READING HALLDOORS OF WISDOM |
HISTORY OF THE POPES FROM THE GREAT SCHISM TO THE SACK OF ROME
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I
THE RISE OF THE PAPAL POWER
The change that passed over Europe in the sixteenth
century was due to the development of new conceptions, political, intellectual,
and religious, which found their expression in a period of bitter conflict. The
state-system of Europe was remodeled, and the mediaeval ideal of a united
Christendom was replaced by a struggle of warring nationalities. The Papal
monarchy over the Western Church was attacked and overthrown. The traditional
basis of the ecclesiastical system was impugned, and in some countries
rejected, in favor of the authority of Scripture. The study of classical
antiquity engendered new forms of thought and created an enquiring criticism
which gave a new tendency to the mental activity of Europe.
The processes by which these results were achieved
were not isolated but influenced one another. However important each may be in
itself; it cannot be profitably studied when considered apart from the reaction
of the rest. The object of the following pages is to trace, within a limited
sphere, the working of the causes which brought about the change from mediaeval
to modern times. The history of the Papacy affords the widest field for such an
investigation; for the Papacy was a chief element in the political system and
was supreme over the ecclesiastical system of the Middle Ages, while round it
gathered much that was most characteristic of the changing intellectual life of
Europe.
The period which we propose to traverse may be defined
as that of the decline of the Papal monarchy over Western Europe. The abasement
of the Papacy by the Great Schism of the fourteenth century intensified Papal
aggression and wrought havoc in the organization of the Church. The schemes of
reform which consequently agitated Christendom showed a widespread desire for
change. Some of these movements were held to pass beyond reform to revolution, and
were consequently suppressed, while the plans of the conservative reformers
failed through national jealousies and want of statesmanship. After the failure
of these attempts at organic reform the chief European kingdoms redressed their
most crying grievances by separate legislation or by agreements with the Pope.
A reaction, that was skillfully used, restored the Papacy to much of its old
supremacy; but, instead of profiting by the lessons of adversity, the Papacy
only sought to minimize or abolish the concessions which had been wrung from
its weakness. Impelled by the growing feeling of nationality, it sought a firm
basis for itself as a political power in Italy, whereby it regained
prestige in Europe, and identified itself with the Italian mind at its most
fertile epoch. But by its close identification with Italy, the Papacy, both in
national and intellectual matters, drifted apart from Germany; and the result
was a Teutonic and national rebellion against the Papal monarchy—a rebellion
so far successful that it divided Europe into two opposing camps, and brought
to light differences of national character, of political aim and intellectual
ideas, which had grown up unnoticed till conflict forced them into conscious
expression.
Important as this period may be, it deals only with
one or two phases of the history of the Papacy. Before we trace the steps in
the decline of the Papal monarchy, it will be useful to recall briefly the
means by which it rose and the way in which it was interwoven with the state-system
of Europe.
The history of the early Church shows that even in
Apostolic times the Christian congregations felt a need of organization.
Deacons were chosen by popular election to provide for the due ministration of
Christian benevolence, and elders were appointed to be rulers and instructors
of the congregation. As the apostles passed away, the need of presidency over
meetings of the representatives of congregations developed the order of bishops
and led to the formation of districts within which their authority was
exercised. The political life which had been extinguished under the Roman
Imperial system began reviving in the organization of the Church, and the old
feeling of civic government found in the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs a
new field for its exercise. A line of separation was gradually drawn between
the clergy and the laity, and the settlement of controversies concerning the
Christian faith gave ample scope for the activity of the clerical order.
Frequent assemblies were held for the discussion of disputed points, and the
preeminence of the bishops of the chief cities was gradually established
over other bishops. The clergy claimed authority over the laity; the control of
the bishop over the inferior clergy grew more definite; and the bishop in turn
recognized the superiority of his metropolitan. In the third century the
Christian Churches formed a powerful and active confederacy with an organized
and graduated body of officials.
The State looked on this new power with suspicion,
which at times passed into persecution. Persecution only strengthened the
organization of the Church and brought into prominence the depth of its
influence. As soon as it became clear that, in spite of persecution,
Christianity had made good its claim to be ranked as a power amongst men, the
Empire turned from persecution to patronage. Constantine aimed at restoring the
Imperial power by removing its seat to a new capital, where it might rise above
the traditions of its past. In the new Rome by the Bosphorus the old memories
of freedom and of paganism were alike discarded. The gratitude of a Christian
people to a Christian Emperor, combined with the servile ideas of the East to
form a new foundation for the Imperial power on a ground cleared from those
restraints which the past history of the city of Rome seemed to impose on
claims to irresponsible sway. The plan of Constantine so far succeeded as to
erect a compact power in the East, which withstood for centuries the onslaughts
of the barbarian invaders who swept over Western Europe. But though Rome was
left widowed of her Imperial splendor, the memories of empire still hung around
her walls, and her barbarian conquerors bowed before the awe inspired by the
glories of her mighty past. In the rise of the Papacy on the spot left desolate
by the Empire, the mysterious power of the old city claimed the future as her
own by breathing her stern spirit of aggression into the power of love and
brotherhood which had begun to bind the world into a vaster system than even the
Roman Empire had created.
Moreover, in the East the Imperial system had no
intention of conferring on the new religion which it adopted a different
position from that held by the old referred religion which it had laid aside.
Christianity was still to be a State religion, and the Emperor was still to be
supreme. The internal development of Oriental Christianity strengthened these
Imperial claims. The subtlety of the Oriental mind busied itself with
speculations as to the exact relationships involved in the doctrine of the
Trinity, and the exact connection between the two natures of Christ. A feverish
passion for logical definition seized clergy and laity alike, and these
abstruse questions were argued with unseemly heat. Patriarchs hurried into rash
assertions, which calmer enquiry showed to be dangerous: and the patriarchates
of the East lost respect among the orthodox because their holders had been at
times associated with some shallow or over-hardy doctrine. As the struggles
waxed fiercer in the East, men’s eyes turned with greater reverence to the one
patriarch of the West, the Bishop of Rome, who was but slightly troubled by the
conflicts that rent asunder the Eastern Church. The practical tendency of the
Latin mind was comparatively free from the temptations to over-speculation
which beset the subtle Greek.
The barbarian settlements in the West called out a
missionary zeal which was concerned with enforcing the great moral principles
of religion on the consciences of men rather than attempting to commend its
details to their intelligence by acuteness of definition. The Western Church,
which recognized the precedence of the Bishop of Rome, enjoyed the blessings of
inward peace, and more and more frequently were questions referred from the
troubled East to the decision of the Roman bishop.
The precedence of the Bishop of Rome over other
bishops was a natural growth of the conditions of the times. The need of
organization was forced upon the Church by internal discords and the hardships
of stormy days: the traditions of organization were a bequest from the Imperial
system. It was natural that the Council of Sardica (A.D. 347) should entrust
Bishop Julius of Rome with the duty of receiving appeals from bishops who had
been condemned by synods, and ordering, if he thought fit, a fresh trial. It
was natural that the Council of Chalcedon (A.D. 451) should accept the letter
brought by the legates of Leo the Great as an orthodox settlement of the weary
contests about the union of the divine and human natures in the person of
Christ. The prestige of the Imperial city, combined with the integrity,
impartiality, and practical sagacity of its bishops, won for them a general
recognition of precedence.
The fall of the shadowy Empire of the West, and the
union of the Imperial power in the person of the ruler of Constantinople,
brought a fresh accession of dignity and importance to the Bishop of Rome. The
distant Emperor could exercise no real power over the West. The Ostrogothic
kingdom in Italy scarcely lasted beyond the life-time of its great founder,
Theodoric. The wars of Justinian only served to show how scanty were the
benefits of the Imperial rule. The invasion of the Lombards united all dwellers
in Italy in an endeavor to escape the lot of servitude and save their land from
barbarism. In this crisis it was found that the Imperial system had crumbled
away, and that the Church alone possessed a strong organization. In the decay
of the old municipal aristocracy the people of the towns gathered round their
bishops, whose sacred character inspired some respect in the barbarians, and
whose active charity lightened the calamities of their flocks.
In such a state of things Pope Gregory the Great (AD
590-604) raised the Papacy to a position of decisive eminence and makes the
marked out the course of its future policy. The piety of emperors and nobles
had conferred lands on the Roman Church, not only in Italy, but in Sicily,
Corsica, Gaul, and even in Asia and Africa, until the Bishop of Rome had become
the largest landholder in Italy. To defend his Italian lands against the
incursions of the Lombards was a course suggested to Gregory by self-interest;
to use the resources which came to him from abroad as a means of relieving the
distress of the suffering people in Rome and Southern Italy was a natural
prompting of his charity. In contrast to this, the distant Emperor was too
feeble to send any effective help against the Lombards, while the fiscal
oppression of his representatives added to the miseries of the starving people.
The practical wisdom, administrative capacity, and
Christian zeal of Gregory I led the people of Rome and the neighboring regions
to look upon the Pope as their head in temporal as well as in spiritual
matters. The Papacy became a national center to the Italians, and the attitude
of the Popes towards the Emperor showed a spirit of independence which rapidly
passed into antagonism and revolt.
Gregory I was not daunted by the difficulties nor
absorbed by the cares of his position at home. When he saw Christianity threatened
in Italy by the heathen Lombards, he boldly pursued a system of religious
colonization. While dangers were rife at Rome, a band of Roman missionaries
carried Christianity to the distant English, and in England first was founded a
Church which owed its existence to the zeal of the Roman bishop. Success beyond
all that he could have hoped for attended Gregory’s pious enterprise. The
English Church spread and flourished, a dutiful daughter of her mother-church
of Rome. England sent forth missionaries in her turn, and before the preaching
of Willibord and Winifred heathenism died away in Friesland, Franconia, and
Thuringia. Under the new name of Boniface, given him by Pope Gregory II,
Winifred, as Archbishop of Mainz, organized a German Church, subject to the
successor of S. Peter.
The course of events in the East also tended to
increase the importance of the See of Rome. The Muhammadan conquests destroyed
the Patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, which alone could boast of an
apostolical foundation. Only Constantinople remained as a rival to Rome; but
under the shadow of the Imperial despotism it was impossible for the Patriarch
of Constantinople to lay claim to spiritual independence. The settlement of
Islam in its eastern provinces involved the Empire in a desperate struggle for
existence. Henceforth its object no longer was to reassert its supremacy over
the West, but to hold its ground against watchful foes in the East. Italy could
hope for no help from the Emperor, and the Pope saw that a breach with the
Empire would give greater independence to his own position, and enable
him to seek new allies elsewhere.
An opportunity was not long in coming. The great
Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, in his endeavor to organize afresh the shattered
mechanism of the Imperial system, saw the need of rescuing Oriental
Christianity from an effeminate sentimentalism which sapped its strength. A
spirit of ecstatic and transient devotion had taken the place of a serious
sense of the hard duties of practical life. By ordering the restriction of
images to the purpose of architectural ornaments, Leo hoped to infuse into his
degenerate people some of the severe puritanism which marked the followers of
Mohammed. He hoped, moreover, by enforcing his decree, to assert the power of
the Emperor over the Church, and so to strengthen the Imperial authority. In
the East his edict met with serious opposition; in the West it was regarded as
a needless and unauthorized interference of the Imperial power in the realms of
Church government. Combining political and ecclesiastical animosity, Pope
Gregory II loudly protested against the execution in Italy of the imperial
decree. The Romans drove from the walls the imperial governor, and the Pope was
left undisputed head of the Imperial city of the West.
In this abeyance of the Empire the Lombard King
naturally aspired to seize the vacant dignity, and the only possible help for
Italy was to be found in the Frankish kingdom, which, under the strong rule of
kingdom, the house of Pippin of Landen (A.D. 740-756), had renewed its early
vigor. In consolidating his power Pippin the Short saw the usefulness of
ecclesiastical organization as a means of binding to the Frankish monarchy the
German tribes across the Rhine. Through the labors of Boniface, the apostle of
the Germans, the Papacy reaped a rich return for Gregory I’s gift of
Christianity to the English by the formation of an alliance between the Pope
and the ruler of the Franks. There were more ways than one in which these two
vigorous powers could help each other. Pippin wished to set aside in name, as
he had done in deed, the Merovingian line, which still held the titular
sovereignty of the Franks. Relieved from their scruples by the supreme priestly
authority of the Pope, the Franks elected Pippin, who had hitherto been Mayor
of the Palace, as their king; and the bishops gave peculiar solemnity to this
transfer of national allegiance by the ceremony of anointing the new sovereign
with holy oil. Soon Pope Stephen III asked for help in his turn, and fled to
Pippin before the triumphant advance against Rome of the Lombard King.
Pippin recognized his obligations to the Pope. In two
campaigns he beat back the Lombard King and made him relinquish his conquests.
Wishing, moreover, to give a signal token of his gratitude, he bestowed on the
Pope the territory which the Lombards had won from the Emperor, the district
reaching along the eastern coast from the mouth of the Po to Ancona. Thus the
possessions of the Emperor passed into the hands of the Pope, and their acquisition
gave definiteness to the temporal power which circumstances had gradually
forced upon the Papacy. On the other hand, the Imperial suzerainty over Italy
devolved on the Frankish King, and the vague title of Patrician of Rome,
bestowed on Pippin by the Pope as representative of the Roman people, paved the
way for the bestowal of the full Imperial title of the West upon Pippin’s
more famous son.
Charles the Great, son of Pippin, extended still
further the power and renown of the Frankish monarchy, till he won for himself
a position which was in Papacy and truth imperial over Western Europe. He
crushed the last remains of the Lombard power in Italy, and extended over the
Papacy his protecting arm. Leo III fled across the Alps to beg for protection against
his foes, who had attempted a murderous outrage upon him. Charles led back the
Pope in triumph to the rebellious city, where on Christmas Day, 800, as he
knelt in S. Peter’s Church in the garb of a Roman Patrician, the Pope advanced
and placed upon his head a golden crown, while the Church rang with the shout
of the assembled Romans, “Long life and victory to Charles Augustus, crowned by
God, great and pacific Emperor!”. In such strange fashion did the city of Rome
assume once more its right of setting up an emperor, a right which, since the
time of Romulus Augustulus, it had been content to leave to the new Rome in the
East.
Everything tended to make this step both easy and
natural. The Eastern Empire was in the hands of a woman, and was sunk for the time
both in feebleness and moral decay. The Germans, on the contrary, were united
for the first time into a strong power, and were ruled by a vigorous hand. No
longer was there any antagonism between Germans and Latins: they had found the
need in which each stood of the other, and were joined in firm alliance. The
coronation of Charles corresponded to the ambition of Latins and Germans alike.
To the Latins it seemed to be the restoration to Rome and to Italy of their
former glory; to the Germans it was the realization of the dream which had
floated before the eyes of the earliest conquerors of their race. To Latins and
Germans alike it was at once the recognition of their past achievements and the
earnest of their future greatness. No one could have foreseen that the power
which would reap the greatest benefit was that represented by him who, in his
twofold capacity of chief magistrate of the city of Rome and chief priest of
Christendom, placed the crown on the head of the kneeling Charles, and then
fell prostrate before him in recognition of his high Imperial dignity.
The coronation of Charles may be explained on grounds
of temporal expediency; but it also had its root in the ideal aspirations of
men’s hearts, an ideal which was partly a memory of the world-wide organization
of the old Roman Empire, and partly an expression of the yearning for universal
brotherhood which Christianity had taught mankind. It put into definite form
the belief in the unity of Christendom, which was the leading principle in mediaeval
politics till it was shattered by the movement which ended in the Reformation.
It was natural to express this theory in the form of outward organization, and
to set up by the side of a Catholic Church, which was to care for the souls of
all Christian people, a universal empire, which was to rule their bodies. No
disappointment was rude enough to show men that this theory was but a dream.
They were not so much concerned with actual practice: it was enough for them
that the theory was lofty and noble.
The establishment of this great symbol of a united
Christendom could not but produce ultimately an accession to the Papal dignity,
though under Charles himself the Pope held the position of a grateful
subordinate. The Empire was the representation of God’s kingdom on earth; the
Emperor, not the Pope, was the vicegerent of the Most High; the Pope was his
chief minister in ecclesiastical affairs, standing in the same relation towards
him as did the high priest towards the divinely-appointed king of the Jewish theocracy.
But the strong hand of Charles was needed to keep his Empire together. Under
his feeble successors local feeling again made head against the tendencies
towards centralization. The name of Emperor became merely an ornamental title
of him who, in the partition of the dominions of Charles, obtained the kingdom
of Italy. Under the degenerate rulers of the line of Charles, it was impossible
to look upon the Empire as the representation on earth of the kingdom of God.
It was at this time that the Papacy first stood
forward as the center of the state-system of Europe. The Empire had fallen
after having given an expression, as emphatic as it was brief, to the political
ideas that lay deep in the minds of men. The unity embodied in the Empire of
Charles had been broken up into separate states; but it still was possible to
combine these states into a theocracy under the rule of the Pope. The theory of
the Papal monarchy over the Church was not the result merely of grasping
ambition and intrigue on the part of individual Popes; it corresponded rather
to the deep-seated belief of Western Christendom. This desire to unite
Christendom under the Pope gave meaning and significance to the Forged
Decretals bearing the name of Isidore, which formed the legal basis of the
Papal monarchy. This forgery did not come from Rome, but from the land of the
Western Franks. It set forth a collection of pretended decrees of early
councils and letters of early Popes, which exalted the power of the bishops,
and at the same time subjected them to the supervision of the Pope. The Pope
was set forth as universal bishop of the Church whose confirmation was needed
for the decrees of any council. The importance of the forgery lay in the fact
that it represented the ideal of the future as a fact of the past, and
displayed the Papal primacy as an original institution of the Church of Christ.
The Papacy did not originate this forgery; but it made
Pope haste to use it. Pope Nicolas I (AD 858-867) claimed and exercised the
powers of supreme ecclesiastical authority, and was happy in being able to
exercise them in the cause of moral right. The Frankish Church was willing to
allow the profligate king Lothar II to put away his wife that he might marry
his mistress. The Pope interfered, sent delegates to enquire into the matter,
deposed the Archbishops of Koln and Trier, and forced Lothar into an unwilling
submission. In like manner he interposed in the affairs of the Eastern Church,
withstood the Emperor, and sided with the deposed Patriarch of Constantinople.
On all sides he claimed for his office a decisive supremacy.
Meanwhile the Empire fell still lower in prestige and
power. The Papacy, allying with the feudal feeling of the great vassals who
were striving to make the Frankish kingship elective, declared the Empire to be
elective also. Charles the Bald in 875 received the Imperial title from the
hands of John VIII as a gift of the Pope, not as a hereditary dignity. If the
decay of the Frankish monarchy had not involved the destruction of order throughout
Europe, the Papacy might have won its way rapidly to supreme temporal as well
as spiritual power. But the end of the ninth century was a time of wild
confusion. Saracens, Normans, Slavs plundered and conquered almost at will, and
the Frankish kings and the Popes were equally powerless to maintain their
position. The great vassals among the Franks destroyed the power of the
monarchy. The fall of the Imperial power in Italy deprived the Popes of their
protector, and left them helpless instruments in the hands of the Italian
nobles, who were called their vassals. Yet, even from its degradation the
Papacy had something to gain, as the claims put forth by Nicolas I gained in
validity by not being exercised. When Empire and Papacy at last revived, two
centuries of disorder threw a halo of immemorial antiquity over the Forged
Decretals and the bold assertions of Nicolas I.
From this common abasement the temporal power was the
first to rise. The German peoples within the Empire of Charles the Great were
at length united the by the urgent necessity of protecting themselves against
barbarous foes. They formed a strong elective monarchy, and shook themselves
loose from their Romanized brethren, the Western Franks, amongst whom the power
of the vassals was still to maintain disunion for centuries. The German kingdom
was the inheritor of the ideas and policy of Charles the Great, and the
restoration of the Imperial power was a natural and worthy object of the Saxon
line of kings. The restoration of the Empire involved a restoration also of the
Papacy. But this was not left solely to political considerations. A revival of
Christian feeling found a center in the great monastery of Cluny, and the
monastic reformers, thoroughly imbued with the ideas of the Forged Decretals,
aimed at uniting Christendom under the headship of the Pope. Their immediate
objects were to bring back the clergy to purer and more spiritual lives, and to
check the secularization of the clerical office which the growing wealth of the
Church and the lax discipline of stormy times had gradually wrought. Their cry
was for the strict enforcement of the celibacy of the clergy and the
suppression of simony. They felt, however, that reform must begin with the
head, and that no one could restore the Papacy except the Emperor. Henry III
was hailed as a second David, when at the Synod of Sutri he superintended the
deposition of three simoniacal or profligate Popes who were struggling for the
chair of S. Peter. Then under a noble line of German popes the Papacy was again
identified with the highest spiritual life of Christendom, and learned to
borrow the strength of the Imperial system, under whose shadow it grew to
power.
This condition of tutelage to the Empire could not
long continue. The German bishop might be filled with the deepest loyalty to
the Emperor; but his ideas and aspirations became enlarged when he was raised
to the lofty position of Head of the Church. So soon as the Papacy was
re-established it aimed at independence. The next objects of the reformers were
to make Rome the center of the new ideas, to secure for the Papacy a safe
position in Rome itself, and to free it from its dependence on the Empire.
Their leading spirit was an Italian monk, Hildebrand of Saona, who, both at
Rome and Cluny, had studied the reforming policy, and then, with keen and sober
appreciation of the task that lay before him, set himself to give it effect.
Hildebrand combined the resoluteness that came from monkish discipline with the
versatility and clear judgment that mark a statesman. He labored patiently at
the task of enforcing ideas which might provide a basis for the Papal power.
His aim was to make clear the principles on which the Papal monarchy was to
rest, and he trusted to the future to fill in the outline which he was careful
to trace distinctly. He had the greatest mark of political genius—he knew how
to wait till the full time had come. He maintained the German power in Rome
till it had crushed the factious party among the Roman nobles. Then, by
entrusting the Papal election to the Cardinal-bishops, priests and deacons, a
step was taken which professed to check the turbulence of the Roman people, but
which also stopped Imperial interference. An alliance with the Norman settlers
in South Italy won to the Papal cause soldiers who had a direct interest in
opposing the Imperial claims. The Papacy slowly prepared to assert its
independence of Imperial protection.
When at length the time was ripe, Hildebrand ascended
the Papal throne as Gregory VII (A.D. 1073-1085). Full of zeal and enthusiasm,
he was desirous of carrying out the grandest schemes. He wished to summon an
army from the whole of Christendom, which under his leadership should conquer
Byzantium, unite the Eastern and Western Churches under one head, and then march
triumphantly against the Saracens and expel them from the lands where they had
usurped an unlawful sway. A worthy domain was to be secured for the Papal
monarchy by the restoration of the old limits of Christendom, and the glories
of the brightest age of the Church were to be brought back once more. It was a
splendid dream — fruitful, like all that Gregory did, for later times; but with
a sigh Gregory renounced his dream for the harsh realities of his actual
condition. Men were lukewarm; the Church at home was corrupt; kings and rulers
were profligate, careless, and unworthy of a lofty aim. The reforming
principles must sink deeper before Western Christendom was fitted for a noble
mission. So Gregory VII turned to enforce immediate reforms.
The celibacy of the clergy had long floated before the
eyes of Christians as an ideal; Gregory VII called on the laity to make it a
reality, and bade them abstain from the ministrations of a married priest,
“because his blessing was turned into a curse, his prayer into sin”. In the
midst of the storm which this severity aroused, he went on to take rigorous
measures against simony, and struck at the root of the evil by forbidding all
investiture by laymen to any spiritual office. Gregory VII put forward his
ideas in their most pronounced and decided form: he claimed for the Church an
entire independence from the temporal power. Nor was this all; as the struggle
advanced, he did not hesitate to declare that the independence of the Church
was to be found solely in the assertion of its supremacy over the State. We
read with wonder the claims which he put forward for the Papacy; but our wonder
is changed into admiration when we consider how many of them were realized
by his successors. Gregory VII did not aim at securing the Papal monarchy over
the Church; that had been established since the days of Nicolas I. He aimed at
asserting the freedom of the Church from the worldly influences which benumbed
it, by setting up the Papacy as a power strong enough to restrain Church and State
alike. In ecclesiastical matters Gregory enunciated the infallibility of the
Pope, his power of deposing bishops and restoring them at his own will, the
necessity of his consent to give universal validity to synodal decrees, his
supreme and irresponsible jurisdiction, the precedence of his legates over all
bishops.
In political matters he asserted that the name of Pope
was incomparable with any other, that he alone could use the insignia of
empire, that he could depose emperors, that all princes ought to kiss his feet,
that he could release from their allegiance the subjects of wicked rulers. Such
were the magnificent claims which Gregory VII bequeathed to the mediaeval
Papacy, and pointed out the way towards their realization
Such views as these necessarily led to a struggle
between the temporal and spiritual power. The conflict was first with the
Empire, which was connected in the most vital way with the Papacy. Gregory VII
was happy in his adversary, the profligate and careless Henry IV. Strong as were
the opponents whom the rigorous policy of Gregory raised up, the opponents of
the misgovernment of Henry were still stronger. The Saxons rose in revolt
against a ruler of the house of Franconia; the enemies of the King combined
with the Pope, and Henry’s moral weakness gave Gregory the opportunity of
impressing by a striking dramatic act his view of the Papal power upon the
imagination of Europe. Three days did the humbled monarch in the courtyard of
the castle of Canossa sue for absolution from the triumphant Pope. Gregory as
priest could not refuse absolution to a penitent, and by obtaining absolution
Henry could overthrow the plans of his opponents; but Gregory, as a politician,
resolved that the absolution so reluctantly extorted, which frustrated his
designs for the present, should work for the future furtherance of his aims.
The humiliation of Henry IV was made a type to posterity of the relations
between the temporal and spiritual power.
Gregory VII boldly plunged the Papacy into an
interminable strife. He was not daunted by the horrors which followed, when
Rome was plundered by the Normans whom he summoned to his aid. He died in exile
from his capital, still confident in the justice of his aims, and left the
fruits of his labors for others to reap.
The course of events in Europe carried away men’s
interests to a field where the Papacy came into prominence which there was none
to dispute. The outburst of crusading zeal united Christendom for common
action, in which the unity of the Church, which had before been a conception of
the mind, became a reality, and Europe seemed one vast army under the
leadership of the Pope. But, in the pious enthusiasm of Urban II at Clermont,
we miss the political wisdom of Gregory VII. Urban could animate but could not guide
the zeal with which men’s hearts were full; and, instead of the scheme of
organized conquest which Gregory VII had mapped out, he kindled a wild outburst
of fanaticism which led only to disillusionment. Yet the movement corresponded
too closely to men’s desires for any failure to extinguish it. The old roving
spirit of the Teutons was turned into a new channel by its alliance with
revived zeal for the Church. The materialism of the Middle Ages long sought to
find the spirit of Christ in local habitation of those fields which His feet
had trodden. So long as the crusading movement lasted, the Papacy necessarily
occupied the chief place in the politics of Europe.
Other influences were also at work which tended to
strengthen the building which Gregory VII had raised. Gregory had gathered
around him a school of canonists whose labors put into legal form the
pretensions which he had advanced. The University of Bologna, which became the
great center of legal teaching throughout Western Europe, imbibed and extended
the ideas of the Isidorian Decretals, and of the Hildebrandine Canonists. From
Bologna issued in the middle of the twelfth century the Decretum of Gratian,
which was accepted throughout the Middle Ages as the recognized code of canon
law. It embodied all the forgeries which had been made in the interests of the
Papacy, and carried to its logical consequences the Hildebrandine system.
Moreover, the University of Paris, the center of mediaeval theology, developed
a system of theology and philosophy which gave full recognition to the Papal
claims. In law and philosophy alike men’s minds were led up to the
acknowledgment of the Papal supremacy as the necessary foundation both
of Christian society and thought.
The struggle about investiture ended, as was to be
expected, in a compromise but it was a compromise in which all the glory
went to the Papacy. Men saw that the Papal claims had been excessive, even
impossible; but the object at which they aimed, the freedom of the Church from
the secularizing tendencies of feudalism, was in the main obtained. The
conflict aroused by Gregory VII deepened in men’s minds the sense of spiritual
freedom; and if it did not set up the Church as independent of the State,
at least it saved it from sinking into a passive instrument of royal or
aristocratic oppression. But the contest with the Empire still went on. One of
the firmest supporters of Gregory VII had been Matilda, Countess of Tuscany,
over whose fervent piety Gregory had thrown the spell of his powerful mind. At
her death, she bequeathed her possessions, which embraced nearly a quarter of
Italy, to the Holy See. Some of the lands which she had held were allodial,
some were fiefs of the Empire; and the inheritance of Matilda was a fruitful
source of contention to two powers already jealous of one another. The constant
struggle that lasted for two centuries gave full scope for the development of
the Italian towns. Courted first by one side, and then by the other, they
learned how to wring privileges from the Emperor in return for the help they
gave him; and when the Imperial pretensions became irksome, they sided with the
Pope against their common foe. The old Italian notion of establishing
municipal freedom by an equilibrium of two contending powers was stamped still
more deeply on Italian politics by the wars of Guelfs and Ghibellins.
The union between the Papacy and the Lombard Republics
was strong enough to humble the mightiest of the Emperors. Frederick
Barbarossa, who held the strongest views of the Imperial prerogative, had to
confess himself vanquished by Pope Alexander III, and the meeting of Pope and
Emperor at Venice was a memorable ending to the long struggle; that the great
Emperor should kiss the feet of the Pope whom he had so long refused to
acknowledge, was an act which stamped itself with dramatic effect on the
imagination of men, and gave rise to fables of a still more lowly submission.
The length of the strife, the renown of Frederick, the unswerving tenacity of
purpose with which Alexander had maintained his cause, all lent luster to this
triumph of the Papacy. The consistent policy of Alexander III, even in adverse
circumstances, the calm dignity with which he asserted the Papal claims, and
the wisdom with which he used his opportunities, made him a worthy successor of
Gregory VII at a great crisis in the fortunes of the Papacy.
It was reserved, however, for Innocent III to realize
most fully the ideas of Hildebrand. If Hildebrand was the Julius, Innocent was
the Augustus, of the Papal Empire. He had not the creative genius nor the fiery
energy of his great forerunner; but his clear intellect never missed an
opportunity, and his calculating spirit rarely erred from its mark. A man of
severe and lofty character, which inspired universal respect, he possessed all
the qualities of an astute political intriguer. He was lucky in his
opportunities, as he had no formidable antagonist; among the rulers of Europe
his was the master mind. In every land he made the Papal power decisively felt.
In Germany, France, and England, he dictated the conduct of the Kings. His very
success, however, was fraught with danger for the future. In England, the Pope
might treat the kingdom as a fief of the Holy See; but when he attempted to use
the Papal power in his vassal’s aid against the old liberties of the land, he
awakened a distrust of the Papacy which quickly grew in English hearts. On all
sides Innocent III enjoyed successes beyond his hopes. In the East, the
crusading zeal of Europe was turned by Venice to the conquest of Constantinople,
and Innocent could rejoice for a brief space in the subjection of the Eastern
Church. In the West, Innocent turned the crusading impulse to the interest of
the Papal power, by diverting it against heretical sects which, in Northern
Italy and the South of France, attacked the system of the Church. These
sectaries consisted of men opposed partly to the rigidity of sacerdotalism,
partly to the intellectual narrowness of the Church doctrine, partly to the
immoral and unspiritual lives of the clergy; others again had absorbed
Manichaean heresies and vague Oriental mysticism; while others used these sects
as a cover for antinomian views, for religious heedlessness, and profligacy of
life. Looked at from the point of view of our own day, they seem a strange
mixture of good and evil; but from the point of view of the Middle Ages they
were a spectacle which could only be regarded with horror. They destroyed the
unity of religious belief and practice; and, without the visible unity of the
Church Christianity became in men’s eyes a mockery. It was in vain to hope for
God’s blessing on their arms against the infidels in the Holy Land, if they
allowed unbelievers within the pale of Christendom to rend asunder Christ’s
seamless coat. Innocent III did not speak in vain when he proclaimed a crusade
against the Count of Toulouse, whose dominions afforded the chief shelter to
these heretics. Political jealousy and a desire for booty strengthened
religious fanaticism; the storm of war swept over the smiling fields of Languedoc,
and the taint of heresy was washed away in blood. From this time forward the
duty of seeking out heretics and bringing them to punishment became a prominent
part of the episcopal office.
Moreover Innocent saw the beginning, though he did not
perceive the full importance, of a movement which the reaction against heresy
produced within the Church. The Crusades had quickened men’s activity, and the
heretical sects had aimed at kindling greater fervor of spiritual life. The old
ideal of Christian duty, which had grown up among the miseries of the downfall
of the Roman world, gave way to an impulse towards more active zeal. By the
side of the monastic aim of averting, by the prayers and penitence of a few,
God’s anger from a wicked world, there grew up a desire for self-devotion to
missionary labor. Innocent III was wise enough not to repulse this new
enthusiasm, but find a place for it within the ecclesiastical system. Francis
of Assisi gathered round him a body of followers who bound themselves to a literal
following of the Apostles, to a life of poverty and labor, amongst the poor and
outcast; Dominic of Castile formed a society which aimed at the suppression of
heresy by assiduous teaching of the truth. The Franciscan and Dominican orders
grew almost at once into power and importance, and their foundation marks a
great reformation within the Church. The reformation movement of the eleventh
century, under the skillful guidance of Hildebrand, laid the foundations of the
Papal monarchy in the belief of Europe. The reformation of the thirteenth
century found full scope for its energy under the protection of the Papal
power; for the Papacy was still in sympathy with the conscience of Europe,
which it could quicken and direct. These mendicant orders were directly
connected with the Papacy, and were free from all episcopal control. Their zeal
awakened popular enthusiasm; they rapidly increased in number and spread into
every land. The Friars became the popular preachers and confessors, and
threatened to supersede the old ecclesiastical order. Not only amongst the
common people, but in the universities as well, did their influence become
supreme. They were a vast army devoted to the service of the Pope, and overran
Europe in his name. They preached Papal indulgences, they stirred up men to
crusades in behalf of the Papacy, they gathered money for the Papal use.
Nowhere could the Pope have found more effective servants.
Innocent III did not realize the full importance of
these new helpers; and even without them he raised the Papacy to its highest
level of power and respect. The change which he wrought in the attitude of the
Papacy may be judged from the fact that, whereas his predecessors had contented
themselves with the title of Vicar of Peter, Innocent assumed the name of Vicar
of Christ. Europe was to form a great theocracy under the direction of the
Pope.
If Innocent III thus realized the Hildebrandine ideal
of the Papacy, he at the same time opened up a dangerous field for its
immediate activity. Innocent III may be called the founder of the States of the
Church. The lands with which Pippin and Charles had invested the Popes were
held subject to the suzerainty of the Frankish sovereign and owned his
jurisdiction. On the downfall of the Carolingian Empire the neighboring nobles,
calling themselves Papal vassals, seized on these lands; and when they were
ousted in the Pope’s name by the Normans, the Pope did not gain by the change
of neighbors. Innocent III, was the first Pope who claimed and exercised the
rights of an Italian prince. He exacted from the Imperial Prefect in Rome the
oath of allegiance to himself; he drove the Imperial vassals from the Matildan
domain, and compelled Constance, the widowed queen of Sicily, to recognize the
Papal suzerainty over her ancestral kingdom. He obtained from the Emperor Otto
IV (1201) the cession of all the lands which the Papacy claimed, and so
established for the first time an undisputed title to the Papal States.
Innocent was an Italian as well as a Churchman. As a
Churchman he wished to bring all the kings and princes of Europe into
submission to the Papal power; as an Italian he aimed at freeing Italy from
foreign rulers, and uniting it into one State under the Papal sway. In this new
sphere which Innocent opened up lay the great danger of Innocent’s successors.
The Papal monarchy over the Church had won its way to universal recognition,
and the claim of the Papacy to interfere in the internal affairs of European
States had been established. It was natural for the Papacy at the height of its
power to strive after a firm territorial basis on which to rest secure; what
had been gained by moral superiority must be kept by political force. However
distant nations might tremble before the Papal decrees, it often happened that
the Pope himself was exiled from his capital by the turbulent rabble of the
city, or was fleeing before foes whom his Imperial antagonist could raise
against him at his very gates. The Papacy was only obeying a natural instinct
of self-preservation in aiming at a temporal sovereignty which would secure it
against temporal mishaps.
Yet the whole significance of the Papacy was altered
when this desire to secure a temporal sovereignty in Italy became a leading
feature of the Papal policy. The Papacy still held the same position in the
eyes of the of men, and its existence was still held necessary to maintain the
fabric of Christendom; but a Pope straining every nerve to defend his Italian
possessions did not appeal to men’s sympathies. So long as the Papacy had been
fighting for ecclesiastical privileges, or for the establishment of its own
dignity and importance, it had been fighting for an idea which in the days of
feudal oppression awakened as much enthusiasm as does a struggle for freedom in
our own day. When the Papacy entered into a war to extend its own possessions,
it might win glorious victories, but they were won at a ruinous cost.
The Emperor Frederick II, who had been brought up
under Innocent’s guardianship, proved the greatest enemy of the newly-won sovereignty
of the Pope. King of Sicily and Naples, Frederick was resolved to assert again
the Imperial pretensions over Italy, and then win back the Papal acquisitions
in the center; if his plan had succeeded, the Pope would have lost his
independence and sunk to be the instrument of the house of Hohenstaufen. Two
Popes of inflexible determination and consummate political ability were the
opponents of Frederick. Gregory IX and Innocent IV flung themselves with ardor
into the struggle, and strained every nerve till the whole Papal policy was
absorbed by the necessities of this strife. Europe groaned under the exactions
of Papal tax-gatherers, who, under the old pretense of a crusade, wrung money
from the ecclesiastics of every land. The great interests of Christendom were
forgotten in the struggle for self-preservation, and the temporal and spiritual
power changed places in Europe. Instead of the Pope, the pious King of France,
Louis IX, led the last crusading expeditions against the infidels, and in his
saintly deeds, rather than in the by-ways of Papal policy, men found the
highest Christian ideal of their age. The Papacy baffled the plans of Frederick
II, but Europe had to pay the costs of a struggle with which it felt no
sympathy, and the moral prestige of the triumphant Papacy was irrevocably
lowered.
Frederick II died, but the Popes pursued with their
hostility his remotest descendants, and were resolved to sweep the very
remembrance of him out in of Italy. To accomplish their purpose, they
did not hesitate to summon the aid of the stranger. Charles of Anjou
appeared as their champion, and in the Pope’s name took possession of the
Sicilian kingdom. By his help the last remnants of the Hohenstaufen house were
crushed, and the claims of the Empire to rule over Italy were destroyed for
ever. But the Papacy got rid of an open enemy only to introduce a covert and
more deadly foe. The Angevin influence became superior to that of the Papacy,
and French popes were elected that they might carry out the wishes of the Sicilian
king. By its resolute efforts to escape from the power of the Empire, the
Papacy only paved the way for a connection that ended in its enslavement to the
influence of France.
Immersed in narrow schemes of self-interest, the Popes
lost their real strength in the respect and sympathies of Europe. Instead of
being the upholders moral of ecclesiastical independence, they became the
oppressors of the clergy and the infringers of ecclesiastical rights. Hence, in
France, lawyers developed a fruitful conception of the liberties of the
Gallican Church — freedom of patrons from Papal interference, freedom of
election to chapters, and a prohibition of Papal taxation except with the
consent of the Church and the Crown. Instead of being the upholders of civil liberty,
the Popes ranked with the princes of Europe and had no sympathy with the cause
of the people. In England, during the Barons’ War the Papacy was on the side of
its pliant ally, Henry III, and steadily opposed all efforts to check his
feeble misgovernment The great English Churchmen, on the other hand, sided with
the Barons, and the English Church was the strongest element in the struggle
against royal oppression. Similarly, in Italy, the Popes deserted the party
which in each city was striving to maintain municipal freedom against foreign
aggressors, or too powerful nobles at home. When the Empire had been reduced to
feebleness, the Popes had no more need of their republican allies, but were
intolerant of civic liberties. Hence they were so short-sighted as to permit
the suppression of republican constitutions by powerful lords, and to allow
dynasties to establish, within the Papal States, a sway which proved to be the
greatest hindrance to the assertion of the Papal sovereignty.
In this career of purely political enterprise the
Papacy again became associated with the factions of contending families in
Rome, till in 1202 the assembled Cardinals were so equally divided between the
parties that they found it impossible to elect. At last, in utter weariness,
they chose a holy hermit of the Abruzzi, Piero da Morrone, whose fame for piety
was in the mouths of men. The Pontificate of Celestine V, for such was the name
Morrone assumed, might seem to be a caricature on the existing state of the
Papacy. A man had been elected Pope by a sudden impulse solely for his holiness:
no sooner was he elected than the Cardinals felt that holiness was not the
quality most requisite for the high office of Head of the Church. Never did
election awaken more enthusiasm among the people, yet never was Pope more
powerless for good. Ignorant of politics, of business, of the ways of the
world, Celestine V became a helpless instrument in the hands of the King of
Naples. He gave up the government of the Church to others, and bestowed his
favors with reckless prodigality. The crowd thronged around him whenever he
went abroad to crave his blessing; a new order, the Celestinians, was founded
by those who were eager to model their life on his; but the Cardinals groaned
in secret dismay over the perils with which his incompetence threatened the
Papacy. After a pontificate of five months he abdicated, to the joy of the
Cardinals, and to the grief of the people, which showed itself in hatred for
his successor. Henceforth it was clear that the Papacy had become a great
political institution: its spiritual significance had been merged in its
worldly importance. It needed a statesman to baffle princes by his astuteness,
not a saint to kindle by his holiness spiritual aspirations among the masses.
Celestine’s successor, Boniface VIII, attempted, when
it Boniface was too late, to launch the Papacy upon a new career. Though
endowed with all the fire of Gregory VII, and with the keen political instincts
of Innocent IV, he failed to understand either the disastrous results of the
policy of his predecessors, or the hidden strength of the opposition which it
had kindled. The Papacy had destroyed the Empire, but in its victory had fallen
with its foe. In overthrowing the Empire it had weakened the outward expression
of the idea on which its own power was founded, and had first used, and then
betrayed, the growing feeling of nationality, which was the rising enemy of the
mediaeval system. When Boniface VIII aimed at absorbing into the Papacy the
Imperial power, when he strove to weld together Europe into a great
confederacy, over which the Pope was to preside, at once the head of its
religion and the administrator of a system of international law, he only
brought to light the gulf which had been slowly widening between the aims of
the Papacy and the aspirations of Europe. His weapons were the weapons of this
world, and though his utterances might assume the cover of religious phrases,
his arts were those of an adventurous politician. First he resolved to secure himself
in Rome, which he did by the remorseless overthrow of the Colonna family. In
the rest of Italy he aimed at bringing about order by crushing the Ghibellins
and putting the Guelfs in power. He called in French help to restore the unity
of the Sicilian kingdom, which had been broken by the rebellion of 1282, and
Charles of Valois overthrew the Ghibellins in Florence, and drove Dante into
exile; but, beyond drawing on himself and the Pope the hatred of the Italian
people, he accomplished nothing.
While these were his measures in Italy, Boniface VIII
advanced with no less boldness and decision elsewhere. He demanded that the
Kings of England and France should submit their differences to his arbitration.
When they refused he tried to make war impossible without his consent by
cutting off one great source of supplies, and issued a bull, forbidding the
taxation of the clergy, except by the consent of the Pope. But in England
Boniface was repelled by the vigorous measures of Edward I, who taught the
clergy that, if they would not contribute to the maintenance of civil
government, they should not have the advantages of its protection. In France,
Philip IV retaliated by forbidding the export of gold or silver from his realm
without the royal consent. Boniface was thus cut off from the supplies which
the Papacy raised for itself by taxation of the clergy. Even while professing
to fight the battle of clerical privilege, Boniface could not carry with him
the staunch support of the clergy themselves. They had experienced the fiscal
oppression of Pope and King equally, and found that the Pope was the more
intolerable of the two. If they had to submit to the tender mercies of one or
the other, the King was at least more amenable to reason. For a time Boniface
had to give way; but circumstances soon seemed to favor him. A quarrel arose
between Edward I and Philip IV, from which both wished to withdraw with credit.
Boniface, not in his Papal, but in his individual capacity, was appointed
arbitrator. In giving his award he assumed the character of a Pope, and
pronounced the penalty of excommunication against those who infringed its
conditions. Moreover, he took up the position of an absolute superior in the
affairs of the German kingdom, where he disallowed the election of Albert of
Austria. In England he claimed to interfere in the settlement of Edward’s
relations towards Scotland. Edward submitted the Pope’s letter to Parliament,
which replied to Boniface that the English kings had never answered, nor ought
to answer, about their rights to any judge, ecclesiastical or civil. The spirit
of national resistance to the claims of the Papacy to exercise supremacy in
temporal matters was first developed under the wise government and patriotic
care of Edward I.
Yet Boniface could not read the signs of the times. He
was misled by the outburst of popular enthusiasm and religious zeal which
followed the establishment of a year of jubilee in 1300. The crusading age was
past and gone; but the spirit that animated the Crusades still survived in
Europe. The restless desire to visit a holy place and see with their bodily
eyes some guarantee of the reality of their devotion, drove crowds of pilgrims
to Rome to earn by prayers and offerings the promised absolution for their
sins. Others since the days of Boniface have been misled as to the real
strength of a system, by taking as their measure the outbursts of feverish
enthusiasm which it could at times call forth. Men trampled one another to
death in their eagerness to reach the tombs of the Apostles; yet in three short
years the Vicar of S. Peter found no one to rescue him from insult and outrage.
The breach between Boniface VIII and Philip IV went on
widening. As the Pope grew more resolute in asserting his pretensions, the King
gathered the French clergy and people more closely around him. The growth of
legal studies had raised up a class of lawyers who could meet the Pope on his
own ground. As he fortified himself by the principles of the canon law, the
French legists rested on the principles of the old civil law of Rome. The canon
law, in setting up the Pope as supreme over the Church, had but followed the
example of the civil law, which traced its own origin to the Imperial pleasure.
The two systems now met in collision, and their fundamental identity rendered
compromise impossible. Angry bulls and letters followed one another. The
Pope furbished up all the weapons in his armory. On doctrinal grounds he
asserted that, “as God made two lights, the greater light to rule the day, and
the lesser light to rule the night”, so He set up two jurisdictions, the
temporal and the spiritual, of which the spiritual is greater, and involves the
temporal in point of right, though not necessarily in point of use. On
historical grounds he asserted: “Our predecessors have deposed three Kings of
France, and if any King did the wrong which they did, we would depose him like
a servant”. Against this was set up the intelligible principle, that in things
temporal the King held his power subject to God alone. Both sides prepared for
extremities. Philip’s lawyers accused the Pope of heresy, of crime, of simony,
and appealed to a General Council of the Church. Boniface excommunicated
Philip, and prepared to pronounce against him the sentence of dethronement,
releasing his subjects from their allegiance. But Philip’s plans were cunningly
laid, and he had Italian craft to help him. The day before the bull of
deposition was to have been published, Boniface was made prisoner by a band of
Philip’s adherents. The exiled Italian, Sciarra Colonna, planned the attack,
and the acuteness of the Tolosan, Guillaume de Nogaret, one of Philip’s
lawyers, helped to make its success complete. As he sat, unsuspecting of evil,
in the retirement of his native Anagni, Boniface was suddenly surprised and
maltreated, without a blow being struck in his behalf. It is true that on the
third day of his captivity he was rescued; but his prestige was gone. Frenzied,
or heart-broken, we know not which, he died a month after his release.
With Boniface VIII fell the mediaeval Papacy. He had
striven to develop the idea of the Papal monarchy into a definite system. He
had claimed for it the noble position of arbiter amongst the nations of Europe.
Had he succeeded, the power which, according to the mediaeval theory of
Christendom, was vested in the Empire, would have passed over to the Papacy no
longer as a theoretical right, but as an actual possession; and the Papacy
would have asserted its supremacy over the rising state-system of Europe. His
failure showed that with the destruction of the Empire the Papacy had fallen
likewise. Both continued to exist in name, and set forth their old pretensions;
but the Empire, in its old aspect of head of Christendom, had become a name of
the past or a dream of the future since the failure of Frederick II. The
failure of Boniface VIII showed that a like fate had overtaken the Papacy
likewise. The suddenness and abruptness of the calamity which befell Boniface
impressed this indelibly on the minds of men. The Papacy had first shown its
power by a great dramatic act; its decline was manifested in the same way. The
drama of Anagni is to be set against the drama of Canossa.
CHAPTER II.
THE POPES AT AVIGNON.
We speak loosely of the Reformation as though it were
a definite event; we ought rather to regard the fall of the Papal autocracy as
the result of a number of political causes which had slowly gathered strength.
The victory of the Papacy over Frederick II marked the highest point of its
power: the beginning of the fourteenth century saw the rise of new ideas which
gradually led to its fall. The struggle of Philip IV against Boniface VIII was
carried on by new weapons — by appeals to political principles. The rights of
the State were asserted against the claims of the Papal monarchy, and the
assertion was made good. The Papacy had advanced to power partly by religious,
partly by political means; and the Papal claims rested on principles which were
drawn partly from texts of Scripture, partly from historical events in the
past. To overthrow the Papal monarchy both of these bases had to be upset.
The ideas of the Middle Ages had to make way for the
ideas of the Renaissance before it was possible for men to grasp the meaning of
Scripture as a whole, and found their political as well as their social life
upon a wide conception of its spirit. But this was the second part of the
process, for which the first part was necessary. Before men advanced to the
criticism of Scripture they undertook the criticism of history. Against the
Papal view of the political facts and principles of the past, the men of the
fourteenth century advanced new principles and interpreted the facts
afresh.
The mediaeval conception of the Papal power was set
forth by Thomas of Aquino. His ideal of government was a constitutional
monarchy, strong enough to keep order, not strong enough to become tyrannical.
The object of Christian society is to lead men to eternal salvation, and this
work is done by the priests under the rule of the Pope. Under the Old Testament
dispensation priests had been subject to kings; under the New Testament
dispensation kings are subject to priests in matters pertaining to Christ’s
law. The king must see that such things as are necessary for the salvation of
his people are cared for, and that things contrary thereto are forbidden. If a
king is heretical or schismatic, the Church must deprive him of his power, and
by excommunicating him release his subjects from their allegiance. The Church
which is thus to lead the State must be ruled by a monarchy strong enough to
preserve the unity of the faith, and decide in matters that arise what is to be
believed and what condemned (nova editio symboli). In the Pope is vested
the authority of the universal Church, and he cannot err; according to Christ’s
words to Peter, “I have prayed for thee that thy faith fail not”. Against such
ideas the struggle of Boniface VIII and Philip IV produced a reaction, which
may be seen in the De Monarchia of Dante, who in behalf of the
Empire asserted the claims of the temporal against the spiritual power. Dante’s
Empire was the ideal creation of unity, peace, and order, which floated before
the mediaeval mind. The empire, he argues, is necessary for the good of
mankind, since the end of society is unity, and unity is only possible through
obedience to one head. This empire belongs of right to the Roman people who won
it, and what they won Christ sanctioned by being born into it; further He
recognized its legitimacy by receiving at the hands of a Roman judge the
sentence by which He bore our sorrows. The assertions of those who maintain
that the Empire does not come immediately from God, but mediately through
the Pope, are not to be received; they are founded on the Decretals and other
traditions which came after the Church, and could not therefore confer on the
Church any rights which it did not previously possess. The foundation of the
Church is Christ; the Empire existed before the Church, which received from
Christ no authority over the Empire, and therefore possesses none; “yet”, he
ends, “let Caesar be reverent to Peter, as the first-born son should be
reverent to his father”. Dante’s arguments are scholastic and obscure, resting
frequently on merely verbal grounds; but the importance of the De
Monarchia lies in the fact that, against the Decretals and against the
current interpretation of Scripture, it founds a political system on the basis
of reason and of historical fact. The form of the book is mediaeval, but a
modern spirit of political dignity breathes through its pages.
Dante’s De Monarchia is but a
specimen of the writings which the conflict of Boniface III and Philip IV
called forth. Aegidius Colonna, who became Archbishop of Bourges, and John of
Paris, a Dominican monk, asserted the independent existence of the temporal and
the spiritual power, since both alike came from God, and each has its own
sphere of action; in many points the priesthood must be subject to the
monarchy, and in no way could it be shown that the Papacy had any jurisdiction
over the realm of France. John of Paris went further and argued that, as Christ
exercised no dominion in temporal matters, no priest could, on the ground of
being Christ’s vicar, exercise a power which his Master never claimed. In these
and such like arguments there is an attempt to reach the facts of primitive
Christianity, and use them as a means of criticizing the Papal claims to
universal monarchy.
These attacks upon the Papal position were not the
only mischief which the assertion of Boniface VIII brought upon the Papacy. The
Papacy had destroyed the Empire, but failed in its attempt to establish itself
in the place of the Empire as the undoubted head over the rising nationalities
of Europe. It was worsted by France, and as a consequence fell under French influence.
When Philip IV pursued his victory and devised the scheme of getting the Papal
power into the hands of a nominee of his own, he met with little difficulty.
Clement V, an Aquitanian by birth, shrank before the troubles which Philip IV
easily contrived to stir up in Italy, and for greater safety took up his abode
at Avignon — a city held by Charles II of Naples as Count of Provence. It was,
however, so near the boundaries of the French King as to be practically under
his influence; and it marked a mighty breach with the tradition of the
past when the seat of the Papacy was removed from the world-city of its ancient
glories.
It is at first a cause of some surprise that the
Papacy did not suffer more than it did from the transference of its seat to
Avignon. But, though deprived of strength, it still had the prestige of past
importance, and could exercise considerable influence when opportunity offered.
Clement V was powerless against Philip IV : he had to consent to recognize the
validity of everything that Philip IV had done against his predecessor; he had
to revoke the obnoxious bulls of Boniface VIII, and even to authorize an
enquiry into his life and character; he had to lend himself as a tool to the
royal avarice in suppressing the order of the Knights Templars. But, in spite
of their disasters, the Papacy and the Empire were still the centers of
European politics. No one ventured to think it possible to diminish their
claims to greatness; it was rather a struggle which nation should succeed in
using them for its own purposes. France had secured a strong hold upon the
Papacy, and wished to become master also of the Empire. Philip IV strove to
procure the election of his brother, Charles of Valois, and so gave the Pope a
new means of asserting his importance. Charles was not elected, and the King
found it wise not to press the Pope too far. At Avignon the Pope was subject to
the influence of the French King; but he was at least personally secure, and
could afford to adopt a haughty tone in dealing with other powers. There was no
abatement in the lofty language of the Papacy; and when Clement V died, he
might have boasted that he handed down the Papal power undiminished to his
successors. His position might be ignoble; but he acted with policy and
prudence in difficult and dangerous circumstances, and made up for his humility
towards the King of France by the arrogance of his attitude towards the Empire.
The success of Henry VII in Italy alarmed King Robert
of Naples, and Clement V warmly espoused the cause of his vassal, in whose
dominions lay the protecting city of Avignon. The death of Henry VII prevented
the quarrel from becoming serious; but on Henry’s death Clement V published a
bull declaring that the oath taken by the Kings of the Romans to the Pope was
an oath of vassalage, and involved the Papal suzerainty over the Empire. At the
same time, during the vacancy of the Empire, the Pope, acting as over-lord, did
away with the Ban of the Empire which Henry VII had pronounced against Robert
of Naples, and also appointed Robert as Imperial Vicar in Italy. Clement V
followed the example of his predecessors in endeavoring to turn into a legal
claim the vague talk of former Popes. His death, within a month of the
publication of his bull, left the struggle to his successor.
John XXII (1313-1322) entered readily into the
struggle, and the disputed election to the Empire, between Lewis of Bavaria and
Frederick of Austria, gave him a lucky opportunity of asserting these new
claims of the Papacy over the Empire. As an obsequious dependent of the Kings
of France and Naples, the Pope was encouraged to put forward against the Empire
claims much more arrogant than those which Boniface VIII had ventured to make
to Philip IV. The French King hoped to lay hands upon the Empire; the King of
Naples wished to pursue his plans in Italy without fear of Imperial
intervention. So long as the Pope furthered their purposes, he might advance
any arguments or pretensions that he pleased. It was this selfish policy on the
part of the princes of Europe that maintained so long the Papal power, and gave
the Papacy the means of rising after many falls and degradations. The Papal
power and the Papal claims were inextricably interwoven in the state-system of
Europe, and the Papacy was a political instrument which any monarch who
could command was anxious to uphold.
John XXII claimed to be the rightful ruler of the
Empire during the vacancy, and so long as the contest between Lewis and
Frederick occupied all the energies of the rival claimants, there was no one to
gainsay the Pope. When the Battle of Mühldorf in 1322 gave the victory to
Lewis, John resented his assumption of the title of King of the Romans without
Papal confirmation, and soon proceeded to his excommunication. In the contest
that ensued there was nothing heroic. Papacy and Empire alike seemed the
shadows of their former selves. John XXII was an austere and narrow-minded
pedant, with no political insight; Lewis was destitute of any intellectual
greatness, and knew not how to control the forces which he had at his command.
The attack of the Pope upon the Empire was a desperate attempt to gain
consideration for the Papacy at the expense of a foe who was supposed to be too
weak to make any formidable resistance. But the national feeling of the German
people gathered round their King, when it became manifest that the onslaught
upon him was made in the interest of France. The lawyers, as before, mustered
in defense of the civil power; and unexpected allies came to its
succor, whose help made the contest memorable in the history of the progress of
human thought.
Since the abdication of Celestine V the Papacy had
drifted further away from its connection with the spiritual side of the life of
the Church. The monkish and the ascetism of Celestine and his followers
was not a robust form of Christian life, but it was the only one which set
itself before the imagination of men. The doctrine of absolute poverty, as held
by S. Francis and his followers, was hard to reconcile with the actual facts of
life and the Franciscan Order had become divided into two parties, one of which
insisted on the rigid observance of the rules of their founder, while the other
modified them into accordance with the growing wealth, learning, and importance
of their Order. The Pope had striven by judicious measures to hold together
these contending parties. But the obvious worldliness of the Papacy estranged
from it the more rigid party, the Spiritual Franciscans or Fraticelli, as they
were called. In their enthusiastic desire to lead the higher life, they found
in Christ and His Apostles the patterns of the lives of Mendicant Friars; and
at last the Papacy was brought into open collision with the Franciscan Order. A
Dominican Inquisitor at Narbonne condemned for heresy a fanatic who, amongst
other things, had asserted that Christ and the Apostles had no possessions,
either individually or in common. A Franciscan who was present maintained the
orthodoxy of this opinion against the Inquisitor, and the question was taken up
by the entire Order. Two General Chapters were held in 1322, which accepted
this doctrine as their own, and rested upon a Papal Bull of Nicolas III, 1279.
This brought the matter before John XXII; but the luxury and quiet of Avignon
made the doctrine of apostolic poverty more intolerable to John than it had
been to his predecessors. They had contented themselves with trying to explain
it away and evade it; John XXII denounced the opinion as heretical. The more
pronounced of the Franciscan body refused to admit the justice of the Papal
decision, and clamored against John himself as a heretic.
The question itself may seem of little moment; but the
struggle brought to light opinions which in after times were to become of deep
importance. As Boniface VIII had developed a temporal, so did John XXII develop
a spiritual, antagonism to the Papacy. The Pope was regarded as the head of a
carnal Church, degraded by worldliness, wealth and wickedness, against which
was set a spiritual Church adorned by simplicity, poverty and godliness. The
Spiritual Franciscans gathered round Lewis in his contest with the Pope, and
lent a religious significance to the struggle. It was not the doings of either
party, but the bold expression of opinions, which made the conflict memorable.
Against the Pope were arrayed men who attacked him in the interests both of the
Church and of the State.
From the ecclesiastical side, the General of the
Franciscan Order, Michael of Cesena, maintained against the Pope the principles
on which his order was founded. In his Tractate against the Errors of the Pope
he criticized the Papal utterances, denounced portions of them as erroneous,
and appealed against him, as against a heretic, “to the Universal Church and a
General Council, which in faith and morals is superior to the Pope, since a
Pope can err in faith and morals, as many Roman pontiffs have fallen from the
faith; but the Universal Church cannot err, and a Council representing the
Universal Church is likewise free from error”. In like manner the Englishman,
William of Occam, who had exercised his powers as a disputant in the University
of Paris till he won the title of “the Invincible Doctor”, brought his pen to
attack the Pope. In a series of Dialogues and Tractates he poured forth a flood
of erudition in which scholastic arguments are strangely mingled with keen
criticism of the Papal claims. At one time he is immersed in details of the
passing conflict, at another he enunciates general principles of far-reaching
importance. Against the plenitude of the Papal power he asserts the freedom of
the law of Christ; men are not by Christ’s ordinance the slaves of the Pope,
nor can the Pope dispose of temporal affairs. Christ gave to Peter spiritual
jurisdiction over the Church, and in temporal matters the right only of seeking
his own maintenance and enough to enable him to fulfill his office. Peter could
confer no more on his successors; if they have more, it comes from human grant
or human indolence. It is not necessary that there should be one primate over
the Church, for the Head of the Church is Christ, and by its union with Him the
Church has unity. This unity would not be lessened if there were different
rulers over different ecclesiastical provinces, as there are kings over
different nations; an aristocratic government maintains the unity of a state as
well as does a monarchy. Occam discusses many questions, and the conclusions
which he establishes do not form a consistent system; but we see certain
principles which he stoutly maintains. He is opposed to the Papal claims to
temporal monarchy and spiritual infallibility. Moreover, he shows a remarkable
tendency to assert the authority of Scripture as the supreme arbiter of all
questions in the Church. The Pope may err; a General Council may err; the
Fathers and Doctors of the Church are not entirely exempt from error. Only Holy
Scripture and the beliefs of the Universal Church are of absolute validity.
Occam seems to be groping after what is eternal in the faith of the Church,
that he may mark it clearly off from what is of human ordinance and concerns
only the temporary needs of the ecclesiastical system.
If this is a sample of the ecclesiastical opposition
raised against John XXII, the attack was still stronger from the political
side, where Marsiglio of Padua and John of Jandun examined with boldness and
acuteness the relations between Church and State. Marsiglio was an Italian,
who, in the politics of his own city, had gained a comprehensive grasp of
principles, and whose mind had matured by the study of Aristotle. John of
Jandun, a Frenchman, was Marsiglio’s friend, and both held high positions in
the University of Paris, which they suddenly quitted in 1327, sought out Lewis,
and placed their learning at his disposal for an attack upon the Pope. It was
strange that scholars and theorists should come forward merely on theoretical
grounds to enter into a contest which in no way affected themselves. They
proposed to Lewis a serious undertaking — that the Empire, as such, should
enter into a controversy on abstract questions with the Pope. The Papacy was
the source of orthodoxy, the center of learning; rude soldiers before this had
answered its claims by deeds, but Lewis was asked to meet the Pope with his own
weapons. Marsiglio urged that John XXII had already laid himself open to the
charge of heresy; his decision about the friars was in contradiction to the
opinion of his predecessors; unless the Papal autocracy were to be absolutely
admitted, it was the Emperor’s duty to check an erring Pope. For a time Lewis hesitated;
then he accepted Marsiglio’s proposal, and appealed to Christendom to support
him in his position.
The great work of Marsiglio, the Defensor
Pacis, was already written, when first he sought Lewis, and was at once
published in explanation of the principles on which Lewis acted. The title of
the work was skillfully chosen; it marked out the Pope as the originator of the
troubles, discords, and wars which a pacific Emperor wished to check. The work
itself is a keen, bold, and clear assertion of the rights of the State as
against the Church. Following in the steps of Aristotle’s Politics, Marsiglio
traces the origin of government and of law. Civil society is a community for
the purpose of common life; in such community there are various classes with various
occupations; the occupation of the priestly class is “to teach and discipline
men in things which, according to the Gospel, ought to be believed, done, or
omitted to obtain eternal salvation”. The regulator of the community is the
judicial or governing class, whose object is to enforce the laws. Law is
defined as “knowledge of what is just or useful, concerning the observance of
which a coercive precept has been issued”. The legislator is “the people or
community of the citizens, or the majority of them, determining, by their
choice or will, expressed by word in a general assembly, that anything should
be done or omitted regarding man’s civil acts under pain of temporal
punishment” . This legislative power is the source of the authority of the
prince or ruler, whose duty it is to observe the laws and compel others to
observe them. If the prince set himself above the laws, he ought to be
corrected by the legislative power which he represents.
This system of civil life is disturbed by the
interference of the spiritual authority, especially of the Pope, with the due
execution of the laws, and with the authority of the prince. The Papal claims
rest on the supposed descent to Christ’s representatives of the plenitude of
Christ’s power; but this carries with it no coercive jurisdiction (jurisdictio
coactiva) by which they may exact penalties or interfere in temporal
affairs. It is their claim to this coercive jurisdiction that destroys civil
government and causes universal disorder.
To trace this point more fully Marsiglio proceeds to
examine the relations of the priesthood towards the community. The Church is
the community of all who believe in Christ; for all, priests and laity alike,
are “Churchmen”, because Christ redeemed them with His Blood. So far as a priest
possesses worldly goods or engages in worldly matters, he is under the same
laws as the rest of the community. The priesthood can have no authority except
what was given by Christ, and the question to be considered is not what power
Christ could have given them, but what He actually gave. We find that Christ
did not Himself exercise coercive jurisdiction, and did not confer it on the
Apostles, but warned them by example, advice and precept to abstain from using
it; moreover, Christ submitted Himself to the coercive jurisdiction of temporal
princes. Hence no priest has any judicial or coercive power unless it be given
him by the legislator; his priestly authority, which he derives from Christ, is
to preach the doctrine and administer the sacraments of Christ. To pronounce
excommunication does not belong to an individual priest, but to the community
of believers or their representatives. The priest is the minister of God’s law,
but has no power to compel men to accept or obey it; only as physicians care for
the health of the body, so do priests, by wise advice and warning, operate on
the soul. It may be objected that, at least in question of heresy, the
priesthood has to judge and punish: really, however, the judge of heresy is
Christ, and the punishment is inflicted in another world; the priest judges in
Christ’s stead in this world, and must warn and terrify offenders by the
thoughts of future punishment. The civil power punishes heresy only so far as
heresy subverts the law.
Marsiglio next subjects to criticism the doctrine of
the Papal supremacy. Priests as such are all equal: S. Peter had no authority
over the other Apostles, no power of punishment or jurisdiction. Moreover, the
legend that S. Peter was the first Bishop of Rome rests on no Scriptural authority,
and has no historical evidence. The appointment and deprivation of
ecclesiastics belong to the community of the faithful, as is shown by the
appointment of the first deacons recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. This
authority of the community is now vested in the princes, and the appointment of
good priests is a matter which concerns the well-being of the State.
The Catholic faith is one, and rests on Scripture
only, so that decretals and decrees of Popes and Cardinals are not necessary
for salvation. When doubts arise about the meaning of Scripture, they can be
settled only by a general council of the faithful, in which laity and clergy
alike have seats. The summoning of such a council belongs to the supreme
legislative power, and only a council can pronounce excommunication or
interdict upon princes or peoples. The authority of the Roman bishop over other
bishops is necessary to give a head to the Church and a president to its
councils; but the Roman bishop has no power of coercion beyond what a council
confers.
The existing theory of the primacy of the Pope sprang
from the respect originally paid to the Bishop of Rome, which has been
extended, partly by unfounded claims of scriptural right, partly by the grants
of princes, especially by the donation of Constantine. The Papal primacy has
corrupted the Church; for the Pope, through the plenitude of his power,
interferes with elections, sets aside the rights of chapters, and appoints
bishops who cannot speak the language of the people over whom they are set as
shepherds, and who simply aim at gathering money from their flocks. Generally
speaking, the bishops cannot preach, nor have they knowledge to refute
heresies; and the inferior clergy are as ignorant as their superiors. Lawyers,
not theologians, fill the Papal Court; ecclesiastical order is everywhere
overthrown by the dispensations from episcopal control which the Pope readily
grants to monks and friars. Simony abounds, and on all sides may be seen the
proofs that the plenitude of the Papal power is the root of corruption in the
Church.
Moreover the Papacy has put forth claims against the
temporal power, especially against the Empire. This arises from the fact that
the Pope crowned the Emperor, and a reverence at first voluntary has gradually
been regarded as a right. Papal recognition has been considered necessary to
complete the authority bestowed on the Emperor by election. But this is
entirely unfounded; the right conferred by election needs no supplement, and
the claims of the Papacy have simply been advanced owing to the frequency of
disputed elections and vacancies in the Empire. The Papal claims and the
exercise of Papal power in temporal matters have plunged Italy and Germany into
discord, and it is the duty of all men, especially of kings and rulers, to
check the abuse of this usurped authority.
This remarkable work of Marsiglio stands on the very
threshold of modern history as a clear forecast of ideas which were to regulate
the future progress of Europe. The conceptions of the Sovereignty of the
people, and of the official position of the ruler, mark the development of
European politics up to our own day. The general relations between Church and
State, which Marsiglio foreshadowed, were those which the Reformation
established in countries where it prevailed. In the clear definition of the
limits of ecclesiastical authority, and in his assertion of the dignity of the
individual believer, Marsiglio’s ideas still remained unrealized. It is a
wonderful testimony to the vigor of Italian civic life that the political
experience gleaned at Padua ran so readily into the form provided by a study of
Aristotle’s Politics, and produced results so clear, so bold, and so
systematic. It is the scientific character of the Defensor Pacis that marks it as especially important, and sets it
far beyond the other political writings of the next two centuries. It was
calculated to produce a powerful impression on men’s minds, and remained as a
great store-house for the writers of the next century. The ease with which the
conciliar movement won its way to general acceptance throughout Christendom
must be attributed in great measure to the dissemination of Marsiglio’s
principles. Pope Clement VI declared that he had never read a more pestilent
heretic; and Gregory XI found that the opinions of Wycliffe were only slightly
changed from those of Marsiglio. If Wycliffe had been as clear and as
systematic as Marsiglio, his influence on his contemporaries would have been
far greater and his teaching would not have lent itself to so much
misunderstanding.
It was Marsiglio’s misfortune that he was allied to a
cause which had not a leader strong enough to give adequate expression to the
principles which the crowned genius of Marsiglio supplied. The traditions of
the past still determined the steps of Lewis; in 1327 he marched into Italy and
was elected Emperor by the people of Rome. The old rights of the Roman Republic
were set up against those of the Pope, and the Imperial crown was placed on the
head of Lewis by Sciarra Colonna, who struck the deadly blow against Boniface
VIII at Anagni. Nor was this enough. The Minorites from the pulpits denounced
John XXII as a heretic, and Rome, which had made an Emperor, was willing to go
further and also make a Pope. John XXII was deposed; a friar was elected Pope
by the clergy and laity of Rome, and took the name of Nicolas V. Lewis had no
means of combating the fictions on which the Papal power was founded save by
setting against them a fiction still more ludicrous. The claim of the citizens
of Rome to appoint the temporal and spiritual heads of Christendom was more
monstrous than that of the Pope to determine the election of the Emperor. The
mediaeval theory might be untenable, but the attempt to overthrow it by a
revival of classical usage was absurd. The last struggle which had so long
raged between Empire and Papacy ended in an empty theatrical display.
Lewis was soon made to feel his real powerlessness. He
failed an attempt to reduce Robert of Naples, and his Italian supporters
dropped away from him. He discovered at last that the Italians welcomed an
Emperor only so long as he was useful for the purposes of their own factions;
when their disputes were settled, they were anxious to get rid of their
troublesome guest. Lewis slowly abandoned Italy; the Ghibellin party was
everywhere put down; the anti-Pope Nicolas was driven to make humiliating
submission to John XXII. Lewis’s prestige was gone, and the Pope was
triumphant. In vain Lewis tried to be reconciled with the Holy See; John XXII
was inexorable; but the end of John’s pontificate gave Lewis some gleam of
triumph. John had made many enemies, who were ready to use any handle against
him, and his own pedantic and scholastic mind made him anxious to win
theological triumphs. He ventured on an opinion, contrary to the general views
of theologians, that the souls of the blessed departed do not see God, and are
not perfectly happy, until after the general resurrection. The University of
Paris strongly opposed this view, as did popular sentiment. King Philip VI of
France sided with the University, and in a peremptory tone advised the Pope to
alter his opinion. The cry of heresy was raised against John, and Lewis was
preparing to summon a General Council to enquire into this Papal heterodoxy,
when John died in December 1334.
His successor, Benedict XII, an upright but
feeble-minded monk, would willingly have made peace with Lewis, but he was too
much under the power of King Philip VI to follow his own inclinations. It was
to little purpose that he told Philip VI that, if he had possessed two souls,
he would willingly sacrifice one to do him service, but as he had only one
soul, he could not go beyond what he thought right. Philip still demanded that
Germany should be kept distracted. Benedict XII had to dismiss the ambassadors
of Lewis, with tears over his own powerlessness. The national feeling of
Germany declared itself more strongly than before in behalf of Lewis. The
States affirmed that Lewis had done all that he ought, and that justice was
wrongfully denied him; they pronounced the Papal sentence of no effect, and
threatened with punishment any of the clergy who ventured to observe the Papal
interdict. Moreover, the Electoral princes declared at Rense that, on a vacancy
in the empire, he who was elected by a majority of votes was straightway to be
regarded as King of the Romans, and stood in no need of Papal confirmation
before assuming the title of King and beginning the exercise of the Imperial
rights. This declaration passed into a law; and whatever success the Pope might
meet with afterwards, he could win no victory in a struggle which had
occasioned such an outbreak of decided national feeling. Benedict’s successor
might humble Lewis before him; but Germany had made good its assertion of national
independence, and had rescued its kingship from the difficulties into which its
connection with the Empire had so long involved it. It is true that the
kingship was weak and infirm, and that the Empire had dwindled to a shadow; but
this only made the German protest against Papal interference more
emphatic in its historical importance.
Lewis, however, did not know how to use his
advantages; he had not the firmness to carry on a protracted contest, but
wavered between rash defiance of the Papal power and abject attempts at
reconciliation. After striving for absolution in 1341, he made in 1342 an
invasion upon ecclesiastical authority at which Europe stood aghast. By the
plenitude of the Imperial power he dissolved the marriage of Margaret
Maultasch, heiress of the Tyrol, with John, son of the King of Bohemia, and
also granted a dispensation on the ground of consanguinity for her marriage to
his own son Lewis, Markgraf of Brandenburg. Such an act was the logical result
of the theories of Marsiglio of Padua and William of Occam; and was suggested,
or at least defended, by them. They argued, keenly enough, that, if a marriage
or a divorce was opposed to the law of God, no one, not even an angel from
heaven, could make it lawful; but, if the impediment can be removed by human
law, the dispensation ought to proceed from the civil power, and not from the
ecclesiastical — from the Emperor, and not the Pope. They forgot that it was an
unfortunate case for the assertion of newly claimed powers when personal
interest and dynastic aggrandizement were so clearly the ruling motives. The
moral as well as the religious sentiment of Europe was shocked, and the
political jealousy of the German nobles was aroused by this accession of power
to the Bavarian house. The sympathy which had been on the side of Lewis was now
transferred to the Pope, and the views of Marsiglio and Occam were looked upon
with increased dread. A reaction set in against the rashness of the reforming
party, a reaction which explains the timidity and caution of those who revived
its principles when the Great Schism of the Papacy called for some revision of
the government of the Church.
The Papacy, on its side also, knew not how to use to
real opportunity which had just been offered. If the piety of Benedict XI could
not overcome the difficulties attendant on a reconciliation with Lewis, the
luxurious and worldly Clement VI was resolved to press Lewis to the uttermost.
He would not content himself with the most humiliating submission, but made
demands which the Diet set aside as destructive to the Empire; he set up
Charles of Bohemia against Lewis, who, however, in spite of his unpopularity in
Germany, maintained his position against the Pope’s nominee till his death
(1347). Even then, Charles was so entirely regarded as a tool of the Pope, that
he had some difficulty in establishing his position.
It would seem that the victory in this long and dreary
conflict remained with the Pope. Certainly his opponents showed their
incapacity for organizing a definite political resistance. Resistance to the
Pope had not yet become a political idea; at times it burst forth, but soon
fell back before other considerations of political expediency. Yet the conflict
did much towards educating popular opinion. The flood of political writings
awakened a spirit of discussion, which tended gradually to spread downwards.
The Papacy was no longer accepted without question as a divine institution; men
began to criticize it and examine the origin and limits of its power. It was no
longer looked upon as supreme over the other powers of Europe, but rather as an
independent power with interests of its own, which were opposed to the national
interests of the States of Europe. The Pope could no longer command public
opinion, and feel that it would give force to his decrees. The conflict with
Lewis of Bavaria ends the mediaeval period of the history of the Papacy.
In one way this struggle inflicted serious injury on
the Papacy; it gave it a delusive sense of power. It well might seem to Clement
VI that Boniface VIII had been avenged, and that the majesty and dignity of the
Papal power had been amply vindicated. Princes might learn, from the example of
Lewis, that rebellions against the Papacy were doomed to failure. Moreover, the
Papal position was secure at Avignon, which place Clement VI in 1348 bought
from Giovanna of Naples. At Avignon the voice of public opinion did not make
itself heard by the Pope’s ear so readily as in the turbulent city of Rome. The
luxury, vice, and iniquity of Avignon during the Papal residence became
proverbial throughout Europe; and the corruption of the Church was most clearly
visible in the immediate neighborhood of its princely head. Luxury
and vice, however, are costly, and during the Pope’s absence from Italy the
Papal States were in confusion and yielded scanty revenues. Money had to be
raised from ecclesiastical property throughout Europe, and the Popes at Avignon
carried extortion and oppression of the Church to an extent which it had never
reached before.
As the Church had grown wealthy in every land Kings
and Popes competed with one another to have a share in its revenues. Gregory
VII had labored to deliver the Church from the power of the temporal rulers,
and his attempt was so far successful as to establish a compromise. The Church
was to have the show of independence, the State was to have the practical right
of nominating to important offices. The claims of the Chapters to elect to
bishoprics were nominally unimpaired; but the royal influence was generally supreme.
Still the Chapters were equally amenable to the Pope and to the King, and might
exercise their right according to the dictation of either. Gradually the King
and the Pope arrived at a practical understanding as to the division of spoil.
If the offices of the Church were to furnish salaries for the King’s ministers,
they must also supply revenues to the head of the Church. At times the Pope’s
authority was exercised to order a rebellious Chapter to accept the King’s
nominee; at times the Royal authority supported the Pope’s request that the
Chapter in their election should provide for one of the Pope’s officials. Thus
the Chapters, placed between two fires, tended to lose even the semblance of
independence; while in this alliance with the Crown, the Papacy soon gained the
upper hand. Armed with spiritual power and claiming obedience as the head of
the Church, the Pope cloaked his usurpations under the show of right, and
extended his claims to smaller benefices, which were in the gift of the King or
private patrons. It was but a further extension of this principle when John
XXII reserved to himself all benefices vacated by promotion made by the Pope,
and afterwards extended his reservation to the most lucrative posts in
chapters, monasteries, and collegiate Churches. Monstrous as were these claims,
they met with no decided opposition. The frequency of disputes about elections,
and the consequent appeals to the Pope, had practically given him the decision
of the validity of ecclesiastical appointments. His assumed power of granting
dispensations from canonical disabilities made him a useful means of
overstepping inconvenient barriers. The Pope had been allowed so much authority
to act as the instrument of the selfish interest of kings, that they had
nothing to urge when he began to use his powers shamelessly in his own behalf.
Clement VI provided for his nephews and his Court at the expense of
Christendom, and said, with a laugh, that his predecessors had not known how to
be Popes.
Besides provisions, reservations, and dispensations,
he demanded large fees for the confirmation of all episcopal elections, and
succeeded in wresting from the bishops many of their rights over the
inferior clergy. Chief of these were the revenues of benefices during a
vacancy, which arose from the extension of feudal reliefs to ecclesiastical
holdings. Bishops, as protectors of benefices, disposed of their revenues when
they were vacant, and this claim tended to become a regular tax of half a
year’s revenue paid by the presentee on his succession. The Papacy in its turn
took this right from the bishops and claimed it for itself. Moreover, the Pope
imposed tithes from time to time on clerical revenues; sometimes for his own
use, sometimes granting them to princes on the specious pretext of a crusade. A
vast system of Papal extortion was gradually developed, partly from the fault
of church-men, who too readily brought their quarrels to the Pope’s tribunals,
partly from the short-sighted policy of kings and princes, who found in an
alliance with the Pope an easy means of helping themselves to ecclesiastical
revenues. Papal aggression could not have grown unless it had been welcomed in
its beginnings; and those who used the Pope’s interference to serve their own
ends had no strong ground for repelling the Pope when he used his powers in his
own behalf. Cries went up throughout Christendom, but it was long before the
cries were more than utterances of despair.
England was the first country which showed a spirit of
national resistance to Papal extortion. The alliance of the Papacy with John
and with Henry III had awakened a feeling of political antagonism amongst the
barons, when they found the Pope supporting royal misgovernment. Under Edward I
the nation and the King were at one, and the claims of Boniface VIII were met
by dignified assertion of national rights. The French war of Edward III gave an
increased meaning to the national resistance to the Papal extortions. The Popes
at Avignon were the avowed partisans of the French King, and England would not
submit to pay them taxes. In 1343 a stand was made against the agents of two
Cardinals whom Clement VI had appointed to offices in England, and they were
ignominiously driven from the land. When the Pope remonstrated, Edward III laid
before him a complaint against the army of provisors which has invaded our
realm, and drew a picture of the evils which they wrought on the Church. The
King was warmly supported by Parliament, which demanded the expulsion of
provisors from the country; and in 1351 was passed the Statute of Provisors,
enacting that, if the Pope appointed to a benefice, the presentation was to be
for that turn in the hands of the King, and the provisors or their
representatives were to be imprisoned till they had renounced their claim or
promised not to attempt to enforce it. This statute led to a collision of
jurisdictions: the royal presentee defended his rights in the King’s courts,
the Papal provisor supported himself by Bulls from Rome. To prevent this
conflict was passed in 1353 the Statute of Praemunire, which forbade the
withdrawal of suits from the King’s courts to any foreign court under penalty
of outlawry and forfeiture. These laws did not at once arrest the evils
complained of; but they served as a menace to the Pope, and impressed on him
the need of greater moderation in his dealings with England. They armed the
King with powers which he might use if the Pope did not observe fair terms of
partnership.
Under the pontificate of Innocent VI (1352-1362) the
advantages reaped by the Papal See from its sojourn at Avignon seemed to have
come to an end. The disturbed condition of France no longer offered security
and repose. In 1361 a company of freebooters scoured the country up to the
gates of Avignon, defeated the Papal troops, and were only bought off by a
large ransom. Innocent VI found it desirable to increase the fortifications of
the city. Moreover, the state of affairs in Italy called loudly for the Pope’s
intervention. The wondrous attempt of Rienzi to recall the old grandeur of Rome
showed the power that still attached to the old traditions of the mistress of
the world. The desperate condition of the states of the Church, which had
fallen into the hands of small princes, called for energetic measures, unless
the Popes were prepared to see them entirely lost to their authority. Innocent
VI sent into Italy a Spanish Cardinal, Gil Albornoz, who had already shown his
military skill in fighting against the Moors. The fiery energy of Albornoz was
crowned with success, and the smaller nobles were subdued in a series of
hard-fought battles. In 1367 Urban V saw the States of the Church once more
reduced into obedience to the Pope.
Meanwhile France was brought by its war with England
to a state of anarchy, and the French King was powerless to keep the Popes at
Avignon or to protect them if they stayed. Urban V was a man of sincere and
earnest piety, who looked with disgust upon the pomp and luxury of the
Avignonese court: and he judged that a reform would be more easily worked if it
were transferred to another place. In Rome there was a longing for the presence
of the Pope, who had not been seen for two generations. The inconvenience of
the Papal residence at Avignon was strongly brought out in the repudiation by
England (1365) of the Papal claim to the tribute of 1000 marks which John had
agreed to pay in token of submission to Papal suzerainty. These motives
combined to urge Urban V, in 1367, to return to Rome amid the cries of his
agonized Cardinals who shuddered to leave the luxury of Avignon for a land
which they held to be barbarous. A brief stay in Rome was sufficient to
convince Urban V that the fears of hisCardinals were not unfounded. The death
of Albornoz, soon after the Pope’s landing in Italy, deprived him of the one
man who could hold together the turbulent elements contained in the States of
the Church. Rome was in ruins, its people were sunk in poverty and degradation.
It was to no purpose that the Pope once more received in Rome the homage of the
Emperors of the East and West: Charles IV displayed in Italy the helplessness
of the Imperial name; John Paleologus came as a beggar to seek for help in his
extremity. Urban V was clear-sighted enough to see that his position in Rome
was precarious, and that he had not the knowledge or the gifts to adventure in
the troubled sea of Italian politics: his moral force was not strong enough to
urge him to become a martyr to duty. The voices of his Cardinals prevailed, and
after a visit of three years Urban returned to Avignon. His death, which
happened three months after his return, was regarded by many as a judgment of
God upon his desertion of Rome.
Urban V had returned to Rome because the States of the
Church were reduced to obedience: his successor, Gregory XI, was driven to
return through dread of losing all hold upon Italy. The French Popes awakened a
strong feeling of national antipathy among their Italian subjects, and their
policy was not associated with any of the elements of state life existing in
Italy. Their desire to bring the States of the Church immediately under their
power involved the destruction of the small dynasties of princes, and the
suppression of the democratic liberties of the people. Albornoz had been wise
enough to leave the popular governments untouched, and to content himself with
bringing the towns under the Papal obedience. But Urban V and Gregory XI set up
French governors, whose rule was galling and oppressive; and a revolt against
them was organized by Florence, who, true to her old traditions, unfurled a banner
inscribed only with the word “Liberty”. The movement spread through all the
towns in the Papal States, and in a few months the conquests of Albornoz had
been lost. The temporal dominion of the Papacy might have been swept away if
Florence could have brought about the Italian league which she desired. But
Rome hung back from the alliance, and listened to Gregory XI, who promised to
return if Rome would remain faithful. The Papal excommunication handed over the
Florentines to be the slaves of their captors in every land; and the Kings of
England and France did not scruple to use the opportunity offered to their
cupidity. Gregory XI felt that only the Pope’s presence could save Rome for the
Papacy. In spite of evil omens — for his horse refused to let him mount when he
set out on his journey — he left Avignon; in spite of the entreaties of the
Florentines Rome again joyfully welcomed the entry of its Pope in 1377. But the
Pope found his position in Italy to be surrounded with difficulties. His troops
met with some small successes, but he was practically powerless, and aimed only
at settling terms of peace with the Florentines. A congress was called for this
purpose, and Gregory XI was anxiously awaiting its termination that he might
return to Avignon, when death seized him, and his last hours were embittered by
the thoughts of the crisis that was now i evitable.
Rome had made many sacrifices to win back the Pope,
and on the occurrence of a vacancy which necessitated an election within the
walls of Rome, it was likely that the wishes of the city would make themselves
felt. The remonstrances of Christendom had been raised against the continuance
of the Papacy at Avignon, and its consequent subordination to French influence.
Moreover, national feeling had been quickened in Italy, and the loss of the
Papacy seemed to be a deprivation of one of her immemorial privileges. To this
national feeling was added a spirit of religions enthusiasm, which found its
supreme expression in the utterances of the saintly Catharine of Siena. She had
exhorted Gregory XI to leave Avignon, to return to Italy, to restore peace, and
then turn to the reformation of the distracted Church. On all sides there was a
desire that the Pope should shake off the political traditions which at Avignon
had hampered his free action, should recover his Italian lands and live of his
own in Rome at peace with all men, and should stop the crying abuses which the
needs of a troubled time and of exceptional circumstances had brought
into the government of the Church.
The Papacy had been strong in the past when it was
allied with the reforming party in remedying disorder. The question was — would
the Papacy again renew its strength by taking up an independent position and
redressing the ecclesiastical grievances under which Europe groaned? The first
step was its restoration to its ancient capital, where it might again be
regarded as the representative of Christendom.
BOOK I. THE GREAT SCHISM. 1378-1414
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