, was consecrated by Adalbert of Bremen. With the consent of a younger Gissur, who had succeeded his father Isleif in the bishoprick of Skalholt, a second see was founded at Hollum in 1105. The bishops, being taken from the most distinguished families, and invested, like the priests of the old idolatry, with secular power, became the most important members of the community. Adam of Bremen, who draws a striking picture of the contented poverty, the piety, and the charity of the islanders, tells us that they obeyed their bishop as a king. In 1121 the first Icelandic monastery was founded, and at a later time the island contained seven cloisters for men and two for women. The Icelanders traded to all quarters; their clergy, educated in Germany, France, and England, carried back the knowledge and the civilization of foreign countries. And in this remote and ungenial island grew up a vernacular literature of annals, poems, and sagas or historical legends the oldest literature of the Scandinavians, and the only source of information as to a great part of northern history. This literature flourished for two centuries, until, on the reduction of Iceland to tribute by the Norwegians in 1261, Latin became there, as elsewhere, the language of letters.

 

GREENLAND

 

From Iceland the Gospel made its way into a yet more distant region. In 982, a Norwegian named Eric the Red, who had fled to Iceland in consequence of having killed a man, and was there sentenced to banishment on account of a feud in which he was involved, determined to seek out a coast which had some years before been seen by one Gunnbiorn. Four years later, when the time of his banishment was expired, Eric revisited Iceland, and induced many of his countrymen to accompany him to the land of his refuge, to which with a design, as is said, of attracting adventurers by the promise which it conveyed the name of Greenland was given. In 999, Leif, the son of Eric, made a voyage to Norway, where Olave Tryggvesen induced him to receive baptism; and on his return to Greenland he was accompanied by a priest. The colony flourished for centuries. In 1055 (a year before the foundation of the first Icelandic see), a bishop was consecrated for it by Adalbert of Bremen. There were thirteen churches in the eastern part of Greenland, four in the western, and three or four monasteries. Sixteen bishops in succession presided over the church of Greenland. From the year 1276 they took their title from the see of Gardar; they were subject to the archbishop of Nidaros, and were in the habit of attending synods in Norway as well as in Iceland. And even from this extremity of the earth tribute was paid to the successors of St. Peter. But from the middle of the fifteenth century Greenland was lost to the knowledge of Europeans. The ice accumulated on its shores, so as to render them inaccessible, and the seventeenth bishop destined for the church was unable to land. The pestilence known as the “Black Death” wasted the population, and it is supposed that, when thus weakened, they were overpowered by tribes of Skrallings (Esquimaux) from the continent of North America, the ancestors of the present inhabitants.

The Northmen appear to have pushed their discoveries from Greenland to the American continent. In the year 1000, Leif, the son of Eric the Red, incited by the narrative of Biorn, the son of Heriulf, as to his adventures when in search of Greenland, sailed southward, and explored several coasts, to one of which the name of Vinland (or (Vineland) was given, because one of his companions, a native of southern Germany, recognized the vine among its productions. Further explorations were afterwards made in the same direction; and settlements were for a time effected on the shores of the great western continent. A bishop named Eric is said to have accompanied an expedition to Vinland in 1121; but nothing further is known of him, and it would seem that no confidence can be placed in the conjectures or inquiries which profess to have found in America traces of a Christianity planted by the Scandinavian adventurers of the middle ages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER VIII.

 

HERESIES. A.D. 1000-1052.

 

The beginning of the eleventh century is remarkable for the appearance of heretical teachers in various parts of Italy and France. It would appear that the doctrines professed by some of these persons had long been lurking among the Italians, and that now the discredit into which the church had fallen combined with the general suffering and distraction of the time to draw them forth into publicity and to procure adherents for them. From the fact that Gerbert, at his consecration as archbishop of Reims (A.D. 991), made a profession of faith in which he distinctly condemned (among other errors) some leading points of the Manichaean system, it has been inferred that heresy of a Manichaean character was then prevalent in some neighboring quarter; but perhaps it may be enough to suppose that the Manichaeism which Gerbert wished to disavow was one of the many errors with which he was personally charged by the enmity or the credulity of his contemporaries. The opinions which were now put forth were of various kinds. One Leutard, a man of low condition, who about the year 1000 made himself notorious in the neighborhood of Châlons-on-the-Marne, would seem to have been a crazy fanatic. He professed to have received commands from heaven while sleeping in a field; whereupon he went home, put away his wife “as if by evangelic precept”, and, going into a church, broke the crucifix. He denounced the payment of tithes, and said that some parts of Scripture were not to be believed, although, when summoned before the bishop of the diocese, he alleged scriptural texts as evidence of his mission. For a time Leutard found many proselytes; but the greater part of them were recovered by the bishop, and their leader drowned himself in a well.

In another quarter, Vilgard, a grammarian of Ravenna, who was put to death for his heresy, attempted a revival of the classical paganism—maintaining “that the doctrines of the poets were in all things to be believed”; and we are told that demons used to appear to him by night under the names of Virgil, Horace, and Juvenal. The historian from whom we derive our knowledge of Vilgard and Leutard relates also that paganism was very common in Sardinia, and that many professors of it went from that island into Spain, where they attempted to spread their opinions, but were driven out by the Catholics.

A sect of Manicheans is said to have been detected in Aquitaine in 1017, and in 10223 a more remarkable party of the same kind was discovered at Orleans. These are reported to have derived their opinions from a female teacher, who came out of Italy, and was so “full of the devil” that she could convert the most learned clerks. For a time the sect grew in secret. Its leaders were two ecclesiastics named Stephen and Lisoi—both respected for their piety, their learning, and their charity, while Stephen was confessor to Constance, the queen whom Robert of France had espoused on his forced separation from Bertha. Among the proselytes were ten canons of the cathedral, and many persons of rank, not only in Orleans and its neighborhood, but, even in the royal court

The discovery of these sectaries is variously related. The most circumstantial account ascribes it to Arefast, a Norman noble, who, having allowed a chaplain named Herbert to go to Orleans for the purpose of study, was startled by finding on his return that he had there imbibed new and heretical opinions. At the desire of King Robert, to whom, through the medium of the duke of Normandy, he reported the matter, Arefast proceeded to Orleans for the purpose of detecting the heretics, and by the advice of a clergyman of Chartres, whom he had consulted on the way, he affected to become a pupil of Stephen and Lisoi. They taught him that Christ was not really born of the virgin Mary; that He was not really crucified, buried, or risen; that baptism had no efficacy for the washing away of sin; that priestly consecration did not make the sacrament of the Redeemer’s body and blood; that it was needless to pray to martyrs or confessors. On Arefast’s asking how he might attain salvation, if the means to which he had hitherto looked were unavailing, the teachers replied that they would bestow on him the imposition of their hands, which would cleanse him from all sin and fill him with the Holy Spirit, so that he should understand the Scriptures in their depth and true dignity; that they would give him heavenly food, by which he would be enabled to see visions and to enjoy fellowship with God. By this mysterious food, which was represented as having the power to confirm disciples immovably in the doctrines of the party, was doubtless meant something of a spiritual kind—the same with the consolamentum of somewhat later sectaries. But a wild story was imagined in explanation of it—that the heretics at some of their meetings recited a litany to evil spirits; that the devil appeared in the form of a small animal; that the lights were then extinguished, and each man embraced the woman nearest to him—even if she were his mother, his sister, or a consecrated nun. A child born of such intercourse was, at the age of eight days, burnt at a meeting of the sect; the ashes were preserved, to be administered under the name of “heavenly food”; and such was the potency of this “diabolical” sacrament that any one who received it became irrevocably bound to the heresy.

Robert, on receiving information from Arefast, repaired to Orleans, where the whole party of the sectaries was apprehended, and Arefast appeared as a witness against them. They avowed their doctrines, and expressed an assurance that these would prevail throughout the world. They professed to entertain views far above the apprehension of ordinary Christians—views taught to them inwardly by God and the Holy Spirit. They spoke with contempt of the doctrine of the Trinity, and of the miraculous evidence of Scripture. They maintained that the heavens and the earth were eternal and uncreated. They appear to have also maintained that the sins of sensuality were not liable to punishment, and that the ordinary duties of religion and morality were superfluous and useless.

After a vain attempt to reclaim the sectaries, they were condemned to death. Such of them as were clerks were deposed and were stripped of their robes. While the trial was proceeding, queen Constance, by her husband’s desire, had stood on the steps of the church in which it was held, in order that her presence might restrain the populace from rushing in and tearing the accused to pieces. Bent on proving that her abhorrence of heresy prevailed over old personal attachment, she thrust her staff into one of her confessor’s eyes as he was led out after condemnation. Two of the party, a clerk and a nun, recanted; thirteen remained steadfast, and approached the place of execution with a smiling and triumphant air, in the expectation of deliverance by miracle. One historian of the time relates that, when the flames were kindled around them, yet no interposition took place, they cried out that the devil had deceived them; but, according to another account, they retained their exultant demeanor to the last. Some dust, which was supposed to be the “heavenly food”, was thrown into the flames with them. The body of a canon named Theodatus, who had been a member of the sect but had died three years before, was taken from the grave and cast into unconsecrated ground.

In 1025, Gerard, bishop of Arras and Cambray, a pupil of Gerbert, discovered in the former city some sectaries who professed to have received their opinions from an Italian named Gundulf. The bishop placed them before a council, and drew forth an acknowledgment of their doctrines. They denied the utility of baptism and the Eucharist, resting their objections to baptism on three grounds—the unworthiness of the clergy; the fact that the sins renounced at the font were afterwards actually committed; and the idea that an infant, being incapable of faith or will, could not be benefited by the profession of others. They were charged with denying the use of penance, with setting at nought the church, with condemning marriage, with refusing honor to the confessors, and limiting it to apostles and martyrs alone. They held that churches were not more holy than other buildings; that the altar was merely a heap of stones, and the cross was but like other wood. They condemned episcopal ordination, the distinction of orders and ranks in the ministry, the use of bells, incense, images, and chanting, and the practice of burying in consecrated ground, which they asserted that the clergy encouraged for the sake of fees. It would seem also that they denied the resurrection of the body. In answer to the bishop, they professed that their opinions were scriptural; that their laws bound them to forsake the world, to abstain from fleshly lusts, to earn their maintenance by the work of their hands, to show kindness to those who opposed them. If they observed these rules, they had no need of baptism; if they neglected the rules, baptism could not profit them.

Gerard combated the opinions of the party at great length, with arguments agreeable to the theology of the age; and, although we may smile at the miraculous stories which he adduced, we must honor his wisdom and excellent temper. He blamed them especially for holding an opinion of their own merits which was inconsistent with the doctrine of divine grace. The sectaries, who appear to have been men of simple mind and of little education, were convinced—rather, it would seem, by the bishop’s legends than by his sounder reasons. They prostrated themselves before him, and expressed a fear that, since they had led others into error, their sin was beyond forgiveness. But he comforted them with hopeful assurances, and, on their signing a profession of orthodoxy, received them into the communion of the church.

Heresy of a Manichaean character was also taught at Toulouse, where the professors of it who were detected were put to death, although their opinions continued to spread in the district; and in 1044 Heribert, archbishop of Milan, when on a visitation of his province, discovered a sect at Monteforte, near Turin. The chief teacher of this sect was named Gerard; it was patronized by the countess of Monteforte, and among its members were many of the clergy. When questioned as to his belief, Gerard gave orthodox answers; but on further inquiry it proved that these answers were evasive. The sectaries held that by the Son of God was meant the human soul, beloved by God and born of Holy Scripture; that the Holy Spirit was the understanding of divine things; that they might be bound and loosed by persons who were authorized for the work, but that these were not the clergy of the church. They said that they had a high priest different from the pontiff of Rome—a high priest who was not tonsured, besides whom there was no other high priest and no sacrament; that he daily visited their brethren who were scattered throughout the world, and that, when God bestowed him on them, they received forgiveness of all sin. They had a peculiar hierarchy of their own; they lived rigidly, ate no flesh, fasted often, kept up unceasing prayer by alternate turns, and observed a community of goods. They inculcated the duty of virginity, living with their wives as mothers or sisters, and believed that, if all mankind would be content to live in purely spiritual union, the race would be propagated after the manner of bees. They considered it desirable to suffer in this life in order to avert sufferings in the life to come; hence it was usual that those among them who had escaped outward persecution should be tortured and put to death by their friends.

The members of the sect were seized and were removed to Milan. Attempts were made to reclaim them, but without effect; and the magistrates, on learning that they had endeavored to gain converts among the country people, ordered them, although without the archbishop’s consent, to be carried to a place outside the city, where they were required, on pain of burning, to bow to the cross, and to profess the catholic faith. Almost all refused; they covered their eyes with their hands, and rushed into the fire which was prepared for them.

It is generally assumed by modern writers, on grounds which it is impossible to discover, that the statement of Heribert’s freedom from any share in the fate of these unfortunate fanatics is untrue. But in another quarter, at least, a voice was raised by a bishop in behalf of Christian principle and humanity as to the treatment of religious error. Wazo, bishop of Liege, who died in 1048, received a letter from Roger, bishop of Châlons-on-the Marne, reporting the appearance of some heretics who avowed the doctrines of Manes, and supposed him to be the Holy Ghost. Among other things, Roger states that even the most uneducated persons, when perverted to this sect, became more fluent in their discourse, than the most learned clerks; and he asks how he should deal with them. Wazo tells him in reply, that forcible measures are inconsistent with our Lord’s parable of the tares; that bishops do not at their ordination receive the sword; that their power is not that of killing but of making alive; that they ought to content themselves with excluding those who are in error from the church, and preventing them from spreading the infection. The writer who has preserved the correspondence enforces this advice by the authority of St. Martin, and expresses a belief that the bishop of Tours would have strongly reprobated the punishment of some sectaries who were put to death at Goslar in 1052.

The origin of the sects which thus within a short period appeared in so many quarters is matter of doubt and controversy. The heretical parties north of the Alps professed for the most part to have received their opinions immediately from Italy; but it is asked whether they had been introduced into that country by Paulician refugees, the offspring of the Paulicians who, in 969, had been transported by John Tzimisces from Armenia to Thrace, and established as guards of the western frontiers of his empire, with permission to retain their religion;—or whether they were derived from Manicheans who, notwithstanding the vigorous measures of Leo the Great and other popes for the suppression of the sect, had continued to lurk in Italy. The avowal of the party at Monteforte, that they did not know from what part of the world they had come, which had been cited in behalf of the connection with Paulicianism, appears rather to favor the opposite view, inasmuch as it would seem to imply not only a foreign origin (which was common to both Manicheans and Paulicians), but an establishment of their doctrines in Italy long before the then recent time at which Paulicianism had been introduced into Europe. Moreover the sectaries of Monteforte differed from the Paulicians in the rejection of flesh and of marriage, in the system of their hierarchy, in maintaining the distinction between elect and hearers; and the western sects in general paid honor to Manes, whereas the Paulicians anathematized him. The indistinctness with which the Manichaean tenets appear in some of the cases has been accounted for by supposing that the obscure followers of Manes, lurking in corners for centuries, were kept together rather by external observances than by any accurate knowledge of the system which they professed; while something must also be allowed for the defectiveness of the notices which have reached us. It seems, therefore, possible that the new heretics may have derived their opinions from the Manicheans; and, according to the advocates of this view, it was not until the east had been brought into communication with the west by the crusades that the western sectaries learnt to trace a likeness between themselves and the Paulicians, which, by means of fabulous inventions, was then referred to a supposed connection in earlier times. But there seems to be a deficiency of proof for the supposition that the Manichaean sect had continued to exist in Italy—the only evidence of its existence after the time of Gregory the Great being apparently the mention of some heretics who are styled Arians, but may have been Manicheans, at Padua in the tenth century.

In the east also the beginning of the eleventh century was marked by the rise or by the increased activity of some heretical sects—as the Athinggani, the Children of the Sun, and the Euchites; but their influence was so limited that it is unnecessary here to give any particular account of them.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER IX.

 

SUPPLEMENTARY.

 

The Hierarchy.

 

THE relations of the papacy with secular powers, and especially with the emperors of the west, were governed rather by circumstances than by any settled principles. On each side there were claims which were sometimes admitted and sometimes denied by the other party; but even when they were admitted, the enforcement of them depended on the questions whether the claimant were strong and whether circumstances were favourable to him.

The German emperors still retained the same rights of sovereignty over Rome which had been held by the Carolingians. The imperial share in the appointment of the pope by means of commissioners continued, and popes were even glad to sanction it afresh, as a means of averting the disorders incident to an election carried on amid the fury of the Roman factions and the violence of the neighbouring nobles. A synod under John IX in 898, when Lambert had been crowned as emperor, enacted that, for the prevention of such tumults and scandals as had taken place through the absence of imperial commissioners, the presence of commissioners should be necessary at future elections; and in another canon it threatens the emperor’s indignation, as well as spiritual penalties, against any who should renew the disorders which had been usual on the death of a pope, when the palace was invaded by plunderers, who often extended their depredations over the city and its suburbs. And, although the document bearing the name of Leo VIII, which confers on Otho the Great and his successors the power of nominating to the papacy as well as to the empire, is probably spurious, its provisions agree with the state of things which actually existed at the time. The emperor was regarded as having the right to decide the appeals of Roman subjects who had been aggrieved by the pope. Emperors even deposed popes, and that not by any wanton exercise of force, but as if in the fulfilment of a duty attached to their office; thus we have seen that Otho the Great was extremely reluctant to proceed against the wretched young debauchee John XII. It was considered that even the pope was not irresponsible on earth, and that for the execution of manifest justice on the chief pastor of the church the highest secular authority was entitled to intervene. Yet on the whole the popes were gaining, and were preparing to secure advantages for their successors.

It seems probable that Charlemagne, in projecting the revival of the Roman empire, may have hoped to become master of the popes; but the event redounded to the benefit of the papacy. Leo III surprised Charlemagne himself into receiving the crown from his hands; and although the great emperor was careful that his son should assume it in such a manner that it should appear to be held independently of the Roman sanction, Louis submitted to be crowned afresh by Stephen IV. The popes continued to crown the emperors until an opinion was settled in the minds of men that the highest of secular dignities could only be conferred by God himself through the instrumentality of His chief minister, the successor of St. Peter; and, although the possession of the Italian kingdom was regarded as implying a title to the empire, the imperial name was not assumed by the German sovereigns of Italy until after a coronation at Rome by the pope.

As the eastern bishops, by appealing to the emperor in their differences, had established an imperial supremacy in spiritual things, so the princes of the west, by referring their quarrels to the pope, and by asking him to ratify their conquests, contributed to invest him with a power of arbitration and control which more and more claimed a superiority over all secular government. And this was enhanced by the pope’s assumption of an universal censorship of morals, and by his wielding the terrors of excommunication, which were able to make kings tremble, not only by the direct exclusion from spiritual privileges, but through the apprehension of the effects which such a sentence might produce among their people. The wideness and variety of the scene on which the popes acted were also conducive to the growth of their authority, since an attempt which was foiled by the energy of one opponent succeeded elsewhere against the weakness of another, and thenceforth became a precedent for general application. In newly-converted kingdoms, such as Hungary and Poland, the power of the pope over the national church was from the first established as a principle; nor did the shameful degradation of the papacy during a large portion of the time now under review produce any considerable effect on its estimation in foreign countries, where little or nothing was heard of the pope as an individual, and he was regarded only as the successor of the chief apostle.

The territorial power and income of the papacy were limited by the encroachments of the Italian nobles and by the invasions of the Saracens. But the popes found new sources of wealth in the practice of annexing to their see the revenues of bishoprics and abbeys in various parts of Christendom, and in payments levied from countries which were in communion with them, such as the Peter-pence of England and the tribute paid by Poland. And a continual succession of forgeries made it appear that such territories as the see of Rome possessed were but portions of a far larger inheritance, which of right belonged to it by virtue of donations bestowed by emperors and other sovereigns from the time of Constantine the Great.

The policy of the popes towards the church aimed at centralising all authority in the papacy. The principles of the forged decretals were taken as a foundation of their claims. Titles more pompous than before were given by those who wished to pay court to them, and were not refused. The epithet universal, which Gregory the Great had declared to be unfit for any Christian prelate, was addressed to Nicolas I by Adventius bishop of Metz and by Charles the Bald; and it afterwards became usual. Adventius styles Nicolas “Your Majesty”, a phrase which was very commonly used by Peter Damiani in addressing the popes of his time. Theotmar, archbishop of Salzburg, and his suffragans addressed John IX as “Supreme Pontiff and Universal Pope, not of a single city but of the whole world”. Some bishops avowed that they held their episcopate from God through St. Peter. i.e. through the apostle's successors in the see of Rome. The claims involved in the new pretensions of the papacy were at first somewhat indefinite. What was meant by the pope’s universal episcopate? What was his supreme judicature? When and how was this to be exercised? But when once such vague and sounding titles had been impressed on the general mind, it was in the power of the popes to make almost any deductions whatever from them. The claim which Nicolas advanced for obedience to all the decrees of popes rested on a different ground from that which had sometimes been put forward by his predecessors. In earlier times, such a claim was founded on the supposition that Rome was the most faithful guardian of apostolic faith and practice, or, at the utmost, that the pope was the highest expounder of the law not that he pretended to a power of legislation. But now it was rested simply on the ground that Rome was Rome; and the matter set forth under the sanction of such a pretension consisted of a forgery which professed to derive a new and unheard-of system of papal domination from the earliest ages of the church.

The party which relied on the authority of the decretals was bent on humbling the class of metropolitans. There are circumstances which seem to indicate that metropolitans had begun to assume power greater than that which had in earlier times belonged to them. But the design was not limited to reducing them within their ancient bounds; they were not to be allowed any power of judicature over bishops; and when they were stripped of their judicial power, their authority as superintendents or inspectors was not likely to be much regarded. It was the interest of bishops to aid the popes in a course which annihilated the power of metropolitans and provincial synods over members of the episcopate, and subjected these to the pope alone. There were even inducements which might persuade metropolitans to consent to sacrifice the independence of their own order. They, in common with other bishops, were strengthened against secular princes by an alliance with the papacy. They felt that their dignity was enhanced by a connection with a power which exalted religion above all earthly authority; and the use of the pall was of great effect in reconciling them to the change.

The pall, originally a part of the imperial attire, had been at first bestowed by the eastern emperors on the patriarchs of their capital. In the fifth and sixth centuries it was conferred on other patriarchs; and in time it was given by popes and patriarchs to bishops, although the imperial consent was necessary before the honor could be conferred on a bishop whose predecessors had not enjoyed it.

The pall was sent by the popes to their vicars; it was regarded as the mark of a special connexion with the Roman see, to which the receiver was bound by a strict oath of subjection and obedience. When some metropolitans had thus received it, others, wishing to be on a level with them, made application for a like distinction, so that it came to be regarded as the ensign of metropolitan dignity, and that this dignity came to be regarded as a gift of the pope. Nicolas I, in his answer to the Bulgarians, lays it down that their future archbishop shall not exercise his office until he receive the pall from Rome; such, he says, is the usage in Gaul, Germany, and other countries; and John VIII, at the synod of Ravenna, in 877, enacted that every metropolitan should, within three months after his election, send to Rome a statement of his faith, together with a petition for the pall. While the metropolitans, thus received some compensation for the loss of their independent power, in their special connexion with Rome, and in their exercise of jurisdiction as delegates of the pope, the pall became not only a mark of their subjection, but a source of profit to the Roman treasury.

Although Gregory I had positively forbidden that anything should be given for it, fees were now exacted, and so heavy were they in some cases that Canute, on his pilgrimage to Rome, complained to the pope of the oppressive amount required from English archbishops, and obtained a promise of an abatement in future. That metropolitans submitted to exorbitant payments for the sake of obtaining this ensign, is a proof that the advantage of such a sanction for their authority must have been strongly felt.

The metropolitans lost less in England and in Germany than elsewhere. In England the whole foundation of the church rested on the primacy of Canterbury. In Germany the metropolitans of Mayence, Cologne, Treves, and Salzburg, held high dignities of the empire as annexed to their sees. Yet, in the case of the great German prelates, there was the disadvantage that the popular opinion unconsciously referred their power not to their spiritual but to their secular offices.

In addition to their vicars, the popes appointed legates to exercise some of their functions, such as that of holding councils for the investigation of cases which had been referred to Rome, or in which the popes took it on themselves to interfere. These legates were sometimes ecclesiastics sent from Italy; but, as foreign ecclesiastics were regarded with suspicion by princes, it was more usual to give the legatine commission to some bishop of the country in which the inquiry was to take place. Even kings were sometimes invested with the authority of papal deputies, as we have seen in the instance of Charles the Bald at the council of Pontyon.

The claim of the popes to exclusive jurisdiction over bishops was uncontested from the time of the victory gained by John XV and Gregory V in the affair of Arnulf of Reims. Persons nominated to bishoprics, if they found any difficulty in obtaining consecration from their own metropolitan, sought it at the hands of the pope; and a Roman synod under Benedict VI, held probably in 983, with a view to the suppression of simony, directed that not only bishops but priests or deacons should repair to Rome for ordination, if it were not to be obtained without payment at home. Yet to the end of the period the prelates of France and Germany resisted some attempts of the popes to encroach on their rights.

The title of “universal bishop” was admitted only as implying a power of general oversight not as entitling the popes to exercise episcopal functions in every diocese. This resistance was especially shown when the popes attempted to interfere with the penitential discipline. Every bishop had been formerly regarded as the sole judge in cases of penance within his own diocese, as the only person who could relax the penance which he had himself imposed. The bishop's power of absolution was still unassailed; there were not as yet any cases reserved for the decision of the pope alone. But the popes began to claim a jurisdiction as to penance similar to that which they were gradually establishing over the church in other respects; they asserted a right of absolving from the penance to which offenders had been sentenced by other bishops. The resort of penitents to Rome had been encouraged by various circumstances. In many instances bishops had themselves consulted the pope, or had recommended an application to him, either with a view of escaping responsibility in difficult cases, or in order that the long and toilsome journey to Rome might itself in some measure serve as a penitential exercise. But when penitents began to flock to Rome for the purpose of obtaining from the pope the absolution which was refused by their own diocesans, or in the belief that the absolution of St. Peter's successor was of superior virtue, the practice drew forth strong and frequent protests from councils and from individual bishops. Ahyto (or Hatto) of Basel, about 820, orders that penitents who wish to visit the apostolic city should first confess their sins at home, “because they are to be bound or loosed by their own bishop or priest, and not by a stranger”. When an English earl, who had been excommunicated by Dunstan for contracting an unlawful marriage, had succeeded, by the employment of influence and money at Rome, in obtaining from the pope a mandate that the archbishop should restore him, Dunstan firmly refused to comply. “I will gladly obey”, he said, “when I see him repentant; but so long as he rejoices in his sin, God forbid that, for the sake of any mortal man, or to save my own life, I should neglect the law which our Lord has laid down for His church”. And to the end of the period a like opposition to the papal assumptions in this respect was maintained. All that was as yet conceded to the pope was a power of granting absolution on the application, or with the consent, of the bishop by whom penance had been imposed. But in this, as in other matters, principles had already been introduced by which the popes were in no long time entirely to overthrow the ancient rights of the episcopal order.

The secular importance of bishops increased. They took precedence of counts, and at national assemblies they sat before dukes. In France many prelates took advantage of the weakness of the later Carolingians, or of the unsettled state of the new dynasty, to obtain grants of royalties (regalia), privileges especially belonging to the crown, such as the right to coin money, to establish markets, to levy tolls, to build fortifications, and to hold courts of justice, even for the trial of capital offences. Towards the end of the period, however, these bishops for the most part found it necessary, for the sake of security against the aggressions of the nobles, to place themselves under the feudal protection of the sovereign, and in consideration of this the royalties were again resigned.

But it was in Germany that the bishops acquired the greatest power. The repeated changes of dynasty in that country were favorable to them. Each new race found it expedient to court them; and the emperors, partly out of respect for religion, partly from a wish to strengthen themselves by the support of the clergy, and to provide a counterpoise to the lay nobility, favored the advance of the order by bestowing on them grants of royalties, and whole counties or even duchies, with corresponding rights of jurisdiction.

In proportion as the bishops became more powerful, it was more important for princes to get the appointment of them into their own hands. The capitulary of Louis the Pious, which enacted a return to the ancient system of free elections, had never taken effect to any considerable extent. In France, in England, and in Germany, the choice of bishops was really with the sovereign; even where the right of nomination was contested (as it was by Hincmar in the cases of Cambray and Beauvais), the opponents allowed that the royal licence must precede the election of a bishop, and that the royal confirmation must follow on it. Although the church petitioned for free elections, it would have been well content to secure a right of rejecting persons who were unfit in respect of morals or of learning. Even a pope, John X, allows that, by ancient custom, the king’s command is required in order to the appointment of a bishop, although he also mentions the necessity of election by the clergy, and acclamation by the laity. Election was for the most part nothing more than acquiescence in the sovereign’s nomination; so that while Adam of Bremen always speaks of bishops as being appointed by the emperor, Thietmar generally speaks of them as elected. A sovereign might refuse to confirm an election, and any substitute proposed by him in such a case was sure to be accepted by the electors. And it was in vain that complaints were raised against the system of royal control, or that attempts were made to limit it by laying down new rules as to the qualifications requisite for the episcopate.

A remarkable proof of the degree in which the German sovereigns believed the disposal of bishoprics to be a right of their own office, is found in the fact that Henry the Fowler granted to Arnulf duke of Bavaria the privilege of appointing bishops within that territory. The saintly emperor Henry II made bishops by direct nomination, possibly (as has been suggested) from a wish to secure the appointment of better men than the flocks would have been likely to choose for themselves; and it is said that a comparison between the bishops who owed their sees to his patronage and those who were afterwards elected by the clergy bears out the wisdom and the honesty of his policy. We are told that the emperors were sometimes directed by visions to promote certain deserving persons to vacant bishoprics, or to refrain from opposing their election.

In the Greek church also the emperors continued to nominate to the most important sees. Nicephorus Phocas enacted that no bishop should be appointed without the imperial consent, and when a see was vacant, he committed the revenues to the care of an officer, who was bound to limit the expenditure to a certain sum, and to pay over the residue to the treasury. The patriarch Polyeuctus refused to crown John Tzimisces, unless on condition that the law of his predecessor should be abrogated; but the emperor, immediately after his coronation, proceeded to exercise his prerogative by nominating a patriarch for Antioch.

Bishoprics became objects of ambition for persons of noble or even royal birth, so that it was at length a rare and surprising case, and even serious objections were raised, when any one of obscure origin was elevated to such a position. Attempts were made to render the possession of sees hereditary in certain families; and in Germany these attempts took a peculiar and remarkable turn. A prelate was often able to secure the succession to his see for a nephew or a cousin; and the interest of families in such cases led them not to impoverish but to enrich the see, with a view to the benefit of their own members who were to hold it. It was regarded as a part of the family property, and the bishop might rely on the support of his kinsmen in all his differences and feuds with his other neighbours. Henry II was fond of bestowing bishoprics on wealthy persons, who might be likely to add to the riches of their sees, such as Heinwerc, of Paderborn, of whose relations with his imperial patron and kinsman many humorous tales are told by his biographer.

But the disposal of bishoprics from motives of family interest naturally introduced great abuses. Atto bishop of Vercelli, who, in the earlier part of the tenth century, wrote a treatise “On the Grievances of the Church”, tells us that the princes of his time were indifferent as to the character of those whom they nominated to high spiritual office, that wealth, relationship, and subserviency were the only qualities which they looked for; and not only unfit persons but boys were appointed to sees, from those of Rome and Constantinople downwards. Atto describes one of these boy prelates, at his consecration, as answering by rote the questions which were put to him, either having been crammed with the answers or reading them from a memorandum; as dreading, in case of failure, not lest he should lose the grace of consecration, but lest he should fall under the rod of his tutor; and having no conception either of the responsibilities of his office, or of the temptations which would beset him.

A particularly scandalous case was that of Theophylact, whom his father, the emperor Romanus, resolved to raise to the patriarchate of Constantinople on a vacancy which occurred in 928. As the prince was only eleven years of age, a monk named Trypho was made temporary patriarch; but when desired to resign his office, three years later, he was unwilling to comply. It is said that Theophanes, bishop of Caesarea, waited on him, and, with great professions of friendship, told him that the emperor intended to eject him on the ground that he was ignorant of letters : “If”, he said, “you can disprove this objection, you have nothing to fear”. At the suggestion of his insidious visitor, Trypho wrote his name and style on a paper, which was afterwards annexed to another, containing an acknowledgment that he was unfit for the patriarchate, and expressing a wish to retire from it. Trypho was thus set aside, and, after a vacancy of a year and a half, Theophylact, at the age of sixteen, became patriarch in 933, being installed in his office by legates of pope John XI. During three and twenty years Theophylact disgraced the patriarchal throne. He introduced indecent music and dances into the service of the church; but he was chiefly distinguished by his insane fondness for horses, of which he kept more than two thousand. Instead of the ordinary diet, they were fed with dates, figs, raisins, almonds, and other fruits which were steeped in costly wines and flavoured with the most delicate spices. It is related that once, while performing the eucharistic rites on Thursday before Easter, the patriarch was informed that a favourite mare had foaled. He immediately left the church, and, after having gratified himself by the sight of the mother and her offspring, returned to finish the service of the day. In order to provide for the vast expenses of his stud, he shamelessly sold all sorts of spiritual offices. Theophylact’s end was worthy of his life; his head was dashed against a wall in riding, and, after having lingered two years, he died in consequence of the accident.

Complaints of simony in the appointment to ecclesiastical offices, whether high or low, are incessant during this period. The simoniacal practices of sovereigns are supposed to have originated from the custom of offering gifts on being admitted to their presence. Those who were promoted by them to ecclesiastical dignities testified their gratitude by presents, which in course of time took the nature of stipulated payments. The working of the system became worse when bishops, instead of making payment at the time of their promotion, relied on the revenues of their sees for the means of raising the money, as in such cases they were tempted to dilapidate the episcopal property, to oppress their tenants, to engage in unseemly disputes, and to allow their churches to go to ruin.

In respect of simony the German emperors were pure, as compared with other western princes; they sometimes made formal resolutions to refrain from selling their patronage, and to restrain the simoniacal practices of others; but their necessities interfered with the fulfilment of their good intentions. Cardinal Humbert, who had enjoyed an opportunity of observing the Greek church, when engaged on a mission to Constantinople, states that the sale of bishoprics was not practised there as in the west. The practice of paying for preferments, as distinguished from ordination, found defenders; but the defence was indignantly met by such writers as Humbert and Peter Damiani. The distinction between orders and benefices, says Peter, is as absurd as if one were to say that a man is father of his son's body only, and not of his soul.

Bishops were invested in their sees by the western sovereigns. Symbolical forms of investiture are mentioned as early as the time of Clovis, and it is said that Louis the Pious invested bishops by delivering to them the pastoral staff. But the use of such ceremonies does not appear to have been introduced as a regular practice until the age of the Othos, and was perhaps not completely established until the end of the tenth century.

The investiture related to the temporalities of the see, which the sovereign was supposed to bestow on the bishops. Hincmar, in his answer to Adrian II, when desired to renounce communion with Charles the Bald, marks the distinction between his temporalities, which were at the king’s disposal, and his spiritual office, in which he regarded himself as independent. “If I were to act according to your judgment”, he tells the pope, “I might continue to chant at the altar of my church, but over its property, its income, and its retainers, I should no longer have any power”.

When the feudal system was established, it was natural that bishops, as well as dukes and counts, should be invested in their possessions, and they may have found their advantage in a tie which entitled them to the protection of their liege lord. But it became a matter of complaint that the estates and temporal privileges of bishops were conferred on them by means of instruments which symbolised their spiritual character the ring, the figure of marriage with the church, and the crozier or crook, the ensign of pastoral authority. The use of such instruments provoked objections, because they were liable to be interpreted as signifying that the spiritual powers of the episcopate were derived from the gift of earthly princes.

By the institution of investiture sovereigns gained new means of control over bishops. They not only held over them the fear lest their gifts might be withdrawn, but were able to use the investiture so as to secure for themselves the patronage of sees. In order to elude the royal nomination, bishops sometimes consecrated to a see immediately on the occurrence of the vacancy, and thus threw on the sovereign the difficulty and the odium of dislodging a prelate who was already in possession. But princes were now able to prevent such consecrations, by providing that on a bishop's death his ring and staff should at once be seized and sent to them by their officers; for without these insignia the consecration of a successor could not proceed. Hence, as we shall see hereafter, it was complained that by the system of investiture the right of canonical election was annulled.

Sometimes the election of a bishop was notified to the court, with a petition for his investiture, and in such cases it was always in the prince's power to substitute another person for him who had been chosen. Sometimes investiture was given in the name of the sovereign by the prelate who took the chief part in the consecration.

Notwithstanding all the lofty pretensions which ecclesiastics now set up as to the superiority of spiritual over royal power, they did not practically gain much. Hincmar and his brethren of the council of Quiercy told Louis of Germany that bishops ought not, like secular men, to be bound to vassalship; that it was a shameful indignity that the hands which had been anointed with holy chrism, and which daily consecrated the Redeemer's body and blood, should be required to touch the hands of a liege-lord in the ceremony of homage, or that the lips which were the keys of heaven should be obliged to swear fealty. But they did not obtain any exemption in consequence of this representation; and Hincmar himself was afterwards, as a special affront, required to renew his oath of fealty to Charles the Bald.

Although bishops were exempt from the power of all inferior judges, kings still retained their jurisdiction over them. Hincmar, in his greatest zeal for the immunities of the clergy, went only so far as to maintain that the royal judgment must be guided by the laws of the church. The enactments of some synods, that a bishop should not be deposed except by twelve members of his own order, are not to be regarded as withdrawing bishops from the judgment of the sovereign, but as prescribing the manner in which this should be exercised. And, in cases of treason, princes deposed by their own immediate authority. When Hugh Capet brought Arnulf of Reims to trial before the synod of St. Basle, no complaint was made of his having already imprisoned him; the presiding archbishop's proposal, that before proceeding to the investigation the synod should petition for the security of Arnulf’s life, is a proof that the king's power to inflict capital punishment on the accused prelate was admitted; and it was only through the weakness of Robert and through the support of the emperor Otho that the pope was able in that case eventually to triumph.

While feeble princes yielded to the hierarchy, powerful princes often dealt forcibly with its members. Otho the Great, in punishment of political misdeeds, banished an archbishop of Mayence to Hamburg, and shut up a bishop of Strasburg in the monastery of Corbey; and, for the offence of having received a duke of Saxony with honors too much resembling those which were paid to the imperial majesty, he obliged Adalbert, archbishop of Magdeburg, to compound by heavy penalties a horse for every bell which had been rung and for every chandelier which had been lighted. Conrad II, on his last expedition to Italy, carried about with him a train of captive bishops; and when Henry III. deposed Widgers from the archbishopric of Ravenna, the act was highly extolled by the greatest zealot for the privileges of the church, Peter Damiani.

Although the German emperors, like the Carolingians, assembled synods, took part in them, and ratified their proceedings, they did not, like the Carolingians, publish the decrees as their own enactments. And the privileges of sovereigns in general with respect to such assemblies were diminished. Although it was still acknowledged that they had the power of summoning councils, their right in this respect was no longer regarded as exclusive, so that both in France and in Germany councils were gathered without asking the sovereign's permission.

Through the carelessness of the bishops, the custom of holding regular synods fell into disuse; and when they were revived in a later age, the powers which kings and emperors had formerly exercised in connexion with them were forgotten.

It was regarded as a right of sovereigns to found bishoprics and archbishoprics, and the German emperors exercised it by erecting and endowing sees, some of them perhaps as much from motives of policy as of devotion. The consent of the prelates whose interest was affected by the new foundation was, however, regarded as necessary, and, in order to obtain it, the founders were sometimes obliged to submit to concession and compromise. Henry II even prostrated himself before a council at Frankfort in 1006, that he might obtain its assistance in overcoming the objections raised by the bishop of Würzburg against the proposed see of Bamberg; and when Otho III took it on himself to erect the archbishopric of Gnesen without asking the consent of the metropolitan of Posen, out of whose province that of Gnesen was to be taken, the chronicler who relates this speaks doubtfully as to the legality of the act. The popes now began to claim the right of confirming these foundations; but, from the fact that princes labored to propitiate the local prelates, instead of invoking the pope to overrule their objections, it is clear that the popes were not as yet supposed to have supreme jurisdiction in such cases.

Towards the middle of the ninth century there were considerable dissensions on the subject of the chorepiscopi in France. They had become more and more dissatisfied with their position; they complained that their emoluments bore no proportion to their labor, as compared with those of the diocesan bishops, while on the other side there were complaints that the chorepiscopi were disposed to exceed the rights of their commission. The decretals, fabricated in the interest of the bishops, were adverse to the claims of the chorepiscopi. Raban Maur, however, in consequence of an application from Drogo of Metz, wrote in favour of them, and especially in support of their power to ordain priests and deacons with the licence of their episcopal superiors. The troubles occasioned by Gottschalk may perhaps have contributed to exasperate the difference between the two classes, for Gottschalk had been ordained by a chorepiscopus during the vacancy of the see of Reims; and, notwithstanding the powerful authority of the German primate, the order of chorepiscopi was abolished throughout Neustria by a council held at Paris in 849.

In the eleventh century a new species of assistant bishops was for the first time introduced. Poppo, bishop of Treves, in 1041 requested Benedict IX to supply him with a person qualified to aid him in pontifical acts, and the pope complied by sending an ecclesiastic named Gratian, who must doubtless have already received episcopal consecration. The novelty of the case consisted in the application to the pope, and in the fact that the coadjutor was appointed by him. It was not, however, until a later time that such coadjutors became common in the church.

The practice of taking part in war, which had so often been condemned by councils, became more general among bishops during this period. When the feudal relations were fully established, a bishop was bound, as a part of his duty towards his suzerain, to lead his contingent to the field in person, and it was only as a matter of special favor that a dispensation from this duty could be obtained. The circumstances of the time, indeed, appeared in some measure to excuse the warlike propensities of bishops, who might think themselves justified in encouraging their flocks, even by their own example, to resist such determined and pitiless enemies of Christendom as the Saracens, the Northmen, or the Hungarians. Some prelates distinguished themselves by deeds of prowess, as Michael, bishop of Ratisbon, in the middle of the tenth century, who, after losing an ear and receiving other wounds in a battle with the Hungarians, was left for dead on the field. While he lay in this condition, a Magyar fell on him, with the intention of despatching him; but the bishop, “being strengthened in the Lord”, grappled with his assailant, and, after a long struggle, succeeded in killing him. He then with great difficulty made his way to the camp of his own nation, where he was hailed with acclamations both as a priest and as a warrior, and his mutilation was thenceforth regarded as an honourable distinction.

Although donations of land were still made to the church, its acquisitions of this kind appear to have been less than in earlier times partly, perhaps, because such gifts may have seemed to be less required. The clergy, therefore, felt the necessity of turning to the best account the revenues to which they were already entitled, and especially the tithes. Tithe had originally been levied from land only, but the obligation of paying it was now extended to all sorts of income. “Perhaps”, says the council of Trosley, “some one may say, ‘I am no husbandman; I have nothing on which to pay tithe of the fruits of the earth or even of flocks’. Let such an one hearken, whosoever he be, whether a soldier, a merchant, or an artisan : The ability by which thou art fed is God’s, and therefore thou oughtest to pay tithes to Him”. Many canons are directed to the enforcement of tithes on land newly brought into cultivation; and many are directed against claims of exemption. Such claims were sometimes advanced by persons who held lands under ecclesiastical owners, and pretended that it was an oppression to require a second rent of them under another name. The council of Ingelheim, held in 948, in the presence of Otho I, enacted that all questions as to tithes should be subject to the decision of the bishops alone; and a great council at Augsburg, four years later, confirmed the rule

The amount thus added to the revenues of the clergy must, after all possible deductions for difficulties of collection, for waste, and for other allowances, have been very large; but the individual members of the body were not proportionably enriched. The number of the clergy was greatly increased; and, although the principle had been established that “benefice is given on account of office or duty”, it was considered to be satisfied by imposing on the superfluous clerks the duty of reading the church-service daily, and thus they became entitled to a maintenance. The bishops, as their state became greater, found themselves obliged to keep a host of expensive retainers. Knights or persons of higher rank who were attached to the households of the great prelates, often by way of disarming their hostility, were very highly paid for their services; the free men whom the bishops contributed towards the national force, or whom they hired to fight their feuds, were costly, and, as the prelates found themselves considered at the national musters in proportion to the number of their followers, they often, for the sake of supporting their dignity, led more than the required number with them.

According to the system of the age, all these adherents were paid by fiefs, which were either provided out of the estates of the church or by assigning them the tithes of certain lands. Such fiefs in general became hereditary, and thus the episcopal revenues were consumed by the expense of establishments which it was impossible to get rid of.

The vidames or advocates in particular pressed heavily on the church. The wealth and privileges of the clergy continually excited the envy and cupidity of their lay neighbours, who were apt to pick quarrels with them in order that there might be a pretext for seizing their property. Every council has its complaints of such aggressions, and its anathemas against the aggressors. But the denunciations of councils, or even of popes, were of little or no avail; force alone could make any impression on the rough and lawless enemies of the clergy. The vidames, therefore, if they discharged their office faithfully, had no easy task in defending the property of the churches or monasteries with which they were connected. But not only was the price of their assistance often greater than the damage which they averted; they are charged with neglecting their duty, with becoming oppressors instead of defenders, with treating the property of the church as if it were their own.

The oppression, of the advocates was especially felt by monastic bodies, which often found it expedient to pay largely to the sovereign for the privilege of being able to discharge these officers. The advocateship became hereditary; in some monasteries it was reserved by the founder to himself and his heirs, who, thus, by the power of preying not only on the original endowment, but on such property as the community afterwards acquired, were in no small degree indemnified for the expense of the foundation. In some cases, the advocates appointed deputies, and thus the unfortunate clients had two tyrants under the name of defenders. Vast, therefore, as the revenues of the church appear, much of its wealth was merely nominal. A large part passed from the clergy to lay officials, and the rest was exposed to continual danger in such rude and unsettled times.

The condition of the Greek clergy is described by Liutprand as inferior to that of their Latin brethren. Their manner of life struck him as sordid; and, although some of the bishops were rich and others were poor, they were all alike inhospitable. The bishops were obliged to pay tribute to the emperor; the bishop of Leucate swore that his own tribute amounted to a hundred pieces of gold yearly; and Liutprand cries out that this was a manifest injustice, inasmuch as Joseph, when he taxed all the rest of Egypt, exempted the land which belonged to the priests.

An important change took place in the canonical bodies, which, as we have seen, had originated towards the end of the preceding period. Although the canonical life was attractive as offering almost all the advantages of monasticism with an exemption from some of its drawbacks, the restraints and punctilious observances of Chrodegang’s rule were felt as hardships by many who had been accustomed to the enjoyment of independence. The canons had taken a high position. From living with the bishop they were brought into a close connexion with him : their privileged body acquired something like that power which in the earliest ages had belonged to the general council of presbyters; and they claimed a share in the government of the diocese. The bishop, however, had at his disposal the whole revenues of the church, and although he might be obliged to set aside a certain portion for the maintenance of the canons, he had yet in his hands considerable means of annoying them. He could stint them in their allowances, he could increase their fasts, he could be niggardly in providing for occasions of festivity. Complaints of bishops against canons and of canons against bishops became frequent.

The first object of the canons was to get rid of the bishop's control over their property. The composition made between Gunther of Cologne and his chapter, at a time when he had especial reason to court the members, is the earliest instance of its kind. By this the canons got into their own hands the management of their estates, and were even enabled to bequeath their houses or other effects to their brethren without any reference to the archbishop. The instrument was confirmed by a great council held at Cologne in 873 under archbishop Willibert, whose reasons for consenting to it are unknown; and the new arrangement was soon imitated elsewhere.

After having gained this step, the canons in various places, and more or less rapidly, advanced further. They abandoned the custom of living together, and of eating at a common table; each had a separate residence of his own within the precincts of the cathedral. They divided the estates of the society among themselves, but in such a way that the more influential members secured an unfair proportion; while many of them also possessed private property. The canons purchased special privileges from kings and emperors, from bishops and from popes. The vacancies in each chapter were filled up by the choice of the members, and nobility of birth came to be regarded as a necessary qualification. Marriage and concubinage were usual among this class of clergy; and their ordinary style of living may be inferred from the statement of Ratherius, bishop of Verona, that the simplicity of his habits led his canons to suppose him a man of low origin, and on that account to despise him. At length the duties of the choir the only duties which the canons had continued to acknowledge were devolved on “prebendaries” engaged for the purpose, and the canons, both of cathedral and of collegiate churches, lived in the enjoyment of their incomes, undisturbed even by the obligation of sharing in the divine offices.

Thus by degrees the system which Chrodegang had instituted became extinct. The revivals of it which were attempted by Adalbero of Reims, by Willigis of Mayence, and other prelates, were never of long continuance; and in a later time that which had been a violation of the proper canonical discipline became the rule for the foundation of cathedral chapters on a new footing.

The dissolute morals of the clergy are the subject of unceasing complaint. The evils which arose out of the condition of domestic chaplains increased, notwithstanding all the efforts of bishops and of councils to introduce a reform. The employers of these chaplains engaged them without any inquiry as to their morals, their learning, or even their ordination; they claimed for them the same exemption from episcopal jurisdiction which was allowed to the clergy of the royal chapel, and every employer considered it a point of honour to support his chaplain in any violation of canons or in any defiance of bishops.

The mischiefs connected with this class of clergy were in great measure chargeable on the practice of the bishops themselves in conferring orders without assigning a particular sphere of labour to the receiver. The origin of such ordinations has been already traced; but now even the higher orders of the ministry were thus bestowed, for the sake of the fees which had become customary. Canons were passed that no one should be allowed to officiate in a church without the bishop's licence, and without producing a certificate of his ordination; while other canons forbade the appointment of chaplains without the bishop’s consent. The council of Ravenna, under John VIII, in 877, enacted that every presbyter should, at ordination, be appointed to some particular church; but the custom of ordaining without such a title was already too firmly established.

Among the many abuses which arose out of the sale of spiritual preferments was the practice of patrons who insisted on presenting their nominees without allowing the bishop to inquire into their qualifications, or even into the validity of their ordination. In opposition to this the council of Seligenstadt, in 1022, ordered that no layman should present a clerk without submitting him for examination to the bishop.

But the chief subject of complaint and of ecclesiastical legislation is the neglect of celibacy and chastity by the clergy. The older canons, which forbade clergymen to entertain in their houses any women except their nearest relations, were found, instead of acting as an effective restraint, to tempt them to more frightful kinds of sin; and even the company of mothers, aunts, and sisters was now prohibited. Riculf, bishop of Soissons, ordains, in 889, that, lest the sins of Absalom and of Lot should be repeated, not even the nearest kinswomen of the clergy should dwell with them; if a clergyman should invite his mother, his sister, or his aunt to dinner, the women must return before nightfall to their own home or lodging, which must be at a distance from the parsonage. As experience seemed to point out more and more the expediency of relaxing the law of celibacy, councils became stricter in their requirements. Subdeacons were required at ordination to promise that they would never marry, or, if already married, they were required to renounce their wives; a council at Augsburg in 952 enacted that all manner of clerks of mature age should be compelled to observe continency, even although unwilling.

The clergy, however, when forbidden to marry, indemnified themselves by living in concubinage sometimes, as appears from a canon passed at Poitiers in 1000, resorting to strange expedients for the purpose of concealing their female companions; and they married in contempt of the prohibitions. Atto describes clergymen as openly living with meretriculoe a term which he would probably have applied to wives no less than to unmarried companions as making them the heads of their establishments, and bequeathing to them the money which had been gained from the holy oblations; thus diverting to harlots that which of right belonged to the poor. In consequence of these scandals, he says, many persons, to their own spiritual hurt, withheld their oblations; and the clergy, when called to account for their misconduct by bishops, had recourse to secular protectors, whose alliance enabled them to defy their ecclesiastical superiors. From the bishops downwards, it was common both in Germany and in Italy for the clergy to have wives, and that without any disguise; and the same was the case in Normandy, as well as in the independent church of Brittany. In order to judge fairly of such persons we must not regard them from the position of either the modern opponents or advocates of clerical celibacy. Living and holding office as they did under a law which forbade marriage, we cannot respect them for their violation of that law. Yet if they believed the prohibition to be merely a matter of ecclesiastical discipline, and not enforced by the Divine word, if they saw that the inexpediency of such discipline was abundantly proved by experience, and if they found that those who were charged with the maintenance of the canons were willing to tolerate a breach of them in this respect, provided that it were managed without any offence to public decency, we may suppose that the clergy in question were reasonably justified to their own consciences. We may hold them excusable, if we cannot join with those who would admire them as heroic or enlightened.

The acts of Dunstan in England have been already related, and we have seen that his reformation, which for the time appeared to be triumphant, was not of any long continuance at least in its full extent. Reformers in other quarters failed to obtain even a temporary success. Among the most remarkable of these was Ratherius, a native of Liege, who acquired great fame for learning, eloquence, and strictness of life, and in 931 was advanced to the see of Verona by Hugh the Great of Provence, in fulfilment of a promise which Hugh was disposed to evade, but which was enforced by the authority of the pope.

Ratherius represents the Italian clergy in the darkest colours : they were, he says, so grossly ignorant that many of them did not know the Apostles’ creed, while some were anthropomorphites; and their obstinate unwillingness to chant the Athanasian creed suggested suspicions of Arianism. They were stained by all manner of vices; the bishops were altogether secular in their manners, and even in their dress limiting, hawking, gaming, delighting in the company of jesters and dancing-girls. They were luxurious in their food and drink; they were utterly careless of their duties, and set the church's laws at nought; instead of dividing their revenues according to the canons, they appropriated all to themselves, so that the poor were robbed, and churches, which had suffered from the negligence of bishops or from the violence of pagans, lay in ruins; they despised all who showed the fear of God; they took pride in splendid furniture and equipages, without any thought of Him who was laid in a manger and rode on an ass. Unhappily Ratherius was altogether wanting in the prudence which would have been requisite for dealing with such persons; his intemperate zeal, his personal assumption, his passionate impatience of opposition, his abusive language and unmeasured severity in reproof alienated the clergy, laity, and monks, with whom he had at first been popular, while his independent spirit and his determination to maintain the rights of his see provoked the licentious and cruel king. Hugh, on a charge of treason, imprisoned him at Pavia for two years and a half, while the bishopric was given to Manasses, archbishop of Arles, who also held the sees of Trent and Mantua, and had the effrontery to justify his pluralities by alleging that St. Peter had been bishop of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. In 939, Hugh for reasons of policy restored Ratherius; but the bishop was again obliged to leave his see, and his impracticable character provoked his expulsion or compelled his withdrawal from other preferments which he successively obtained from Liege, to which he had been promoted by the influence of Bruno of Cologne; in a third time from Verona, which he had recovered through the patronage of Otho the Great, by the ejection of a more popular bishop (A.D. 963); from the abbey of St. Amand, which he is said to have purchased of king Lothair; from the abbey of Haumont, and from that of Lobach or Lobbes, on the Sambre, the place of his education, which he had held with the bishopric of Liege, and of which in his latter days he again became the head through the expulsion of his predecessor Folcuin. Ratherius died at Namur, in 974, at the age of 82. He was throughout a vehement opponent of marriage among the clergy; yet he seems at last to have been convinced that the attempt was hopeless, and to have contented himself with endeavouring to preserve the hierarchy from becoming hereditary, by desiring that the married priests should choose laymen as husbands for their daughters, and should not allow their sons to become clerks.

It was not on religious grounds only that the celibacy of the clergy was enforced; for the possessions of the church were endangered by the opposite practice. The married clergy often contrived to make their livings hereditary; or they alienated ecclesiastical property to their children, whom, in order to render such alienations secure, they placed under vassalage to some powerful layman. Clergymen of servile birth were careful to choose women of free condition for wives and concubines, so as to ensure for their offspring the privileges of freemen, by virtue of the legal principle that the child must follow the condition of the mother. Benedict VIII, at a council held at Pavia in 1022, inveighed with great severity against those who by such means impoverished the church. “Let the sons of clergy be null”, he says; “and especially the sons of such clerks as belong to the family (i. e. to the serfs) of the church. Yea, let them let them, I say, I say they shall, be null”. They shall neither follow their mother in freedom nor their father in inheritance; they shall be serfs of the church for ever, whether born of wives or of concubines; they may in mercy be allowed to serve as, Nethinims hewers of wood and drawers of water, but must not aspire to any higher ministry. Their mothers shall be driven out, and shall be compelled to leave behind them all that they have gotten from the church. The pope's address to the council is followed by canons which enact that no member of the clergy shall have a wife or a concubin; that the children of clerks shall be condemned to hopeless servitude; and that no judge shall, under pain of anathema, promise them freedom or the power of inheriting; and these canons were confirmed by the authority of the emperor Henry II.

Some canons forbade, not only that any one should give his daughter in marriage to a clerk, but that any lay person should intermarry with the child of a clerk; and there were canons which forbade the ordination, of the sons of clergymen, as being an “accursed seed”. In this respect, however, the humaner principle that the innocent should not suffer for the sins of their parents appears to have more generally prevailed.

Dearly as the benefit was bought, we must not overlook one great good which resulted from the enforcement of celibacy that to this is chiefly to be ascribed the preservation of the clergy during the middle ages from becoming, like other classes whose dignity had at first been personal and official, a hereditary caste.

 

Monasticism.

 

During the earlier part of this period, the monastic life was on the decline. Some of the abuses which had arisen among the Greeks may be gathered from the canons of the synod which was held at Constantinople in 861, and which is known as the “First and Second”. It is there stated that many persons professed to consecrate their substance by founding monasteries, yet contrived to make such foundations a source of profit; and that some assumed the monastic habit with the view of gaining a reputation for piety, but lived with the freedom of laymen. In order to guard against these evils, it is enacted that no monastery shall be built without leave of the bishop in whose diocese it is situated, and that no one shall be admitted to the monastic profession until after a noviciate of three years. Another canon orders that bishops shall not dilapidate the property of their sees for the purpose of founding monasteries.

In the west, the reform undertaken by Louis the Pious soon passed away. The practice of impropriating the revenues of abbeys (an abuse which was also largely practised in the eastern church) increased. Abbacies were granted by French kings to laymen as hereditary possessions; some of them were even assigned to queens or other ladies. Kings took the revenues of abbeys into their own hands, and bishops were not slow to imitate the example; thus Hatto of Mayence, who died in 912, annexed to his archiepiscopal dignity the abbacies of twelve monasteries, and some abbacies were fixedly attached to certain sees.

The want of due superintendence which arose from this practice combined with other causes to produce a great decay of monastic discipline. Such was this decay in France that the monks are said to have been generally unacquainted with the rule of St. Benedict, and even ignorant whether they were bound by any rule whatever. In many monasteries the abbots openly lived with wives or concubines

The council of Trosley, in 909, laments the general corruption. Some monasteries, it is said, have been burnt or destroyed by pagans, some have been plundered of their property, and those of which the traces remain observe no form of a regular institute. They have no proper heads; the manner of life is disorderly; some monks desert their profession and employ themselves in worldly business; as the fine gold becomes dim without the workman's care, so the monastic institution goes to ruin for want of regular abbots. Lay abbots with their wives and children, with their soldiers and their dogs, occupy the cloisters of monks, of canons, and of nuns; they take it on themselves to give directions as to a mode of life with which they are altogether unacquainted, and the inmates of monasteries cast off all regard for rule as to dress and diet. It is the predicted sign, the abomination of desolation standing in the place where it ought not. About the same time we are told that John, afterwards abbot of Gorze, on resolving to become a monk, could not find any monastery north of the Alps, and hardly any one in Italy, where the regular discipline was observed.

Soon after this a reformation was set on foot in various quarters. The lead was taken by Berno, abbot of Beaume, and founder and abbot of Gigni. He had already established a reform in these two societies, when in 912 he was invited to Cluny by William, duke of Auvergne or Upper Aquitaine, who desired him to choose a spot within the dukedom for the foundation of a monastery; and Berno made choice of Cluny itself. A society of canons had been founded there in the preceding century, but the buildings were then occupied by the duke's hunting establishment. In his “testament”, or charter, William declares that he gives the estate for the foundation of a monastery in honour of St. Peter and St. Paul; first, for the love of God, then for the souls of the late king Odo, of his own wife, kindred, and friends, for the good of the catholic faith, and of all orthodox Christians in times past, present, or to come. Berno is to be the first abbot, and after his death the monks are to enjoy the uncontrolled election of their superior. They are to be exempt from all interference of the founder and his family, of the king's majesty, and of every other earthly power. The duke solemnly charges all popes, bishops, and secular princes to respect their property; he prays the two apostles and the pope to take the monastery under their special protection, and imprecates curses on any one who shall invade it.

Berno, like St. Benedict and other monastic founders, began with a company of twelve monks. The institutions of Cluny excited emulation, and other monasteries were committed to the abbot for reform. In 927, Berno was succeeded by his disciple Odo, whose fame so much eclipsed that of his master that even some members of the Cluniac order have spoken of Odo as their founder. To the rule of St. Benedict Odo added many minute observances. Thus the monks were required at the end of meals to gather up and consume all the crumbs of their bread. There was at first a disposition to evade this regulation; but when a dying monk exclaimed in horror that he saw the devil holding up in accusation against him a bag of crumbs which he had been unwilling to swallow, the brethren were terrified into obedience. Periods of strict silence were enforced; and stories are told of the inconveniences to which the Cluniacs submitted rather than break this rule as that one allowed his horse to be stolen, and that two suffered themselves to be carried off prisoners by the Northmen. For their communications among themselves at such times a code of signals was established, which the novices were obliged to learn. The monks were bled five times a year, and it is doubtful whether Odo permitted the use of any medical treatment except bleeding and the application of cautery. When two of his monks entreated him to allow them some medicine, he consented, but told them in anger that they would never recover; and the result justified his foresight, if not his humanity.

The fame of Cluny spread. Odo, at the request of popes, thrice visited Italy for the purpose of reconciling princes, and he availed himself of these opportunities to introduce his reforms in that country. Under his successor, Aymard, no fewer than 278 charters, either bestowing or confirming gifts, attest the wealth which was attracted to the monastery by the spectacle which it exhibited of revived austerity. A series of conspicuous saints maintained and advanced the renown of the Cluniacs. Majolus, or Mayeul, who, in consequence of Aymard’s having lost his sight, was appointed his coadjutor in 948, and became sole abbot in 965, had before joining the congregation refused the archbishopric of Besançon, and on the death of Benedict VI, in 974, he declined the popedom. The fifth abbot, Odilo, was equal to any of his predecessors in reputation and in influence. Popes treated him as an equal; kings and emperors sought his friendship and were guided by his advice; bishops repaired to Cluny, to place themselves as simple monks under his governments His contemporary Fulbert of Chartres styles him “the archangel of the monks”; another contemporary, the notorious Adalbero of Laon, in a satirical poem calls him “King Odilo of Cluny”. He was believed to have the power of miracles, and an extraordinary efficacy was ascribed to his prayers. Benedict VIII, it is said, appeared to John bishop of Porto, telling him that he was suffering torments, but that he could be delivered by the prayers of Odilo. The abbot, on being informed of this, engaged in the charitable work, and after a time the release of the pope was shown in a vision to one of the monks of Cluny. In days when the popes were far from saintly, the people looked away from them to the great head of the monastic society, whose position was such that he refused to exchange it for an archbishopric, or even for St. Peter's chair.

The reform begun at Cluny extended far and wide. When a revival of the true monastic asceticism had been displayed in any province, a regard for public opinion and for self-preservation urged the imitation of it on the other communities of the neighborhood. A general zeal for monachism sprang up; multitudes of men became monks, many offered their children, some even devoted themselves and their posterity as serfs to a monastery, in the hope of a reward in heaven. Princes or bishops often employed the Cluniacs in carrying out a forcible reformation; many monasteries of their own accord conformed to the Cluniac rule, and placed themselves in connexion with the mother society.

The nature of this connexion was various; in some cases, the affiliated monastery was in strict subjection, so that it not only looked to Cluny for its abbots and priors, but did not even receive a novice without a reference to the “archabbot”; in other cases the lesser monastery enjoyed independence in the administration of its own concerns and in the choice of its superiors, while it acknowledged the great abbot as its chief, and regarded him as invested with a supreme authority and authorised to watch over its discipline. Thus was formed the “Congregation of Cluny”, the first example in the west (if we except the peculiar system of St. Columba) of an organisation which had been introduced into Egypt by Pachomius in the earliest age of monasticism. The work of establishing this organisation was accomplished by the sixth abbot, Hugh, who succeeded Odilo at the age of twenty-five in 1049, and governed the society for sixty years.

The number of monasteries connected with Cluny, in France, in Germany, in Italy, in England, and in Spain, amounted by the end of the twelfth century to two thousand.

Another famous society was founded by Romuald, a nobleman descended from the ducal family of Ravenna. Romuald’s early life was dissolute, but at the age of twenty he was suddenly reclaimed from it. His father, Sergius, had been engaged in a dispute as to some property with a kinsman. The two met, each at the head of his partisans, and Sergius slew his opponent. Romuald, who had been concerned in the fray, although he had not himself shed blood, was so much shocked by the result, that he entered the monastery of St. Apollinaris with the intention of doing penance for forty days, and while there, he was determined, by visions in which the patron saint of the house appeared to him, to embrace the monastic life.

After having spent three years in the monastery, he placed himself under the tuition of a hermit named Marinus, who was in the habit of daily reciting the whole psalter, saying thirty psalms under one tree and forty under another. Romuald was required to respond in these exercises, and whenever he failed (as often happened from his slowness in reading), he received a blow from the hermit's staff. By the frequent repetition of this, he lost the hearing of his left ear, whereupon he humbly begged that the chastisement might be transferred to the right ear. Although he used afterwards to relate the story of his training as a matter of amusement, his own piety savoured too much of his eccentric master's zeal.

When living on the borders of Spain as a hermit, he heard that his father, who had withdrawn into a monastery, was inclined to return to the world, and he resolved to prevent such a step. The people of the neighborhood, on learning that he was about to leave them, were unwilling to lose so holy a man, and, by a strange working of superstition, laid a plan for murdering him, in order that they might possess his relics. Romuald escaped by feigning madness, and made his way barefoot to Ravenna, where he assailed his father with reproaches and blows, fastened his feet in stocks, and loaded him with chains until the old man was brought to a better sense of the monastic duty of perseverance.

Throughout his life Romuald was involved in a succession of troubles with monks in various places, on whom he attempted to force a reform with too great violence and rigour. Among his own ascetic performances, it is related that he was once silent for seven years.

Stirred to emulation by the labours of his friend Bruno or Boniface, who had been martyred by the heathens of Prussia, he undertook a mission to Hungary. On the way he fell ill, and thought of returning, whereupon he suddenly recovered; but as often as he resumed his intention of proceeding, his sickness again attacked him. At length he yielded to what he supposed to be a providential intimation that the work was not for him; but fifteen of his companions went on, and labored in Hungary with good effect.

Romuald’s great work was the foundation of Camaldoli among the Apennines in the year 1018. He began by building five cells and an oratory. The inmates were to live as hermits, and were not to associate together except for worship. Their duties as to devotion, silence, and diet, were very rigid; but Romuald, although he often passed days in entire abstinence, would not allow his disciples to attempt a like austerity; they must, he said, eat every day, and always be hungry. A vision of angels ascending Jacob’s ladder induced him to prescribe a white dress, whereas that of the Benedictines was black. Romuald died in 1027, at the age of a hundred and twenty. Rudolf who was “general” of the Camaldolese from 1082, mitigated the severity of the rule, and added to the hermits an institution of coenobites, whose habits gradually became very different from those of the original foundation. These monks became an order, with monasteries affiliated to Camaldoli, but it did not spread to any great extent, although it has continued to the present day.

Another monastic reformer was John Gualbert, a Florentine of noble birth, whose conversion, like that of Romuald, arose out of one of the feuds which were characteristic of his age and country. Having been charged by his father to avenge the death of a kinsman, he met the murderer on Good Friday in a narrow pass near the bottom of the hill on which stands the monastery of St. Miniato, and was about to execute his vengeance; but when the guilty man threw himself from his horse and placed his arms in the form of a cross, as if expecting certain death, Gualbert was moved to spare him in reverence for the holy sign and for the solemn day. He then ascended the hill in order to pay his devotions in the monastic church, and while engaged in prayer, he saw a crucifix incline its head towards him, as if in acknowledgment of the mercy which he had shown. By this miraculous appearance, Gualbert was moved to become a monk, but his father, on hearing of his design, rushed to St. Miniato, assailed him with reproaches, and threatened to do mischief to the monastery. Gualbert, however, persevered in his resolution, and distinguished himself so much by his asceticism that ten years later his brethren wished to elect him abbot. But he declined the dignity, and soon after left the monastery in disgust at the election of a simoniacal abbot, according to some authorities, while others suppose that he withdrew out of a desire to avoid the distraction occasioned by crowds of visitors. After a sojourn at Camaldoli (where he learnt from Romuald’s institutions although the founder was already dead), Gualbert fixed himself at Vallombrosa, and there founded a society of hermits in 1039. To these coenobites were afterwards added, and the organisation of the order was completed by the institution of lay-brethren, whose business it was to practise handicrafts and to manage the secular affairs of the community, while by their labors the monks were enabled to devote themselves wholly to spiritual concerns. The rigour of the system was extreme; novices were obliged to undergo a year of severe probation, during which they were subjected to degrading employments, such as the keeping of swine, and daily cleaning out the pigsty with their bare hands; and Gualbert carried his hatred of luxury so far as to condemn the splendour of monastic buildings. His anger against offences is said to have been so violent that delinquents “supposed heaven and earth, and even God Himself, to be angry with them”; but to the penitent he displayed the tenderness of a mother. For himself he declined ordination, even to the degree of ostiary. He deviated from the Benedictine rule by attiring his monks in gray, but the colour was afterwards changed to brown, and eventually to black. Gualbert built and reformed many monasteries, and in obedience to pope Alexander II he reluctantly became head of the order which he had founded. His death took place in 1093.

In Germany the attempts at monastic reform met with much stubborn resistance. The monks sometimes deserted their house in a body, as when Godehard, afterwards bishop of Hildesheim, attempted to improve Hersfeld, although he at length succeeded in bringing them back. Sometimes they rose in rebellion against their reforming abbots, beat them, blinded them, or even attempted their lives. The general feeling of his class is expressed by Widukrod of Corbey, who gravely tells us that a “grievous persecution” of the monks arose about the year 945, in consequence of some bishops having said that they would rather have a cloister occupied by a few inmates of saintly life than by many careless ones, a saving which the chronicler meets by citing the parable of the tares. Yet in Germany some improvement was at length effected. Among the agents of this improvement William abbot of Hirschau is especially eminent. He raised the number of his monks from fifteen to a hundred and fifty, founded some new monasteries, reformed more than a hundred, and in 1069 formed the monks into a congregation after the pattern of Cluny, adopting the system of lay-brethren from Vallombrosa. The virtues of William were not limited to devotion, purity of life, and rigour of discipline; he is celebrated for his gentleness to all men, for his charity to the poor, for the largeness of his hospitality, for his cheerful and kindly behaviour, for his encouragement of arts and learning. He provided carefully for the transcription of the Bible and of other useful books, and, instead of locking them up in the library of his abbey, endeavoured to circulate, them by presenting copies to members of other religious houses. The sciences included in the Quadrivium, especially music and mathematics, were sedulously cultivated at Hirschau, and under William the monks were distinguished for their skill in all that relates to the ornament of churches in building, sculpture, painting, carving of wood, and working in metals.

In the course of these reforms, the lay impropriations were very generally got rid of. Many of the holders spontaneously resigned their claims; others were constrained by princes to do so, and new grants of like kind were sparingly made. The practice, however, was not extinct, and monasteries, as we have seen, suffered grievously from the exactions of the advocates whose duty it was to protect them. Kings often interfered in their affairs, and the privileges of free election which monastic bodies had received, or even purchased, from bishops, from princes, and from popes, were found in practice to be utterly unavailing against a royal nomination of an abbot.

The change of dynasty in France had a very favourable effect for monasteries. Hugh Capet, before his elevation to the throne, had held the abbacies of St. Denys and St. Germain, and was styled abbot-count. But from a wish, probably, to secure to himself the interest of the monks, he resigned his abbacies, restored to the monastic communities the power of choosing their superiors, and on his deathbed charged his son Robert to refrain from alienating monastic property, and from interfering with the right of free election.

The power of bishops over monasteries was diminished during this period. Any impression which the decay of monastic discipline might have made on the popular mind in favor of episcopal superintendence was neutralised by the sight of the disorders which prevailed among the bishops themselves, and by the fact that many of them, by impropriating the revenues of abbacies, contributed largely to the evils in question. And when the monks had been restored to reputation and influence by the reforms of the tenth century, they began to set up claims against the episcopal authority. Abbo of Fleury led the way by refusing to make the customary profession of obedience to his diocesan, the bishop of Orleans. A spirit of strong hostility arose between the two classes, and was signally displayed when a council at St. Denys, in 997, proposed to transfer to the parochial clergy the tithes which were held by monastic bodies, as well as those which were in the hands of laymen. The monks of St. Denys rose in tumult, and with the aid of the populace dispersed the assembled prelates; the president of the council, Siguin archbishop of Sens, as he fled, was pelted with filth, was struck between the shoulders with an axe, and almost killed. Abbo, as the leader of the monastic opposition, was charged with having instigated the rioters; and, although he vindicated himself in a letter addressed to king Hugh and his son, it is evident, from the relish with which his biographer relates the flight of the bishops, that the monastic party were not unwilling to see their opponents discomfited by such means. Abbo went to Rome for the assertion of the monastic privileges, and afterwards, when sent on a mission as to the question of the archbishopric of Reims, he obtained from Gregory V a grant that the bishop of Orleans should not visit the monastery of Fleury except by invitation from the abbot.

Monastic communities were naturally disposed to connect themselves immediately with the papal see since the pope was the only power to which they could appeal against bishops and princes. Some of them, as that of Cluny, were placed by their founders under the special protection of the pope, and a small acknowledgment was paid to Rome in token of such connexion. Yet the exemption which monasteries thus obtained from the control of their diocesan bishops was not as yet intended to debar the bishop from exercising his ordinary right of mural oversight, but to secure the monks against abuses of the episcopal power against invasion of their property, interference in the choice of abbots, unfair exactions, or needless and costly visitations. And such papal grants as affected to confer privileges of greater extent were set aside. Sylvester II acknowledged, in a question as to a monastery at Perugia, that a monastic body could not transfer itself to the pope’s immediate jurisdiction without the consent of the diocesan. The contest between the abbey of Fleury and its diocesans was not concluded by the grant bestowed on Abbo; for some years later we find John XVII complaining to king Robert that the archbishop of Sens and the bishop of Orleans treated the apostolical privileges with contempt, and had even ordered Gauzelin, the successor of Abbo, to throw them into the fire; while Fulbert, bishop of Chartres, who endeavoured to act as a mediator, declares that it was impossible for the abbot to escape from his duty of canonical obedience. Gregory V failed in an attempt to exempt Hirschau from the authority of the bishop of Constance; and when a later pope, John XVIII, granted the abbot of Hirschau a licence to say mass in the episcopal habit (for this was one of the forms in which the assumption of abbots displayed itself) the bishop complained to Conrad the Salic. Pressed at once by the emperor and by the bishop, the abbot was obliged to give up to his diocesan the episcopal staff and sandals which he had received from the pope, and these insignia were publicly burnt at the next diocesan synod. In 1025, at the synod of Anse (near Lyons) a complaint was made by the bishop of Macon, within whose diocese Cluny was situated, that the archbishop of Vienne had officiated at consecrations and ordinations in the abbey. The abbot, Odilo, produced a privilege from the pope, authorising the brotherhood to invite any bishop whom they might choose for the performance of such offices; but the council declared that no privilege could be valid against the ancient canons which invested bishops with jurisdiction over the monasteries within their dioceses. As the question continued to be disputed, Alexander II, in 1063, committed the investigation of it to cardinal Peter Damiani, who (as might have been expected from his monastic character and prejudices) gave a decision in favour of the abbot; and the pope renewed the grant, allowing the Cluniacs to call in any other bishop than their diocesan, and ordering that no bishop should lay them under interdict or excommunication. Although the time was not yet ripe for the full display of monastic independence, the course of things was rapidly tending in that direction.

The continued popularity of monachism is shown, among other instances, by the means which secular persons took to connect themselves with it. Carrying out the principle of the brotherhoods which from the sixth century had been formed for the purpose of commending their deceased members to the Divine mercy by prayers and masses, it became usual to seek enrolment as confraters of a monastery, and by such a connection the confrater was entitled to expect spiritual benefits from the prayers of the society. In this manner Conrad I was associated with St. Gall, and Henry II with Cluny. Another practice, which has been traced by some as high as the seventh century, was that of putting on the monastic habit in dangerous sickness, a new form, apparently, of the obligation to penance which had been more anciently undertaken in such circumstances. If one who had taken the habit, on recovering, returned to secular life, his relapse was disapproved; but it was sometimes found that even the monastic habit, where it was retained, was no security against a return to the sins of the earlier life.

Monasteries or monastic orders were often connected with each other by the bond of mutual intercession and by mutual commemoration of deceased brethren; and the deaths of abbots or of other distinguished members in any monastery were in such cases announced to the other houses of the association by circulars which were conveyed by special messengers.

In the eleventh century, then, monasticism was again in the fullness of its influence. The scandals of its past decay were more than retrieved by the frequent and widely extended reformations which had taken place each of them displaying in freshness and fervour a zeal and a rigour which for the time captivated the minds of men, and forbade them to admit the thought that that which was now so pure might itself also in time decline.

 

Rites and Usages.
 

The ninth century saw the rise of a class of ritualists, who wrote commentaries on the services of the church. The first of them was Amalhart or Amalarius, a chorepiscopus of Metz (already mentioned in the history of the predestinarian controversy), who about 820 composed a treatise “On the Offices of the Church”, in which he applied to these the system of mystical torture which had long been exercised on Holy Scripture. All the incidents of Divine service, every attitude and gesture, the dresses of the clergy, the ornaments of the church, the sacred seasons and festivals, were expounded as pregnant with symbolical meanings. Raban Maur and Walafrid Strabo, abbot of Reichenau, followed with liturgical writings in a similar style before the middle of the century; but another eminent writer of the time, Agobard, had taken a strongly different line. Being offended by the mass of irrelevant matter which he found in the service-books of the church of Lyons, he ejected from them all hymns and anthems but such as were taken from Scripture. For this he was censured by Amalarius in a book "On the Order of the Antiphonary"; and he replied in tracts which, with much display of indignation against his opponent, maintain the principle on which his liturgical reforms had been executed. The archbishop declares the pieces which he had expunged to be “not only unfit and superfluous, but even profane and heretical”; he denounces the practice of devoting excessive attention to music, while the study of Scripture is neglected a practice, he says, which puffs up clerks who know nothing but music with a conceit of their accomplishments; and, when Amalarius published his work on the Divine Offices, Agobard not only reprobated the idle character of his comments, but charged him with errors in doctrine. At a later time, Florus, master of the cathedral school at Lyons, who had been opposed to Amalarius in the case of Gottschalk, assailed him with much asperity for his ritual system, and cited him before two councils, the second of which, on finding that his mystical theories rested on no better a foundation than his own fancy, pronounced them to be dangerous. But the style of exposition which Amalarius introduced was followed by the ritualists of the middle ages; it has been kept up in the Roman church; and attempts (which, however, can hardly be regarded as serious) have even been made to revive it in the English church of our own day.

In the ninth century were formed some collections of lives of saints, arranged according to the order of the calendar, and bearing the title of Martyrologies. Among the compilers of these were Florus, Ado, archbishop of Vienne, Usuard, a monk of St. German's, at Paris, and Notker of St. Gall. Biographies of individual saints were produced in vast numbers. Older lives were re-written; new legends were composed, as substitutes for the more authentic records which had perished in the ravages of the Northmen; many narratives, with the holy men and women who were the subjects of them, sprang from the invention of the monks. Not only was there much likeness of detail between stories of this kind, but even the whole accounts of some saints were identical in everything except the names. Few men in those days shared the scruples of Letald, a monk of Mici, who, in the preface to a biography, blames the practice of attempting by falsehoods to enhance the glory of the saints, and says that, if the saints themselves had been followers of lies, they could never have reached their perfection of holiness.

From the time when St. Dionysius, the martyr of Paris, was identified with the Areopagite, other churches endeavored to invest their founders with a like venerable character. Among them was the church of Limoges, which, as its first bishop, Martial, had been reckoned by Gregory of Tours with the companions of Dionysius in the third century, now referred him, as well as the founder of the see of Paris, to the apostolic age. At a council held at Limoges in 1023, a question arose as to the proper designation of the saint : the bishop, Jordan, was for styling him confessor, but Hugh, abbot of St. Martial’s, insisted that his patron was entitled to be called apostle, as having been one of the seventy disciples. Among the most strenuous advocates of the abbot's view was the chronicler Ademar, who had received his education in the monastery of St. Martial : in a vehement letter on the subject, he professes his belief in a legendary life of the saint, as being of apostolic antiquity, and no less authentic than the four Gospels; and he strongly declares that no mortal pope can deprive of the apostolical dignity one whom St. Peter himself reveres as a brother apostle. The matter was taken up by councils at Poitiers and at Paris; whosoever should refuse the title of apostle to St. Martial was branded as being like the Ebionites, who, out of enmity against St. Paul, limited the number of apostles to the original twelve; and John XVIII, on being appealed to, declared that it would be madness to question the saint's right to a name which was given not only to the companions of the first apostles, but to St. Gregory for the conversion of England, and to others for their eminent labours as missionaries. The apostolic dignity of Martial, which raised him above martyrs, to whom as a confessor he would have been inferior, was confirmed by councils at Bourges and at Limoges in 1031, and bishop Jordan acquiesced in the decision.

The number of saints had increased by degrees. Charlemagne, as we have seen, found it necessary to forbid the reception of any but such as were duly accredited; but the multiplication went on, the bishops being the authorities by whom the title of sanctity was conferred. In the end of the tenth century, a new practice was introduced. At a Roman council, held in 993, Ludolf, bishop of Augsburg, presented a memoir of Ulric, one of his predecessors who had died twenty years before, and referred it to the judgment of the bishops who were present, as being an assembly guided by the Holy Spirit. The sanctity of Ulric was attested by stories of miracles, wrought both in his lifetime and after death; and the pope, John XV, with the council, ordered his memory should be venerated as that of a saint, in words which, while they refer all holiness and religious honour to the Saviour, yet contain the dangerous error of interposing his saints as mediators between Him and mankind.

This was the first authentic instance in which canonisation (i.e. the insertion of a name in the canon or lists of saints) was conferred by the decree of a pope. The effect of such a decree was to entitle the saint to reverence throughout the whole of Western Christendom, whereas the honor bestowed by bishops or provincial councils was only local. But the pope did not as yet claim an exclusive right; metropolitans continued to canonise, sometimes with the consent of popes, sometimes by their own sole authority, until Alexander III, in 1170, declared that, "even although miracles be done by one, it is not lawful to reverence him as a saint without the sanction of the Roman church". Yet, in whatever hands the formal sanction might be lodged, the character of saintship was mainly conferred by the people. When a man of reputed holiness died, miracles began to be wrought or imagined, an altar was built over the grave, and an enthusiasm was speedily raised which easily made out a case for canonisation. Bishops and popes felt the expediency of complying with the popular feeling, and thus the catalogue of saints was continually swelled by fresh additions.

Stories of miracles done by the saints abounded, and they show how the belief in such interpositions, as probable in every variety of occasions and circumstances, was likely to place these lower mediators in the way of the Author of all miracles. The oppressiveness of too frequent miracles, and the bad effects which the possession of wonder-working relics produced on monks, were felt by many abbots, and some of them, like Hildulf a of Moyen-Moutier in an earlier time, took means to deliver their monasteries from such dangerous privileges.

The honours paid to the blessed Virgin were continually advancing to a greater height. The most extravagant language was used respecting her, and was addressed to her. Peter Damiani speaks of her as “deified”, as “exalted to the throne of God the Father, and placed in the seat of the very Trinity”. “To thee”, he says, “is given all power in heaven and in earth; nothing is impossible to thee, to whom it is possible even to raise again the desperate to the hope of bliss. For thou approachest the golden altar of man’s reconciliation, not only asking but commanding; as a mistress, not as a handmaid”. He revels in the mystical language of the Canticles, which he interprets as a song in celebration of her nuptials with the Almighty Father. Saturday was regarded as especially consecrated to the Virgin, and offices of prayer to her were framed. The Ave, or angelic salutation, became an ordinary part of devotion, and traces are found of what was afterwards styled the Rosary the repetition of a certain number of prayers (as the Paternoster fifteen times, and the Ave a hundred and fifty times) in her honour. New titles were invented for her; thus Odo of Cluny styled her “mother of mercy”. The newly converted Hungarians were taught by a Venetian, on whom king Stephen had bestowed a bishopric, to call her “lady” or “mistress”, and they were placed under her special protection as “the family of St. Mary”.

The festival of All Saints, which had been instituted at Rome in the eighth century, and had been already known in England, was in 835 extended to France, Germany, and Spain, by Gregory IV. In the end of the tenth century a new celebration was annexed to it. A French pilgrim, it is said, in returning from Jerusalem, was cast on a little island of the Mediterranean, where he met with a hermit who told him that the souls of sinners were tormented in the volcanic fires of the island, and that the devils might often be heard howling with rage because their prey was rescued from them by the prayers and alms of the pious, and especially of the monks of Cluny. On reaching his own country, the pilgrim, in compliance with the hermit's solemn adjuration, reported this to abbot Odilo, who in 998 appointed the morrow of All Saints to be solemnly observed at Cluny for the repose of all faithful souls, with psalmody, masses, and a copious distribution of alms and refreshment to all poor persons who should be present. The celebration was early in the next century extended to the whole Cluniac order; and eventually a pope (it is not certain who) ordered its observance throughout the church.

The passion for relics was unabated, and was gratified by the “invention” (as it was somewhat ambiguously called) of many very remarkable articles. Among those discovered in France during the tenth century were one of our Lord's sandals at St. Julien in Anjou, part of the rod of Moses at Sens, and a head of St. John the Baptist (for more than one such head were shown) at St. Jean d'Angely. Vendome boasted the possession of one of the tears shed by our Lord over Lazarus, which had been caught by an angel, and given by him to St. Mary Magdalene. The discoveries extended far back into the Old Testament history; there were relics of Abraham and hairs of Noah's beard; for of any additional improbability arising from the greater remoteness of time the age was altogether insensible. These relics drew vast crowds of pilgrims, and became important sources of wealth to the monasteries or churches which possessed them. For the sake of such sacred objects, theft had always been reckoned venial; and now, as we have seen, the peasantry of Catalonia were even ready to murder St. Romuald in the hope of obtaining benefits from his remains.

The impostures connected with this superstition were numberless, and in some cases they were detected. Relics were sometimes tested by fire, as those found in the Arian churches on the conversion of Spain to orthodoxy had been. Radulf the Bald gives an account of a fellow who went about under different names, digging up bones and extolling them as relics of saints. At a place in the Alps he displayed in a portable shrine some fragments which he styled relics of a martyr, St. Just, and pretended to have discovered by the direction of an angel. A multitude of cures were wrought a proof, says the chronicler, that the devil can sometimes do miracles; and the people of the neighborhood flocked to the relics, “each one regretting that he had not some ailment of which he might seek to be healed”. The impostor grew into high favor with a marquis who had founded a monastery at Susa; and when a number of bishops had met for the consecration, the pretended relics, together with others, were placed in the church; but in the course of the following night, some monks who were watching saw a number of figures, black as Ethiops, arise out of the box and take to flight. Although, however, the fraud was thus miraculously discovered, we are told that the common people for a time adhered to their belief in the relic-monger. Nor were the dealers in relics the only persons who practised on the popular credulity in this respect; another class made it their trade to run about from one shrine to another, pretending to be cured by the miraculous virtue of the saints.

Contests sometimes arose as to the genuineness of relics. The monks of St. Emmeran, at Ratisbon, disputed with the great French abbey of St. Denys the possession of its patron’s body. The body of St. Gregory the Great was believed at once to bo in St. Peter's at Rome, and to have been secretly carried off to St. Medard's at Soissons; while Sens, Constance, and somewhat later Torres Novas in Portugal could each display his head. The monks of Monte Cassino denied the genuineness of the remains which had been translated to Fleury as those of St. Benedict, and that saint himself was said to have confirmed the denial by visions; Canterbury and Glastonbury had rival pretensions to St. Dunstan; and we have seen that both Gnesen and Prague claimed to possess the real body of St. Adalbert, the apostle of Prussia.

Pilgrimages were more frequent than ever. Rome was, as before, the chief resort, and the hardships of the way were sometimes enhanced by voluntary additions, such as that of walking barefoot. Compostella became another very famous place of pilgrimage from the time when the relics of St. James the Greater were supposed to be found there in 816. Many ventured to encounter the dangers of the long and toilsome journey to Jerusalem, where, from the ninth century, was displayed at Easter the miracle of the light produced without human hand “considering the place, the time, and the intention, probably the most offensive imposture to be found in the world”. This pilgrimage was often imposed as a penance; and the enthusiasm for voluntarily undertaking it was intensely excited by the approach of the thousandth year from the Saviour’s birth, and the general expectation of the end of the world. Beginning among the humblest of the people, the feeling gradually spread to the middle classes, and from them to the highest to bishops, counts, and marquises, to princes and noble ladies; to die amid the hallowed scenes of Palestine was regarded as an eminent blessing, as an object of eager aspiration; and, after the alarm of the world's end had passed away, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem still continued to be frequented. In 1010 the church of the Holy Sepulchre was destroyed by the caliph Hakem, a frantic tyrant, who invented a new religion, still professed by the Druses of Lebanon. It was believed that the caliph was instigated to this by some western Jews, who alarmed him by representing the dangers likely to result from the interest with which the Sepulchre was regarded by Christians; and the Jews of France and other countries paid heavily in blood and suffering for the suspicion. After the assassination of Hakem the caliphs resumed the former system of toleration. Hakem’s mother, a Christian, began the rebuilding of the church; increasing crowds of pilgrims flowed eastward, carrying with them gifts in aid of the work, and returning laden with relics; and the fashion continued to become more general, until in the last years of the century it produced the crusades.

 

ARCHITECTURE.

 

The beginning of the eleventh century was marked by an extraordinary activity in church-building. There had been little disposition to undertake such works while the expected end of all things forbade the hope of their endurance; but when the thousandth year was completed, the building of churches became a passion. It was not limited to the work of providing for necessity by the erection of new buildings or by enlargement of the old, nor even to the addition of embellishments; but churches which had in every way been found amply sufficient were destroyed in order that more costly structures might be raised in their stead. “It was”, says a chronicler, “as if the world were re-awaking, as if it everywhere threw away its old dress, and put on a white vesture of churches”. And the effect on the art of architecture was important. Charlemagne's great church at Aix had been copied (although not without the introduction of original features) from the Byzantine type, as exhibited at Ravenna, and after it many churches along the Rhine had displayed Byzantine characteristics, especially the surmounting cupola. St. Mark’s at Venice, a church of very oriental style, was built between 977 and 1071. But in general the ecclesiastical architecture of the west was Roman, and the plan of the basilica was preserved. The churches of the eleventh century maintain the continuity of Roman art, but have yet a new character of their own. It is no longer Roman art in debasement, but a style fresh and vigorously original, the solemn, massive, and enduring architecture which, in its various modifications, has been styled Romanesque, Lombard, or Norman.

It would appear that the art of staining glass, which afterwards became so important in the decoration of churches, was already invented, although the date of the invention is unknown. There has, indeed, been much confusion on this subject, through the mistaken assumption that passages which contain any mention of coloured windows must relate to the painting of figures on the glass, whereas the older descriptions of such windows in reality mean nothing more than the arrangement of pieces of coloured glass in variegated patterns. Perhaps the earliest distinct notice of stained glass is in Richer’s history, where we are told that, towards the end of the tenth century, Adalbert, archbishop of Reims, adorned his cathedral with windows "containing divers histories."

 

EXCOMMUNICATION AND ANATHEMA.

 

The system of Penance underwent some changes. Things which had been censured by councils in the earlier part of the ninth century became authorised before its end; thus the penitential books, proscribed (as we have seen) by the council of Châlons in 813, are named by Regino among the necessary furniture of a parish priest’s library, as to which the bishop is to inquire at his visitation. By means of these books any re-enactments of old canons, or any new canons which appeared to increase the severity of penance, were practically evaded. The rich could commute their penance for payments to churches for works of public utility, such as the building of bridges and making of roads, for alms to the poor, for liberation of slaves or redemption of captives, for the purchase of masses and psalms; while for the poorer classes the Penitentials provided such commutations as pilgrimages, recitations of psalms or other devotional exercises, visiting the sick and burying the dead. The system of vicarious penances, which has been already noticed as existing in England, was, with some varieties, practised in other countries also. Councils might and did enact that with the outward acts which were prescribed the right dispositions of the heart should be joined. But how were these to be secured or ascertained? how were the penitents to be preserved from the delusions which a formal prescription of external acts, as equivalent to repentance, could hardly fail to engender? And the dangers of such a system were the more serious, because, by a departure from the view taken in the early ages, penance was now supposed able not only to restore the offender to the church on earth, but to assure him of the divine forgiveness.

With a view of increasing the hold of church-discipline on the minds of men, a distinction was invented between excommunication and anathema, and the assistance of the secular power was called in to enhance by civil penalties the terror of these sentences. Excommunication was exclusion from the privileges of the church; the heavier doom of anathema placed the offender under a curse. The council of Pavia in 850 enacted that the excommunicate person should be incapable of holding any military office or any employment in the service of the state, and should be debarred from ordinary intercourse with Christians. But anathema inflicted further punishments; the culprit against whom it was pronounced could not be a party in ecclesiastical suits, he could not make or establish a will, he could not hold any property under the church, he could not even obtain justice in secular courts where an oath was required, because he was not admissible to swear. No priest would bless the marriage of such a person; the last sacraments were denied to him, and he was to be shut out from Christian burial, penalties which, if the sinner himself were unmoved by them, were likely to act powerfully on the minds of some who were connected with him, and often drew from these large offers of payment for the reconciliation which it was supposed that the church could bestow even after the offender had passed from the world. The forms of curse became more elaborately fearful, and tales are told of the effect which they took on the unhappy men against whom they were launched, causing them to die suddenly in their impiety, or to wither away under the tortures of long and hopeless disease.

There were, however, some for whom the disabilities annexed to anathema or excommunication had little terror. Emperors and kings, counts and dukes, were strong enough to get justice for themselves, although under a sentence which would have debarred meaner men from it : they could obtain the ministrations of religion from chaplains, in defiance of all ecclesiastical censures; they held their secular positions unaffected by the denunciations of the church. In order to bring such powerful offenders under control, the Interdict was devised a sentence which placed a whole district or kingdom under ban, closing the churches, silencing the bells, removing the outward tokens of religion, and denying its offices to the people, except in such a measure and with such circumstances as tended to impress the imagination with a deeper horror. The infliction of penalties which involved alike the innocent and the guilty had been disapproved in earlier days. The first known attempt at imposing an interdict, that of the younger Hincmar, was defeated by his metropolitan and by his brother-bishops; and the earliest certain instance in which a bishop actually enforced such a sentence was that of Alduin, bishop of Limoges, in 994. An interdict pronounced against a sovereign was expected to act on him not so much in a direct way as by exciting the minds of his subjects; but the terrors of its indirect action were found to be such as few of the boldest, or of those who were least sensible to spiritual impressions, would venture to provoke or to defy.

In the earlier part of the eleventh century, a remarkable attempt was made by the clergy of France to mitigate the violence and the discords of the time. Radulf the Bald dates its origin from 1033, when the promise of an abundant harvest, after three years of terrible famine, appeared likely to open men's minds to the religious impressions connected with the completion of a thousand years from the Saviour’s passion. But it would seem that the movement had really begun somewhat earlier, and that the subject had already been treated by councils, as by that of Limoges in 1031 the same which decreed the apostolic dignity of St. Martial.

With a view of putting an end to the feuds or private wars which had long wasted the population and the soil of France, it was proposed to bind men to the observance of peace; that they should abstain from wrong-doing and revenge, that every one should be able to go unarmed without fear of old enmities; that churches should shelter all but those who should be guilty of breaking the “peace of God”. At the council of Limoges it was ordered that, if the chiefs of the district refused to comply, it should be laid under an interdict; that during the interdict no one, with the exception of the clergy, beggars, strangers, and infants, should receive Christian burial; that the offices of religion should be performed as if by stealth; that the churches should be stripped of their ornaments, that no marriage should be celebrated, that mourning habits should be worn, that no wine should be drunk on Friday, and no flesh should be eaten on Saturday. When the movement became more general, a bishop professed to have received a letter from heaven, commanding the observance of the peace. Gerard, bishop of Cambray (the same who has been mentioned as having converted a party of heretics to the church) alone opposed the scheme, as he had opposed a somewhat similar project some years before. He maintained that it was an interference with matters which belonged to the state; that the exercise of arms was sanctioned by Scripture; that it was lawful to require the restoration of things taken by violence, and amends for bodily injuries; that the proposed fasts ought not to be enforced on all, inasmuch as men were neither alike able to bear them nor alike guilty so as to require such chastisement. The bishop's enemies, however, were able to misrepresent his conduct in such a manner that his flock rose against him as being an enemy to peace; and he found it advisable to withdraw his opposition. The people, it is said, were eager to accept the proposal, as if it had been a revelation from heaven, and from Aquitaine the movement spread into other provinces of France. A harvest equal to that of five years was gathered in; another and another fruitful season followed. But the enjoyment of plenty wore out the popular enthusiasm; violence and vice became more rife than ever and the decrees of councils were little heeded.

In 1038, Anno archbishop of Bourges, as if distrusting the efficacy of purely spiritual threats, assembled the bishops of his province, and agreed with them that an oath should be exacted from their people, by which every male above the age of fifteen should bind himself to wage implacable war against all robbers, oppressors, and enemies of holy church. The clergy were not exempted from the oath, but were to carry their sacred banners on the expeditions undertaken for the pacification of the country; and in consequence of this compact, many castles, which had been the strongholds of violence and tyranny, were destroyed, and ruffians, who had been a terror to their neighbours, were reduced to live peaceably. About the year 1041, a modified scheme was brought forward under the name of the “truce of God”. It was now proposed, not that an unbroken peace should be established, but that war, violence, and all demands of reparation should be suspended during Advent, Lent, and certain festival seasons, and also from the evening of Wednesday in each week to the dawn of the following Monday a time which included the whole interval from the Saviour’s betrayal to his resurrection. And in connection with this other decrees were passed for the protection of the weaker classes the clergy, monks, nuns, and women for securing the privilege of sanctuary, and for mitigating the injuries which were inflicted on the labours of husbandry, as that shepherds and their flocks should not be injured, that olive-trees should not be damaged, that agricultural tools should not be carried off, or, at least, should never be destroyed.

Henry I of Neustria refused to sanction this project, and it is said that, in punishment of his refusal, his dominions were visited by an extraordinary disease, a "fire from heaven", which was fatal to many of his subjects and crippled the limbs of others. But the truce, which found zealous and powerful advocates, such as Odilo of Cluny, was received throughout the rest of France and in other countries; and it became usual for the inhabitants of a diocese or a district to bind themselves by compact to the observance and to organise measures for the enforcement of it. The weekly period of rest was, however, too long to be generally adopted. A council held in 1047 at Elne, an episcopal city of the Spanish march, reduced it to the interval between the ninth hour on Saturday and the daybreak of Monday; and it appears thus abridged in the laws of Edward the Confessor. Yet at a later time we again find the longer weekly rest of four days enacted by councils; and it was in this form that the truce received for the first time the papal sanction from Urban II at Clermont, and was confirmed in the second and third councils of the Lateran. The frequent re-enactments of the truce would, if there were no other evidence, be enough to show that it was but irregularly observed. Yet, imperfect as was the operation of this measure, its effects were very beneficial in tending to check the lawlessness and disorder of the times by the influence of Christian humanity and mercy. “We must”, says a historian nowise favorable to the church of the middle ages, “regard it as the most glorious of the enterprises of the clergy, as that which most conduced to soften manners, to develope the sentiments of compassion among men without injury to the spirit of bravery, to supply a reasonable basis for the point of honor, to bestow on the people as much of peace and happiness as the condition of society would then admit, and, lastly, to multiply the population to such a degree as was able afterwards to supply the vast emigrations of the Crusades”.

 

Chivalry.
 

It was in these times that the institution of chivalry, so powerful in its influence on the middle ages, grew up, and at the end of the period embraced in this book the system was nearly complete

We have seen that during the distractions of France castles multiplied throughout the land; that each castle became an engine of aggression and defence, a centre of depredation. In this state of society every man’s hand was against every man; the lord of the castle lived within its walls, cut off from intercourse with his neighbors, and only sallying forth for war, for private feuds, or for plunder. Yet the isolation of the nobles was not without its good effects. Debarred from other equal society, the feudal lord was obliged to cultivate that of his wife and children; and hence resulted a peculiar development of the family life. The lady, who in her husband’s absence acted as the guardian of the castle, was invested with new responsibilities and a new dignity; while the training of youth occupied much of the time which might otherwise have hung heavily. The sons of vassals were sent to be educated under the roof of the superior, where they grew up together with his own sons; and thus a tie was formed which at once assured the lord of the fidelity of his vassals, and the vassals of their lord’s protection. The nobly-born youths were able, like the deacon in the church, to perform offices of service without degradation. In the evening hours they were admitted to the society of the ladies, and from such intercourse a general refinement of manners arose among the higher classes.

That among the Germans the admission of a young man to the rank of warriors was marked by a public investiture with arms, we know from the evidence of Tacitus; and the continuance of the custom after the Frankish conquest of Gaul is to be traced from time to time in the annals. This ancient national usage now acquired a new importance, and assumed a form which at once signified the admission of the youth to the order of knighthood, and symbolized the tie between the vassal and the superior. It was celebrated with religious ceremonies which nave it the character of a military ordination. The candidate, a son of the lord or one of his vassals, was stripped of his dress, was bathed as if in a baptism, was clothed afresh with garments of symbolical meaning; he watched his arms in the castle chapel; he confessed and communicated; his armour was put on, his weapons were blessed, an exhortation as to his duties was addressed to him; he solemnly vowed to serve God, to protect the ladies and the weak, to be faithful and humble, gentle, courteous, honourable, and disinterested. According to a practice which was common in attesting documents and the like, he received a blow in remembrance of his new obligations, and by this blow, for which a stroke of the sword was afterwards substituted, the ceremony was completed.

The nature of these ceremonies proves that the clergy had taken up the old Teutonic rite of initiation, and had converted it to purposes of religion and humanity; and this is no less evident from the engagements to which the knight was bound differing so widely as they did from the general character of the laity in the times when they were introduced. The warriors, whose rude force was naturally dangerous to the church and to social order, were to be enlisted in the service of both, and bound to it by solemn engagements. And poetry as well as religion soon threw itself around the new institution. The legends of saints, which for centuries had been the only popular literature, were now rivalled by lays and romances of knightly adventure; and the ideal embodied in these compositions “noble chivalry, courtesy, humanity, friendliness, hardiness, love, friendship” became the model which the knights aspired to imitate. The history of the ages in which chivalry prevailed shows indeed a state of things far unlike the pure and lofty precepts of the institution; yet, however the reality may have fallen short of the ideal, it was a great gain for civilisation that such a pattern should be established as authoritative that men should acknowledge a noble and elevating standard in their hearts, although their actual lives too commonly presented a sad and discreditable contrast to it.